To sooth a savage breast

If you only know Frankenstein’s creature from the movies, you’d think he talked like Tarzan. “Alone, bad! Friend, good!” Except, of course, Tarzan in the books didn’t say things like that and neither does the monster. He quotes Plutarch. He knows Paradise Lost almost verbatim. Victor calls him “fiend”, “demon”, “monster”, “vile insect”. The visionary genius is reduced almost to incoherence by his hatred for the thing he's made, but we rarely see the creature in a blind rage. By the time he meets his maker for the second time, he has left the innocent brute behind. Now he has become a civilized killer.

Also because of the movies, most people think Frankenstein is a story about a mad baron who sticks a criminal brain into a corpse and brings it to life in his castle laboratory during a thunderstorm, with the help of his hunchbacked assistant, only to be thwarted by rampaging villagers with pitchforks.

In fact none of those things is in the novel. I created my digital interactive retelling of the story, in part to rescue Mary Shelley’s classic from the neglect into which it has fallen. It’s a great story, but one bogged down by swathes of unlovely prose. My aim in making it interactive has been to turn it up to eleven, to reach out and drag the modern reader right into the text. That opening scene of the creature’s birth gave me the clue for one way to do that – a way to show his awakening consciousness using all of the senses. And that led me towards music as the vanishing point where his raw sense of hearing converges with his aspirations to join the communality of art and culture that unites the rest of humankind.

Because of the way the story has mutated its way through popular culture, a common image has Victor Frankenstein sewing his creature together out of dead bodies: the world’s most monstrous rag doll. In my version of the story, as in Mary Shelley’s original novel, it might be more accurate to think of the creature constructed, golem-like, a swollen homunculus of flesh. I describe his skin being grown on needlework frames, his tissues cultured from simple cells. This creature is not an old thing patched up; he’s a whole new being.

It’s alive

On “a dreary night of November”, with rain pattering dismally against the panes, the creature draws his first breath. Everything is a blank slate. His senses are one confused storm of inputs and feelings. Sounds have colour. Shapes have taste. Gradually he makes sense of the world, marvelling at the mystery of birdsong and the immense round mountain that rolls across the sky at night.

Spurned by his maker and rejected violently by everyone he meets, the creature takes shelter in an outbuilding adjoining the chateau of an aristocratic family, the de Lacys. And here’s where Mary Shelley came up with an inspired story device: a crack in the wall through which he is able to spy on them. He observes the de Lacys at the dinner table, or gathered around the elderly, blind pater familias as he plays the harpsichord. When a Turkish girl comes to stay, the son of the family starts to teach her French and, eye pressed to the crack, that’s how the creature gets his education too.



It’s at this point in the novel that we start to perceive, buried in its grosser body tissue, the outlines of another familiar story: the former ingénue who, as he acquires education and culture, becomes increasingly dismissive of those who remind him of his former ignorance. “Her grasp of French is almost as good as mine,” remarks the creature of Safiye, the Turkish girl, in a backhanded compliment. When an official of the Revolutionary government shows up to evict the family, the detail that causes the creature greatest outrage is that the man cannot read.

Finally the creature feels that his efforts at self-education have earned him a place by the hearth. He is ready to creep out of his ruined hovel and go round to the house. Dressed in stolen clothes, he waits till the others are out to present himself to old Monsieur de Lacy, whom he expects to be the most sympathetic to his plight – and who, being blind, is not going to panic the moment he appears at the door:

Alone in the cottage, the old man sits at his keyboard playing the opening contrapunctus of Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge. It is a sweet sad air, mournful and yet gloriously so. Though Bach intended this piece of music as just an exercise, everything human is contained there. We live and will die. Nothing has meaning except what we give it. And yet the tiny equations of mortal perception contain everything that is beautiful and true.

Now, Mary Shelley doesn’t do a whole lot of showing. “He played several mournful but sweet airs,” is how she renders this scene, “more mournful and sweet than I had ever heard him play before.” But I wanted the reader to see how the creature has changed over these months – from a thing whose senses run together in a synaesthetic whirlpool to a man who can quote Plutarch and Milton. And that piece by Bach, played here by Margaret Fabrizio, seems to me the epitome of humanity in its melding of simplicity and beauty, logic and almost spiritual emotion.

