FRANKISSSTEIN

Making monsters?

Jeanette Winterson’s latest reanimates Mary Shelley’s classic.

released 23 May 344 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Jeanette Winterson Publisher Jonathan Cape

Just over 200 years ago, while staying in a Swiss villa, an 18-year-old woman came up with an idea which created a genre. Since then, Frankenstein has been re-realised and reimagined many times, creating more classics of book and screen in the process, but the most interesting versions have always been ones which re-examined the core questions of the novel. What makes us human? Can that ever be replicated in our creations – and how would we react to them if it could?

This latest take on the tale, by Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit author Jeanette Winterson, tackles just those questions, and is based around one key point: just how central are our physical forms to our sense of self? And with sexbots appearing at tech expos, AI in nearly every home and cryonics facilities continuing to intrigue, how close are we, really, to a world in which that physical form is truly unnecessary?

Subtitled Frankissstein: A Love Story, it’s set across two time periods. In the first, Mary Shelley travels with her husband Percy, stepsister Claire, the infamous Lord Byron and his doctor Polidori. Death is all around her – by the time of that trip to Lake Geneva she had already lost one child, while in England the Peterloo massacre is soon to erupt, against the background of another clash between the competing roles of humans and machines. So Mary daydreams of a world in which fragile bodies do not doom the human mind and soul.

Meanwhile in our near future, the 19th century characters are echoed in the 21st – we meet Ry Shelley, Victor Stein, Ron Lord, evangelical Claire and journalist Polly D, playing out those same questions in a world that may finally be capable of answering them. Medical doctor Ry is transgender, bringing an understanding of the disconnects that can already exist between mind and physical form. Victor is a professor who’s obsessed with human evolution past the point of biology, lecturing on how our current enhancements – glasses, hip replacements, prosthetics – will eventually lead to a world in which “intelligence will no longer be dependent on a body”. But what exactly is he planning to achieve?

This is a surprisingly funny novel, from Mary’s catty digs at her stepsister to Polly’s misadventures with “intelligent” vibrators. And characters that could be clichéd are instead well-rounded, with unexpected layers. Ron Lord is an unreconstructed man who’s found massive success with a sexbot company – many of his statements on sex and gender are truly cringeworthy – but he knows that a major foundation of his business is not sex, but loneliness.

The original Frankenstein is explicitly informed by Shelley’s own emotional relationships with birth, death and parenting, and this retelling is again a very feminine take on the tale. In the past, Mary muses that men would not find death so heroic if they too carried a life inside them for nine months then saw it perish, while in the future, it seems to be men who are continually fascinated by the potential of bots and AI, while women worry about the biases of the real world being replicated across the virtual.

The biggest criticism of Frankissstein is that it feels more a novel of ideas than one of plot; while we see some resolution in the life progression of Mary, the 21st century section feels like it simply runs out of steam, with a dramatic climax that doesn’t quite take. Wherever Stein is trying to take the world, we’re certainly not there just yet. But with a surprising amount of the novel based on real, current science and technology, it won’t be too long before we’re tackling these questions for real. Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, was one of the inventors of computer programming in her work with Charles Babbage.

Can what makes us human be replicated?