MARY AND THE BIRTH OF FRANKENSTEIN: A Novel
by Anne Eekhout
Translated by Laura Watkinson
HarperVia. 320 pages, $30.
INTEREST in Mary Shelley’s mesmerizing 1818 novel Frankenstein has been having something of a renaissance in recent years. The reboots of Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his nameless, beleaguered creation include the Oscar-winning movie Poor Things, adapted from Alasdair Gray’s sweeping novel of the same name. And while the film is set in a world several decades after the original Frankenstein and imagines “the Monster” as an elderly scientist who has inherited his maker’s art of creating life, an even more direct connection to the original work is Anne Eekhout’s Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein.
Prepare to be scared—but frightened in a good way, as a successful ghost story frightens, tingles, lingers. The Dutch novelist’s English debut turns Shelley’s “tale of misery and terror” on its side, proposing a compelling new back story to the well-known genesis of the iconic novel. In addition to preserving the original’s primary themes of guilt, loneliness, and justice soaked in revenge, Eekhout refreshes the story with elements of grief and imagined highlights of an adolescent Sapphic crush. Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein focuses on two influential, life-changing summers in Mary Shelley’s life. Separate narrative lines move back and forth between 1816 and 1812.
The 1816 episodes are set in atmospherically gray and dreary Cologny, Switzerland, and recount the familiar gathering of nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley and poets Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori. One dark and stormy, laudanum-laced, wine-drenched night in May, when the “rain falls and falls and falls” and the group of four have been entranced by reading a French translation of German ghost tales, the gauntlet is thrown down. Byron suggests: “Let’s each write a ghost story.” Percy replies: “Whoever writes the most frightening story wins.” At first, Mary is reluctant to participate. But one of the German stories, about a mother, a daughter, and a monster, triggers some post-traumatic memories of the loss of her own child and conjures chilling images of four years earlier in Dundee, Scotland.
It was there that fifteen-year old Mary was charmed by and besotted with the “unimaginably intriguing” family acquaintance, seventeen-year old Isabella Baxter. Having spent her entire life in London, “the waves, the waves, the waves” along with “the wind, the wind” transport her to a destiny where “fear and love, imagination and truth coexisted on the riverside, in the undergrowth, under ancient trees. There was nothing that could not grow there. There was nothing that might not exist there.” They share common interests in macabre tales, Gothic novels like Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Scottish “depictions of octopuses the size of whaling ships, swordfish with human features, such as a beard or a faint, unfathomable smile, and sea creatures that seemed to be half male, half female with breasts and beards, elegant, long hair, tough, muscular arms, and a fish’s tail.”
Over the summer, desire develops into passion. Sitting beside a hearth’s fire, Mary feels a “longing [sing]through my body. Like a glowing knife ripping me open from my heart to my lower belly in the most loving way.” When they lay in grass blanketed in sunshine, Mary smells Isabella’s “sweat and soap” and “felt the urge to lift my skirt a little, to undo my boots, to remove my stockings, and to lie there bare-legged in the grass, to feel the earth and grass against my skin, the hem of my gown on my knees, my foot against hers.” After they kiss at the Fife Fair of Curiosities (bearded women, dwarves, fortune tellers, a cat circus) there is a spine-tingling, blood-curdling incident when they spot a frightening beast that may or may not have been real. Something “big. Black. Deep.”
The creature appears again at crucial moments of mounting sexual tension—when they remove their corsets to expose naked skin to air and experience an exotic sense of freedom, when they skinny dip in a lake. It is a “thing [that]had the proportions of a human. But it was larger. Wider. The skin was dark, and it had hair on its back and legs. The arms were long, as with an ape, but it was not an ape. The head was big, coarse, it had human features, but not in the right proportions. It had small eyes and a small nose, but the mouth was huge.” Indeed, it’s starting to look a lot like the end result of Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment.
Tales of witches, monsters, and mythic characters dominate both narrative sections. The novel opens in Cologny during the “witching hour” of three a.m., when “sheet lightning persists” and the weather whiplash of death pollutes the Geneva atmosphere. When it flashes back to Dundee, family story nights resurrect folktales of a being with “the head of a man, the body of a fish” or the myth of The Draulameth, a sea monster that understands humans, dragging them to the edge of the sea where they go willingly until “the deeper you go, the more firmly the sea embraces you. Your head goes under. … Breathing no longer means anything. You think you are happy. Then it appears, its tongue licks your temples, and your heart flips inside your chest. The beats last hours. And with every beat of your heart, a piece of you disappears—until you no longer exist.” These grotesque images feed Mary’s fertile mind. A dome of doom haunts Mary every night with residual memories of her dead daughter. It permeates her waking life and insinuates itself into her imagination, ultimately reaching into the realm of her writing about “the most frightening thing in existence. Longing, loss, grief.”
Eekhout’s Mary Shelley and the Birth of Frankenstein may send you back to read the original Frankenstein. Her deft deconstruction of the story and her own imaginative reconstruction are spellbinding and unique, like the original book.
Robert Allen Papinchak, a former university English professor, is an award-winning book critic in the Los Angeles area.
