Mary Shelley’s horror novel Frankenstein, written in 1816, exploring ideas about death, science and creativity, continues to inspire Western writers to rework its Gothic tropes.

Frankissstein
JEANETTE WINTERSON
(JONATHAN CAPE, 352 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Mary Shelley’s horror novel Frankenstein, written in 1816, exploring ideas about death, science and creativity, continues to inspire Western writers to rework its Gothic tropes. Jeanette Winterson (inset) is the latest to take up the baton, with Frankissstein, which grapples with modern anxieties about sex, identities and machines.

The form of Mary Shelley’s original, one story contained within another, brilliantly embodies her theme of strange gestation and strange birth. Jeanette Winterson’s version presents itself as an assembly of different parts, all the gaps, nuts and bolts showing: her homage to those film and cartoon versions of the “monster”, perhaps. Her non-realist method cunningly lets her insert explanations, without apology. For example, the opening chapter, retelling the story of Mary Shelley, is interrupted by italicised passages informing the reader, presumed ignorant, of relevant facts: “In the summer of 1816 the poets Shelley and Byron, Byron’s physician, Polidori, Mary Shelley and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, by then Byron’s mistress, rented two properties on Lake Geneva in Switzerland.” Byron obligingly ventriloquises himself: “For a man, love is of his life, a thing apart. For a woman, it is her whole existence.” Mary Shelley replies suitably: “My mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, would not agree with you.”

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