Neglecting baby

To be frank, Frankenstein has been a bit of a letdown so far. Just as the good doctor fails to rear his monstrous offspring, so does Mary Shelley fail to nurture her narrative. There's never any tension, no sense of the horrific. Much like the creature, the text as a whole fails to exceed the sum of its parts. The book is divided into volumes, each with an ostensibly different "author": Mark Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the creature. Of course, Shelley is the meta-author, but she doesn't do the best possible job of differentiating her narrators. Since I haven't yet read the creature's narration, I can't speak to it, but I found the voices of Walton and Frankenstein nearly interchangeable. Both struck me as glaringly one-dimensional. The only real difference was the degree of sentimentality. Where Walton's narrative is pretty forward-looking and only occasionally stoops to brooding on loneliness, Frankenstein's "story" seems more like the diary of an angsty adolescent. The young Victor only seems capable of feeling one emotion at a time; he's either rhapsodizing about the joys of his perfect family or bemoaning the horrors he has wrought. But things don't take too long to sour for Victor, and I found the constant lament pretty wearing after a few dozen pages.

While I can't defensibly say that the narrative fails, it certainly doesn't succeed as well as it could have. As a ghost story, it certainly leaves a lot to be desired—had I read the book in the dark, I would've have felt little more than disappointment at the moments of maximum terror. I get the sense that cinematic descriptions just aren't Mary's strong suit. Daunted by the task of describing the creature's genesis, she hurried Frankenstein's account of his creation from concept to completion. How else to explain the bafflingly thin treatment of Frankenstein's assembly and animation? I almost put the book down in disappointment after reading the anemic three-sentence account of Frankenstein's birth. I really hope things pick up in the second volume.

Goodnight!