But it’s not enough to show your character has become almost a gentleman, you must remind the reader where he came from. A few minutes later, talking to M de Lacy, he invites him to play something:

Turning back to the harpsichord, he lets his fingers find the keys and then bursts into a performance of Rameau’s Tambourin. It is of a very different mood from the Bach he was playing before I came in: a fast-paced work full of gusto and melodramatic flourishes. A mere entertainment. How disappointing that he doesn’t recognize a kindred spirit.

The creature’s scornful reaction to what is, after all, a jaunty bit of 18th century pop (played here with great gusto by Julian Frey) is more than just resentment at being thought unsophisticated. It shows us his fatal flaw. Sheltered in his hovel beside the chateau, all that he has seen through the crack is the best and most serious side of mankind. The aristocratic M de Lacy is wise enough to appreciate that there is room in life for both the transcendent brilliance of Bach and the heel-kicking silliness of Rameau. The creature fails to understand that. His morality is as pure and absolute as an adolescent’s, as furious as one of those French revolutionary fanatic’s. And in the gap between these two pieces of music, he will experience his downfall.

This is a longer version of a guest post I originally wrote for The Undercover Soundtrack, a website about how music inspires writers.

They're not zombies

Another taster bite from The Frankenstein Wars, the interactive adventure that Cubus Games are creating based on my story and world concept. This is Tom Clerval's first meeting with the creature created by Victor Frankenstein three decades earlier:

There was a creak on the companionway. Mr Legion filled the frame of the door, having to twist his hulking torso to enter the cabin so that for a moment he resembled one of those wretches who are unearthed after being buried alive, their rigorous limbs pressed taut against the confines of the wood. His flesh gleamed like oiled ivory in the lamplight. I noted fresh stitching where his arm had been wounded less than an hour before, the skin already healing over the hastily-worked sutures.

As he stepped in he was able to straighten up, but even so his big angular head still bumped against the cabin ceiling, and the very mass of him seemed to press the air and light away so that Blakeney and I sat closer against the narrow hull. I felt as an inhabitant of a doll's house might feel, when the wall is suddenly thrown open and a giant child intrudes its looming face and limbs and vital energy.

Imagine my even greater astonishment, faced by this gaunt apparition that had haunted my childhood dreams, when he drew a long thin cigar from his pocket, tilted back the hood of the lamp, and sucked it alight with all the delicacy of a toff in a Pall Mall club.

Blakeney must have sensed my confusion. "Mr Legion is hardly the simple-minded monster given life by your godfather's experiments, Dr Clerval. He was a child then; now he is a man. Of a kind."

The creature turned his eyes upon me. They held a look that burned with the fever-light of shrewd intellect and dark depths of resentment. When he opened his lips, I sat so transfixed that it took me moments to realize that the soft, rich tones were his speaking voice. His glance slid off me so that he addressed neither Blakeney nor myself, but an unseen audience: “Of a kind..? Unfinished! Sent before my time into this world scarce half made up, that dogs bark at me - why, I have no delight to pass away the time, unless to spy my shadow in the sun, and ponder on my own deformity…”

He blew out a smoke ring, watching it with a satisfied smile as it rose and grew diffuse. Was he ugly? Truly deformed? Though my godfather had not cast him to normal standards of beauty, nonetheless he had built something impressive. Viewed as an attempt at copying humanity, he was a monster indeed. But seen as a new thing, a species apart – then his long, harsh body took on the outlines of something noble, even divine.

Moving with the easy grace one sometimes sees in very big men, he turned to leave, adding over his shoulder, “And so I am determined to prove a villain, and hate the idle pleasures of these days.”

Blakeney filled the silence after his heavy tread had faded along the companionway. "That was all for your benefit. His sense of mischief, you understand. Theatricality, one might even say."

“He works for you?” I asked, still marvelling at the transformation. In my memory, I saw that same giant body pouncing like an animal from the mountainside, those lips parting only to issue a howl to chill the blood. If Blakeney had shown me an African lion smoking a cigar and quoting Shakespeare, I could not have been more amazed.

