There is always the question of where to start.
In this instance I can do no better than to say that it started, of course, with that book.
*
I do indeed despise that book. I always have, though I can see that my feelings have ripened over the years. I used to merely dislike it; now I loathe it. It repels me. I know that sounds over the top, but it’s true. It repels me in more ways than I can say. I have thrown very few books across the room in my lifetime, one or two only; from anger, frustration. A book is tiresome? You merely set it down. It takes something special to make you hurl a book from your grip: a furiously disappointing ending, for example, one in which you know the author couldn’t be bothered to work hard enough to give you something original, something worthwhile.
I look at the copy I own of Mary’s abomination and I see it; well-worn, not from loving re-reading, but from the impact of repeated landings on floors and against walls.
I would burn it, but I can’t. There’s the intellectual’s taboo about burning books. We don’t do it. We don’t.
Where first they burn books, they will in the end burn people too.
Who said that? I have no Internet connection up here; my phone, which I rarely bother to turn on now, shows a single bar of reception, which does precisely nothing. I can’t look anything up. Living in this way makes me realise how easy it is to be distracted by the less important points of a story. How often you turn to the world when you should be turning inwards. At first, it annoyed me; now I understand that it is making me focus on what I should focus on – the book, and the infection.
It’s been years since I have written in this way. I need some of these details, but they can wait, that’s OK – there’s a time for research, and there’s a time for writing. So as I think of them, I’m writing a list of the things I have to look up next time I’m in town and can get a proper signal on my phone.
Mount Tambora (both heights)
‘Beati gli occhi che lo vider vivo’ – check original source
Neurotoxic effects of butane gas exposure
Exorcism of ice?? Exorcism?!
And now I have written;
Where first they burn books, they will in the end burn people too.
I have an idea it was a German who said it. A writer, I think. Writers care about books, by and large. Goethe, maybe? No. Not Mann, I’d know if it were Thomas Mann. Heine perhaps. Yes, it’s Heinrich Heine. That would be a whole century before the Nazi burnings. Something I do know; that people burn books, and that they ban books is, in a way, a good sign. It’s a good sign because it means books have power. When people burn books, it’s because they’re afraid of what’s inside them, and there’s the thing: to be afraid of the contents of a book means that they have power.
(To be afraid of the contents of a book …)
Orwell’s vision of our terrible future was that world – the world in which books are banned or burned. Yet it is not the most terrifying world I can think of. I think instead of Huxley – (did I ever tell you I’m meant to be related to Aldous Huxley? That’s the family legend and it’s fine by me) – I think of his Brave New World. His vision was the more terrible, especially now because it appears to be rapidly coming true, whereas the world of 1984 did not. What is Huxley’s horrific vision? It is a world where there is no need for books to be banned, because no one can be bothered to read one.
So, where first they burn books, later they burn people. We have seen that to be true and books themselves are how we can make sure we remember that.
But that’s not why I haven’t burned this particular book. I haven’t burned it because, first, I would only be destroying my copy. The Book itself would remain untouched by my puny funeral pyre. Its ‘bookness’, its existence as a story, is independent of any single copy. Just like a gene in the gene pool. (Remember that email I had from a reader about my last novel? I want you to go around the world and burn every copy so that no one else has to go through what I did. I still haven’t replied to that one. I surprise you, I know. Yet she had the right idea – you would have to destroy every single copy. But, even if you did, you would still fail as long as one person lived who had read it. Which is why book burners are always doomed to fail.)
So that’s, second, why I can’t burn it – since the book is as immortal as any work of human hand can possibly be now, there is nothing I can do. The only thing I can do anything about is my response to it, and if I were to burn it, I would only be admitting that it’s under my skin.
And yet, dammit, you guessed this pages ago: it is, isn’t it?
A third thought: I haven’t always been obsessed with it, far from it. There are books I like much better, books I have read more times, books I have been obsessed with. Long years of my life have turned over, one to the next, without my so much as thinking about Mary Shelley’s awful tract, never mind picking it up. Yet there it sits now, on the boards in the centre of the room where I threw it in exasperation two hours ago. It’s why I’m here. And it’s why I am slowly destroying my reason, no doubt.
*
Since the book landed on the floor, complaining with a slight rustling of bent pages, I have made myself something to eat, which is no easy trick. I settled for bread and cheese, and soup (again), heated on the ancient gas ring. There is no kitchen here, not really. It’s pushing it to call this house a house at all. An alpine chalet, barely touched in who-knows-how-long, few signs of modern things. More like a byre to camp in than a place to live, though someone did, and quite recently, Étienne told me. Of course someone did, I can see the evidence of it.
Such as … such as the gas ring on the worktop in the corner that passes for the kitchen. The burner is old and cranky, and is fed by a large bottle of butane gas through a rubber tube that looks as if it might be perishing. I’m not sure the valve is properly attached either, for that matter. Every time I light it I half-expect to be blown sky-high, and to hell with it, that would be a way to go, blown to bits in a remote mountain house, and all because of a book. At least I’d take the blasted thing with me, well, that one copy I own, and that, as I have said, would be an utterly meaningless victory. And yet can you imagine how it would look? The chalet erupting in a fireball of timeworn wood; tin sheets from the roof hurled into the black sky, spinning; the welling, roiling flames; sparks in the dark and the high heaven of stars above as the screen on which would be projected a scene that no one would see.
