Raising the Dead

Peter Ackroyd knows a thing or two about raising the dead. His experiments in reanimation have been conducted entirely in the laboratory of literature, and his quick-witted new novel, “The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein,” argues persuasively for the wisdom of that choice. Ackroyd has for the past three decades done rather nicely for himself as a prolific historian, biographer and novelist, specializing in the lives and reputations (i.e., afterlives) of English writers. His Victor Frankenstein, however, is fired by the belief that the deceased can literally be regenerated, through the wondrous means of modern — early-19th-century — science. This earnest young Frankenstein has attended lectures by the eminent scientist and man of letters Humphry Davy, and has learned from them that electricity is “the spark of life, the Promethean flame and the light of the world.” He has also heard, from one of the most powerful thinkers of the age, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that “man creates the world in which he lives,” and that even the great scientific discoveries of Isaac Newton “were created by his mind and imagination.” And, perhaps most decisively, while at Oxford the impressionable Victor has fallen under the spell of a charismatic fellow student named Percy Bysshe Shelley: a poet of staggering ambition, a champion of radical political ideas, a militant atheist and an ardent believer in the perfectibility of man. It was the Romantic era, and a hopeful time.

The ideas of Romantic luminaries like Davy, Coleridge and Shelley were heady, highly charged and not to be trifled with by amateurs. But in that intellectually eventful age pretty much everybody who was anybody was to one degree or an­other a passionate amateur, and a man like Victor Frankenstein — curious, excitable, fervently optimistic — could easily mistake himself for a genius. Ackroyd’s Frankenstein is very much a child of his age, playing with fire and getting badly burned.

Ackroyd is altogether more grown-up — as well he ought to be, with the perspective of the nearly two centuries that have passed since his hero saw the first light of print in Mary Shelley’s brilliant novel “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.” Mary Shelley, who was just 21 when the book was published (anonymously) in 1818, set out with the simple intention of telling a ghost story: “one which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror — one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.” And in this she succeeded admirably. The impetus was a competition proposed by Percy’s friend Lord Byron as a diversion on a bored night in Geneva: neither Byron nor Percy managed to complete anything consequential, and the remaining competitor, Byron’s personal doctor, John Polidori, squeezed out a small, thin-blooded tale called “The Vampyre.” Only Mary’s story lived.

“The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein” places its resurrected protagonist at the very scene of his own conception, hobnobbing with Mary and the poets and the doctor on that momentous night of literary passion. For a mad scientist, Victor is awfully well connected — better, even, than Charles and Mary Lamb, who held center stage in Ackroyd’s lovely novel of the Romantic age, “The Lambs of London.” Thomas Rowlandson, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Sarah Siddons drift fleetingly into the Lambs’ orbit, and the opium-eating Thomas De Quincey lingers a bit longer there, but the characters in “The Lambs of London,” including its hero and heroine, seem at least a little tangential to the great intellectual movements of the time, the large parabolas described by the likes of Byron, Coleridge, Davy, the Shelleys and William Godwin (Mary’s father). Victor Frankenstein is in the middle of all that: awestruck, transfixed, unmoored, lost in space.

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It’s a fine idea to make a man of science — rather than, say, a poet — the embodiment of the high Romantic spirit, and it’s an idea whose time appears to have come. Richard Holmes’s superb recent history, “The Age of Wonder,” vividly evokes the era’s fascination with everything scientific, and the close relationship between the sciences and the arts, philosophy and even politics. Holmes devotes a chapter to “Frankenstein,” placing Mary Shelley’s “ghost story” in the context of the contemporary debate about Vitalism and making a few surprising connections to the poetry of the time, like Keats’s “Lamia.” (You would expect, if anything, his “Hyperion,” with its “creations and destroyings.”)

The lines were blurry then. Coleridge dabbled in everything; Davy was, in the odd hours between explosions in the laboratory, an energetic, semiskilled poet. Ackroyd’s Percy Shelley says to his friend Frankenstein: “The great experimenters are poets in their way. They are travelers in unknown realms. They explore the limits of the world.” And that spirit of exploration was indeed at the beating heart of Romanticism.

Frankenstein, though? Mary Shelley’s character was not, it’s worth remembering, the blasphemous, wild-eyed twit incarnated by Colin Clive in James Whale’s classic 1931 movie version, and bears perhaps even less resemblance to more recent re-creations like that in the trilogy — currently available in revolving paperback racks at every airport, train station and drugstore in the continental United States — modestly titled “Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein,” in which the protagonist is a Doctor Evil sort of megalomaniac bent on repopulating the world with his unholy creatures. Ackroyd does the Frankenstein mythology a tremendous service by restoring its intellectual weight, its emotional gravitas, its air of tragic idealism. His Frankenstein is Mary Shelley’s, to the life.

Or nearly. Ackroyd’s new Frankenstein does succeed in reviving a corpse: that of a consumptive medical student named (rather suspiciously) Jack Keat. And he suffers, as the original Frankenstein did, agonies of remorse, as well as a persistent sense that he is being pursued by his own unnatural creation. But he doesn’t have a fiancée or a wife for the creature to menace. That role is filled here by Percy Shelley’s first wife, Harriet Westbrook, and the shift is suggestive. There is something perhaps too ardent about Victor’s admiration for the dashing “Bysshe,” who is, the scientist says, “my one friend and ally in this world, where there is so much harm and darkness.” It’s interesting too that in narrating his horrifying tale Victor scrambles a fair amount of the chronology of his friend Shelley’s life, particularly with regard to Harriet and Mary. Ackroyd, a scrupulous writer, surely knows when Harriet died and when Percy married Mary, but his narrator doesn’t seem to, or maybe doesn’t want to. The author of “The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein” is a terribly clever man — no mad scientist he — and if you’re alert you can pick up clues to his hero’s unreliability all through the novel.

The possibility that Victor Frankenstein’s problems may have their source in his unrequited, even unacknowledged, attraction to his Oxford chum is the one wholly post-Romantic theme Ackroyd adds to the story. This Frankenstein speaks to “the mysterious fears of our nature” in a way that’s clearly influenced by modern psychology: some monsters, we now know, are made in the laboratory of the unconscious. Victor has moments in which he seems to be aware of that. “In my search for life,” he says at one point, “I believed that I was about to recreate myself.”

He doesn’t quite manage that — not in the sense he intends, anyway — and Peter Ackroyd, for all his extraordinary literary skill, doesn’t quite reinvent “Franken­stein” either. “The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein” is an entertaining and bracingly intelligent yarn, but, try as he will, Ackroyd is hard pressed to spark an idea that isn’t already burning, fiercely, in Mary Shelley’s still-vital novel. This, perhaps, is the postmodern Prometheus: an attempt, aware of its own futility, to reanimate something that never died.