“Works for me, you say? Not that exactly. We have… an understanding.”

Something in Blakeney's calculating tone brought me out of my daze. “I’m not going to help you, Blakeney.”

“That’s just what he said. And yet we have our understanding.”

See, no zombie he. That's a mind-shattering revelation that the Twitterverse has been struggling with, for example in this brief overview on Pocket Gamer. Well, as Wilde said, it's worse not to be talked about, but I wish more people were familiar with Mary Shelley's brilliant novel about the creation of a new kind of man rather than with the "Hulk will smash" laboratory partwork that is the Universal or Hammer idea of the monster.

Actually, thanks to Project Gutenberg you can read Shelley's original Frankenstein free in almost any format you could ask for. For a shorter read, here's me explaining why this isn't yet another zombie thing. Because, yawn, there are far too many of those already. After all, the watchword is not "It's undead," but "It's alive!"

A brandy with the monster

I've talked about Frankenstein's Legions on this blog before. Here, for instance. And here. I'll be talking about it more over the month ahead because I'm involved in a Kickstarter with Cubus Games, who will be creating an interactive story set in that world, under its new title The Frankenstein Wars.

The concept is simple. In the 1820s, Victor Frankenstein's secrets are recovered. Some of them, anyway - specifically, the ability to sew a body together from scavenged parts and bring it back to life. In France, a new revolution brings the Zeroistes to power. Named for the their "Year Zero" mentality, they are willing to do whatever it takes to usher in a new society. And that includes recycling the bodies of those killed in battle to create an endlessly-respawning army.

And what about Frankenstein's monster? He represents something more than a patchwork revivified man. In Mary Shelley's novel he was a new lifeform, a homo superior, with greater strength, endurance and intellect than any normal man. If you want to read his origin story, it's a lot more interesting than the Universal sparks-n-stitches version, and my interactive novel is as good a place as any to start.

But here in The Frankenstein Wars, the monster is thirty years older. He's learned to be warier and more ruthless - and this is a guy who was willing to strangle kids and murder innocent people even in his formative years. He calls himself Mr Legion now. Here's a scene between him and Lord Blakeney:

That night. Blakeney warms himself in front of a crackling log fire, a glass of brandy cupped in his hand. In the leather armchair opposite him sits Mr Legion, also slowly swirling a brandy. His cigar glows in the gloom of the dining room, where they have just finished a meal.
“I think Miss Byron’s vacation might need to come to an end quite soon,” remarks Blakeney.
“You know, Blakeney, when I was thirty years younger I would have thrown you in the fireplace, burned down the house, and killed every man between here and Hastings. I also would have settled for the cheap brandy.”
“Why is that? The burning and the killing, I mean.”
“You were expecting them to kidnap Ada Byron.”
“Not exactly. I merely made sure we had a contingency in case you failed. As sometimes you do.”
“And now you’d like her back.”
“Her improved revitalizing serum, at any rate. I’m sure Napoleon doesn’t care for the cheap stuff either.”
Mr Legion blows a smoke ring and watches it drift in the firelight, like a god contemplating the constellations he has made. “You’re not counting on Clerval for that?”
Blakeney smiles. “Doctor Clerval is one of those men you can count on utterly. Their moral code is so predictable.” Blakeney gets up and walks to the window, pulling aside the curtain to gaze into the night. “And he’s a man who doesn’t shirk from a challenge. So also there’s that. But what’s really at the bottom of it all, I suppose, is love.”
Legion drains his brandy in one gulp and tosses the cigar stub into the fire. “All right,” he says, rising. “I have my own reasons, of course.”
Blakeney watches the door close behind him. “Of course you do," he says to the empty room. "But in your case it's a long way from love.”

Lord Blakeney, as you will have guessed, is the former Scarlet Pimpernel. Now in his mid-60s he commands the British secret service (officially known as the Alien Affairs Committee). In a very real sense he is the “M” of his day.