*
Assuming the gas supply does not blow me into the dead night sky …
I live most of the time in the single sensitive room that forms the top floor of the house – it has a vaulted ceiling of massive wooden beams. Along one side of this space is a shelf, a mezzanine, with a staircase leading up to it that’s so steep it’s more like a ladder. In the corner, overlooking the valley is the space for cooking; in the corner diagonally opposite is a walk-in cupboard built out from the walls, but I can’t get the door open, and my clothes spill over the back of a chair I took upstairs for the purpose.
I have my desk; a crotchety table I stuck by the second window facing the valley, and between there and the ‘kitchen’ the wooden chimney shoves its way to the roof, twenty feet up. I love the defeated air of the leather armchair that sits before the fire, and next to it a lamp screwed into the centre-post of the house, which gives just enough light to read by, happily. Until you throw the book across the floor, that is …
*
I opened a tin, heated my soup. I may have opened a bottle of red. I cut the bread I bought this morning and a hunk (what a horrible word, why don’t I change it?) of hard cheese and all the time the book lay on the floor, pulsing evil energies at me. I paced past it, pretending not to notice, let it lie there and tried not to go out of my way to avoid it when I took my food to the table, and who am I fooling, of course I would lose that one, for avoid it, or not, it’s like an ex-lover you’re trying not to think about – either way she or he is there, and he or she wins. All I could
do, as I grumpily chewed, was leave it on the floor. I’ll leave it there for the night, and only tomorrow when I have to start working on it, will I pick the bloody thing up and treat it with any kind of respect.
Now, I’ll give it none, for it deserves none.
It can go to hell. And burn.
The generator fails. Again.
Just as I need light to work by.
I stump my feet into boots and out into the night I go, torch in hand. It feebles its way through the darkness; showing me how much I can’t see of the nocturnal cold. I come down the slope beside the house. Something always bothers me about the side of the house, but I can’t grasp what. It’s too dark to think about it now anyway, and maybe it’s not the side of the house that’s got me puzzled, but something else.
I tread cautiously, picking my way with the torch beam.
Turning the corner, there is a beast. It’s a deer; a stag. Its eyes are caught by the torchlight, just as we are both caught by the moment. It stands, planted in the universe in a way I will never be; its eyes glow in the light I’m shining on its face, and then it is gone, with a brushstroke it disappears, arching away into the night, up into the forest above the house. It’s left on my mind like a sun print – I see its antlers, such a heavy crown to carry, but one that says: if I can wear this burden, I have no fear of you. I see the slight startling on its face as I round the corner of the house. I see its haunches as it slips back into the blackness.
Why didn’t it hear me? I must have made enough commotion pulling myself through the heavy old door, scuttling down the slope. Who knows? It’s gone.
I turn and with my shoulder shove open another heavy door: ducking through the doorway and into the cellar.
*
Silence.
It’s so silent – the earth floor absorbs sound, the crumbling walls blank me, the darkness is more total than outside, where, if I turned off my torch I would freely see the stars.
I restart the generator, as Étienne showed me. It splutters into life, resentful, I can tell, I can bloody tell, and I come back, and my hand is suddenly wet. Warm.
I put it into the light and see blood and a cut. Quite a lot of blood.
I stare down at the forest below the house. And I turn off the torch. Time goes by. There are shadows. Trunks. The green of the firs is spectral grey in this light, and I turn off the torch, turn off the torch, waiting for the starlight to appear. The cut on my hand. At the back of my mind I vaguely wonder how I did it, and I listen to the trees and there’s a slight tapping by my right foot, like a fingertip on a wooden table top. It reminds me of a scene I once wrote in a book but I cannot remember which. My hand stings. The cut zizzes. I must fix that generator. Fix it. Like a gangster fixes a problem with a bullet in the brain, because it is provoking to be beaten by a machine and a fifty-year-old machine at that. I have a book to write. And besides, I want electricity.
*
I’m in the forest. Trees around me, and I know the tapping was my blood dripping on to the threshold of the cellar, and now hard cut on the forest floor I’m drifting, and ripping my lungs with the ice-air and the thin, thin ice-air knifes me, no, I don’t like that, points its way into my lungs, ripping with crystals so it’s sore, which I can feel, and did you ever think or know or know how we feel our lungs? Our guts? Our blood pump? The frozen wave of fear when you do something bad and, what else is there to say but, the beating of the heart? A beating heart. A beating heart. Say it in time to your beating heart and the forest is the first to witness me, as the generator rumbles in its cave and I know I am struck with the sudden foreshadowing knowledge that I am not going to write this book.
I stumble up.
I dream of breathing again. All around me. All around me. Close up and so close that it’s part of me and I wake, my eyes wide to the cool dark air.