The Frankenstein Wars app is based on my world and story, but that's not all. It's being written by Paul Gresty, who is also the talent behind the new Fabled Lands book, The Serpent King's Domain. At Cubus's request, Paul is adding some steampunk tech to the mix. There was a little bit there already in my story outline, in the devices Ada Byron had constructed. Personally I'd have have left it at that, not feeling the need to add a gilding of steampunk to the lily of Frankensteinian body horror. But I'm not writing it so I've given Cubus and Mr Gresty carte blanche to take whatever liberties they need to. Without a doubt Paul will be adding his own unique style of interactive storytelling to the bare bones of the plot and characters that I provided.

You'll be hearing more of The Frankenstein Wars over the next few weeks - not just here but on the project's Kickstarter page as well.

Does interactivity have a downside?

As you’d expect of a book that has been in print for two centuries, there have been many interpretations of Frankenstein. Most derive less from the original novel than from Richard Brinsley Peake’s stage play, Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, performed five years after Mary Shelley first sent her “hideous progeny” out into the world. Like Peake’s version, later adaptations usually opt for a surface reading that feels a little lazy to me. Victor is callous, if not sneeringly evil, the woebegone monster provides his comeuppance, and the whole thing is wrapped up in a science-gone-mad cautionary tale. Hence all the rifled graves, stitched body parts and creepy castles stirred into the mix to provoke shudders.

Well, Frankenstein is an overdetermined work, rich in possible meanings, so that’s okay as far as it goes. But, when we consider the clue that Mary Shelley left for us in those words “a modern Prometheus”, we might usefully dig a little deeper.

Victor Frankenstein in the book is a genius and a rebel, a Byron of the sciences. He descends into the belly of the beast, risking insanity and broken health to bring back a secret that gods have tried to keep from Man. In finding fire he creates life. If this is a tale of duality, then the monster is the unruly, all-too-human side of the hero. A decade ago we might still have said that Victor’s monster is the Id that he has made strong by focussing too exclusively on the Super-Ego, except that Freud’s terminology now seems even quainter than Mary Shelley’s schoolbookish prose.

Some have said that Frankenstein is a story of a bad parenting giving rise to a troubled child. On the level of social metaphor, that’s a reading Mary Shelley certainly intended, and it’s the reason I moved Victor’s university from Ingolstadt to Paris during the Revolution. But there is more to a work of fiction than picking at the plot as if it were an account of real events. We could ask whether Pip could have got to the Gargerys’ house to club his sister over the head, or whether Holmes could have faked the existence of Moriarty, but a literal interpretation is not the point of fiction. Pip is seething with repressed grievances of his youth and he is desperate to cast off his embarrassingly humble origins; the injury that tames his bullying sister is a manifestation of his desires. Moriarty is both an actual antagonist (in the “reality” of the story) and Holmes’s alter-ego (in the story as a work of fiction).

Likewise with other stories of duality. Is Deckard a replicant? Yawn. He’s the flipside of Roy Batty, is what matters. Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt is not, within the universe of Thornton Wilder’s screenplay, a literal demon conjured from Young Charlie’s subconscious – though in fictive terms he’s nothing but. It is the richness of literature (and cinema) that it allows for more than just a literal reading.

A well-written novel, the most immersive of all forms of storytelling, should command your full attention and belief. Yet, even while held by the spell of belief, you can appreciate the novel simultaneously on several levels: as a description (honest or otherwise) of the events of the plot; as insight into the characters’ feelings and relationships; and, on a level beyond the plot seen as a make-believe reality, you can tune into the themes and resonances that the author has placed there that make it, not a mere account of events, but art.

The risk of interactivity is that it can strip away that liminal level of fictionality that lies between imaginary reportage (“here’s what is supposed to have happened”) and authorial artifice (“here’s the iceberg of meaning beneath the events themselves”). Interactivity is a powerful tool that can draw you so deeply into the interior of the story world that you lose sight of it as a story. You think you are there.

That’s why my interactive retelling of Frankenstein is not intended as a replacement for the novel, any more than Mrs Shelley intended her story to supplant Paradise Lost. Like a movie adaptation, it emphasizes some aspects, downplays others. It’s told in a style that is necessarily right in the moment, and the interactivity certainly does pull you inside the story. That sounds like marketing spiel, right? Who wouldn’t want to get pulled inside the story? But the downside is that that comes at the expense of removing the reader’s ability to absorb the work’s meaning in parallel with its story. While talking things over with Victor, you are no more likely to regard him as one side of a divided soul than you are to take that view of a rival you're arguing with in real life. Interactivity values the direct, personal connection. It places fiction above fictiveness.

So, if you read the new version, do interact with Victor and his creature – but don’t just leave it there. Take a look at the narrative that’s left behind in the wake of all your choices. There you have a unique, personal version of Frankenstein, created by your interaction with the text, that you can go back and read as a traditional novel. The themes are all present, you just need to raise your view from the decision tree to see the whole forest of ideas that Mary Shelley planted. And the richness of her story, not the cackling hunchbacks and brains in jars, is the reason Frankenstein is likely to remain a bestseller for another two hundred years.

What is Frankenstein's monster made of?

How do you create a monster? Victor Frankenstein isn’t telling. The excuse he gives, eminently reasonable in light of how things turned out, is that he wants to prevent others from rediscovering the process. We're not sure if he's giving life or restoring it; we're left in the dark as to whether it involves sparks or smells or both. A possible clue: recounting his early influences, Victor mentions Paracelsus and other practitioners of alchemy and occultism. Benjamin Franklin and Luigi Galvani don’t get a look in.

“I pursued nature to her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? […] I collected bones from charnel houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. […] The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation.”

As John Sutherland wrote in his essay “How does Victor make his monsters?” there is nothing in the original novel that says the monster is a patchwork of body parts from rifled graves:

“It remains unclear whether [Victor’s] motive has been research into primal tissue, or the kleptomaniac filching of limbs and organs with which Fritz’s midnight forays in the films have made us familiar.”

Fritz (the inimitable Dwight Frye) is of course a creation of the movies; in the novel, Victor has no assistant, hunchbacked or otherwise. The location he chooses for his second laboratory is a tiny island in Orkney, and he goes there alone. Unless he brings with him a stack of coffins, we can safely assume that no corpses are harmed in the making of the second (female) monster. Certainly the island’s population cannot provide Victor with raw materials – there are only three cottages, one of which he rents. No cemetery or morgue is mentioned, supporting the theory that he constructs or even grows the bodies before animating them.

Mary Shelley may have drawn her inspiration for Victor from her husband’s enthusiasm for amateur science. Three or four years before Percy Shelley met Mary Godwin, his friend T J Hogg described his room at Univ:

“Books, boots, papers, shoes, philosophical instruments, clothes, pistols, linen, crockery, ammunition and phials innumerable, with money, stockings, prints, crucibles, bags and boxes were scattered on the floor and in every place, as if the young chemist, in order to analyse the mystery of creation, had endeavoured first to re-construct the primeval chaos. The tables, and especially the carpet, were already stained with large spots of various hues, which frequently proclaimed the agency of fire. An electrical machine, an air-pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope and large glass jars and receivers, were conspicuous amidst the mass of matter.”

It seems that Victor is a (bio)chemist, not an engineer or physicist. The only reference in the original text that justifies the leaping, coiling, thrilling bolts of electricity that arced above Colin Clive and Boris Karloff is where Victor says, “I collected the instruments of life around me, so that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.” The rest of the passage describing the monster’s birth is tragic rather than climactic. He seems to slip reluctantly into the land of the living, and Victor has no exultant shout of “It’s alive!” His mood is one of anxiety, hopelessness and disgust.

Disgust is a big part of Victor’s relationship with the monster, a disgust evidently born of self-loathing. Novels are not literal, of course, so we need to remember that on another level the monster is Victor – the side of him that leers with “a ghastly grin” when he shapes the female creature’s flesh under his hands. Victor even describes him as “my own vampire, my own spirit let loose… forced to destroy all that is dear to me.” He is a proud, lustful, physical creature who makes a stab at pretending to be civilized. As do we all.

And what about that grin? How exactly is it “ghastly”? There’s no spare part surgery in Mary Shelley’s book; if Victor isn’t a physicist, still less is he a surgeon. And, however Shelley envisaged the monster, she surely meant him to be stranger and more disturbing than Robert De Niro criss-crossed with catgut sutures:

“His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.”