There’s still nothing.
I am going to write this book.
I am going to write this book.
I am going to write this book.
It’s my daily mantra.
I am, I am. I will, I will.
Down I come from the cramped sleeping area (I am still not tempted to call it a bedroom), which overlooks the space where I cook, wash up, wash, pace and ponder. And don’t write.
I set a pan on the burner to make hot water for tea and wonder if I can smell gas again. No. No? I scoop the book from the armchair and take it over to the tiny old table I am using as my desk. My hand throbs.
I stare at it, the book, I mean, as so often, and every time I do I feel some kind of remorse for the fact that I hate it, when everyone else in the world seems to love it, and at the same moment I notice the dozens of folded-down corners where I have marked the passages that irk me and then I only have to open it at any given place and my disgust returns!
Things that offend a sensitive reader’s idea of elegance.
Here, let me enumerate.
Exhibit A: The coincidences.
The overly convenient chance occurrences that arise again, and again, and again: a symptom of a writer too lazy or stupid to think of ways around such clumsy plot devices.
For example: Victor is a student, away in Ingolstadt, Germany, when he creates his creature. The creature awakes after long toil on Victor’s part (sadly we are shown almost nothing of that toil) and Victor, appalled by what he’s done, staggers off to wander aimlessly around the city. And after hours of this heedless traipsing and hand-wringing, who is the very first person that Victor encounters? None other than his best friend, Henry Clerval, literally that moment stepping off the coach from Switzerland.
Another. When the creature arrives in Geneva, attempting to track down his creator in his hometown, who is the very first person he comes across? None other than Victor’s little brother William, who will shortly become the initial victim of the monster’s murderous rage.
Another. When Victor himself later arrives in Geneva, who is the first being he encounters? The creature, of course.
In chapter twenty-one, Victor, wrongly accused of Henry’s murder, declares:
I could not help being struck by the strange coincidences that had taken place.
And in a similar way, I could not help throwing the book across the room.
These coincidences are offences against creativity. There are more scattered throughout the book, many more. It would have taken very little effort to have arranged matters so these things fell out as the necessary order of events.
Perhaps such a writer doesn’t care about the coincidences. Perhaps they think the reader doesn’t care about them. Both are unforgivable.
*
Coincidences are one thing. There are more terrible crimes that the book commits. Throughout, there are the bubblings-up of snobbery. And even of its more sinister cousin: racism.
So:
Exhibit B: Fair is better than dark.
Everyone recalls how the young Victor is given a ‘pretty little present’ by his doting mother. That present is, in fact, a human being: Elizabeth, who becomes his adopted sister, his ‘more than sister’, and later, for one night only, his wife.
Let’s not pause to consider the way that Elizabeth is made into an object before she’s even walked on to the page properly.
Let’s pass over the pseudo-incestuous nature of the relationship between her and Victor.
Instead, let’s recall where Elizabeth came from: Victor’s parents, while travelling in the lakes of northern Italy, notice the plight of the region’s poor. One day, the five-year-old Victor and his mother pay a visit to a cottage, where Victor says, they;
found a peasant and his wife, hard-working, bent down by care and labour, distributing a scanty meal to five hungry babes. Among these was one which attracted my mother far above all the rest. She appeared of a different stock. The four others were dark-eyed, hardy little vagrants; this child was thin and fair.
Learning that this girl is from a good family, a noble one though fallen on hard times, Victor’s moth
er rescues this celestial, golden-haired angel from the hardy little vagrants, and brings her to live as their own daughter. And good riddance to the dark-eyed peasants, and the hunger of the other four children.
‘A good family’. A good family. The phrase, versions of it, and notions connected to it, occur again and again.
But is this Victor speaking? Is it his character’s voice? Or is that Mary, the author, speaking?
Mary made Victor, of course, but that does not mean that a character is the writer who wrote him. Of course not. It’s more complex than that. (Though people frequently make this mistake when they shout abuse in the street at the actor who always plays villains …)
Whose snobbery is it? Is it Victor’s? Mary put the words in his mouth (and of his family), perhaps she was trying to make a point about him – he’s detached, a snob, arrogant, and so on. But we are expressly told otherwise by another character.
The book is actually not one story, but four: a story within a story within a story within a story. This structure upsets me too – three would have been good, four feels overdone.
So, Exhibit C: Clumsy structures.
To be precise, the book is a series of nested eggs; a Russian doll of a novel:
It opens with:
1) the polar explorer, Walton, who, while venturing towards the northern polar regions, chances across Victor, who;
2) recounts his tale of how he created and then rejected his creature, who then appears through Victor’s own account in the narrative to relay;
3) his account of how he was made, how he became shunned and how he learned to speak and to read by listening through the wall of the hut of a poverty-stricken family, and is therefore conveniently able to relate;
4) the innermost story of the book! Which is the utterly boring and thematically irrelevant (unless the theme of the novel really is snobbery) account of some preposterous love affair which brought said noble family to live in said tumble-down cottage in the mountains not far from Ingolstadt.