I don’t think an actor in make-up is going to cut it. People who encounter the monster react with fear and loathing – not, “Look at that poor chap,” but “Kill it! Kill it!” He must be terrifyingly deformed. In my version of the book, his skin is grown on frames similar to the ones that Victor’s cousin/fiancée uses for needlework, and that skin is literally transparent - a bug that Victor decides is a feature, as it will make it easier for anatomists to study the internal organs of his creation.

My Victor is a chemist and physicist - not terms that were actually used in English until the mid-1800s, but it’s all in a sense a translation. He studies a little anatomy, and later has the chance to practice surgical techniques under the tutelage of Dr Robert Campbell. (If you convince Victor to do that, it means he is able to make the second creature far comelier than the first.) When we meet him, he’s collecting guillotined heads – but not to bolt onto his monster. He just wants to study the structure of a larynx so that he can replicate it:

“I need the small cartilages of a human voice box – a very intricate structure, much too time-consuming for me to build by hand. If I can find one fresh enough, chemicals can be used to stimulate its growth to suit the creature’s scale. Or perhaps I’ll use it to make moulds in which I can nurture bone cultures. There are a thousand excruciating details like this.”

Soon after, Victor talks about the monster’s brain:

“The structure of the brain is far beyond my power to replicate, so I implanted tissue from the brains of several unborn children, bathed in certain internally secreted chemicals that appear to stimulate growth, and grafted this to a fully developed brain stem. Thus the creature will be born with an infant mind, but the mind should mature at a greatly accelerated rate. As to the nature of its thoughts and feelings – they may be like yours or mine, or they may be something entirely new.”

“So it will learn?” you (it's an interactive novel) may ask Victor.

“It is learning already. The brain is active, though sleeping as in the womb. Perhaps it can even hear what we're saying.”

I have provided more details of the monster’s creation than Mary Shelley did. Readers today will expect some flesh on the bones. The story has become very familiar, from books and movies and plays, and so it’s necessary to push a little if it is still to have power to surprise and shock, but hopefully I’ve kept some of the ambiguity and mystery. I want you to read into the creation process your own private horrors. James Whale made the moment cinematically exciting, but in doing so he lost the most important aspect of Victor’s solitary act: the fact that it is unbearably sad and rather squalid. The desperate loneliness of the staring animal eye, the sudden intake of breath, the reflexive shudder – all for something that can be achieved more wholesomely outside the workshop of filthy creation.

Frankenstein is published by Profile Books and coded for iOS by Inkle Studios. Now on sale in the App Store.

"I began the creation of a human being..."

The cat's out of the bag - or, more appositely, the brain's out of the jar. Profile Books just announced that the interactive novel I'm writing for them is Frankenstein. Yep, Mary Shelley's classic novel vandalized into what-next form by yours truly.

Some of you already guessed this news a while back, though I'm willing to bet the finished book won't be anything like you expect. Our official announcement gives some kind of an idea what's in store:

"Maybe you remember gamebooks or choose-your-own novels, but if so put those right out of your mind. Frankenstein is way more than that. It's an art installation made up of story fragments, where the reader can explore the text, creating a unique and personal experience of this rightly world-famous work and developing a direct relationship with the main characters. That's why we're describing it as interactive literature. It's a truly new kind of novel for the digital age."

What Jamie and I are aiming for is a gamebook that even non-gamers can enjoy, in the same way that plenty of non-SF fans are happy to read Mary Shelley's original book in spite of it being most definitely a science fiction novel - and probably the first such, although if you know of an earlier one, shout it out. Traditionally, mainstream readers have been very dismissive of things like comics and gamebooks. That's a very lazy prejudice (as most prejudices are) so that's one of the attitudes we're hoping to change a little bit with this book.

The engine that's powering this project is by Cambridge-based app developers Inkle Studios, smartest mammals in the new digital book ecosystem by a long way. Thanks to their tech, I can just write the book with all story logic in curly brackets as part of the text. I feed it into their engine and out it comes as a working app. Hey presto, I'm not just the designer and writer of this thing, I'm the coder too. We're hoping to do more with them and Profile Books in the future. A whole lot more. You'll read it here first.