It won't be any spoiler to the literate masses to say that this classic Gothic horror story revolves around young Doctor Victor Frankenstein and the monster that he brings to life. This unnamed creature, the culmination of years of painstaking work by Frankenstein, turns murderous after experiencing cruelty and persecution in his every encounter with humankind. Mary Shelley's work was first published anonymously in 1818. Significant in its day for the distillation of Gothic literary conventions combined with an original and imaginative premise, the book is still widely known today, if not quite so widely read.  
 
I was fairly surprised to find that I did not at all enjoy reading this book. In fact, I found it enormously repetitive and tedious. Despite the brevity of the story, I still thought the story dragged on, as if the author had padded the story heavily without adding anything of substance. I was also surprised to find that the story held absolutely no suspense for me, nor could I say that the story struck me in any way as "creepy." Sort of a disappointment for one of the most famous Gothic horror stories of all time, wouldn't you say? Adding insult to injury were the leaden dialog, a completely unsympathetic main character and the lack of credibility in the actions and thoughts of the characters.  
 
Here's an example of what I mean when I say the dialog is leaden. The scene is one in which a household servant of the Frankensteins has wrongfully been accused of a murder committed by the monster. The excerpt is typical of all the dialog in the novel:  
 
"She is innocent, my Elizabeth," said I, "and that shall be proved; fear nothing, but let your spirits be cheered by the assurance of her acquittal."  
 
"How kind and generous you are! every one else believes in her guilt, and that made me wretched, for I knew that it was impossible: and to see every one else prejudiced in so deadly a manner rendered me hopeless and despairing." She wept.  
 
"Dearest niece," said my father, "dry your tears. If she is, as you believe, innocent, rely on the justice of our laws, and the activity with which I shall prevent the slightest shadow of partiality.'  
 
-Surely some of this turgid stuffiness can be attributed to the time period in which Shelley wrote. But it strains credulity to suggest that intimate family members would really converse with each other in this way, no matter the era.  
 
 
After endowing his creation with life, Victor Frankenstein flees his laboratory, loses track of the monster and then goes about his miserable life for two years, apparently uninterested in what has become of his life's work. Is this plausible? His role during this time consists principally of languishing in nervous fever-wracked states, absolving himself of all responsibility, wallowing all the while in self-indulgent, morbid melancholy and revulsion towards the work of his own hands. He waffles and dithers and generally acts like an idiot for chapters on end. None of this behavior endeared him to me. In fact, the monster possesses qualities, at least at times, that are far more ennobling than any his creator ever displays. The words "miserable" and "misery," "gloom" and "anguish" appear on almost every page, sometimes in multiple paragraphs per page. If Shelley was trying to get the message across about Victor's wretched state, she might have had a little more faith in her readers' ability to absorb that message the first, second, third or fourth times around. Or barring that, she might have had recourse to a thesaurus to look for other descriptive terms. The reader is asked to not only endure, but to care about and empathize with the neurotic thoughts and behavior of Victor Frankenstein for far too long.  
 
Yet another implausible aspect of the story creeps into the narrative by way of the narrator. Frankenstein is actually a story within a story within a story. What that means is that Victor Frankenstein is relating his story to the captain of an exploratory vessel in the Arctic, who is in turn taking the tale down in lengthy letters to his sister. And when Frankenstein recounts the story told to him by the monster, yet another layer is added to this tissue of boredom. But I digress. What I found implausible here is the highly favorable impression that Victor Frankenstein - at this point a dying wreck of a man - makes upon the sea captain. In his letters, the captain speaks of Frankenstein's nobility of soul and of how he grows to love the good doctor as a brother. Knowing Frankenstein through his own words left me with an altogether different impression of the man and I fail to see how the captain could be so taken with his acquaintance.  
 
It has been and can be argued that Frankenstein is largely a moral tale. To reduce the moral philosophy of the tale to its essence, kind treatment makes people good; cruel treatment, revulsion and rejection makes them wicked. Yet this idea doesn't even hold up in Shelley's tale, for Victor, though raised by benevolent and loving parents treats his own creation most cruelly. And the monster, though treated most cruelly by all he encounters, retains an innate moral compass and yearning towards goodness even as he continues his annihilation of Frankenstein's friends and family.  
 
Another theme that Shelley raises but does not satisfactorily treat is the idea that man's desire to master nature and to understand the world in which we live is futile without the all-too-rare qualities of self-mastery and understanding of human desires and limitations. Frankenstein's fatal immaturity allowed his hubristic faith in his own abilities to overreach his wisdom and his compassion. The monster is not inherently monstrous, but becomes so through his creator's rejection of him. Had the young doctor had the wisdom to predict his own reaction to his creation or the compassion to treat it benevolently, Shelley suggests, the disaster could easily have been averted. Yet this message is merely hinted at and not drawn out to any clear explication or moral.  
 
It's clear that Shelley meant to play upon the parallels and contrasts between the creator and the creature in her novel. Each of them is made miserable by the existence of the other. Each of them seeks to master the other. Both feel cut off from the world around them. And they both say of their sufferings "I bore a hell within me." Yet their differences are great too, for where Victor pursues science and rationality in his studies, his reactions devolve into hysterics and passivity; while the monster, who comes into existence with no learning and no one to instruct him, resorts to empirical analysis of the world and consistently acts vigorously on the basis of his analyses. In these contrasts and similarities, we can detect Mary Shelley's background as the daughter of a philosopher and the wife of a poet. Unfortunately, this after-the-fact sort of literary parsing doesn't make up for the anemic and long-winded text that Shelley left us.  
 
 
This is the first time in my memory that I have read a classic piece of literature and found virtually nothing to commend it or repay my time and effort. It surprises me that a book of such a reputation falls so far short in every way by which I am accustomed to judge fiction. Sadly, I cannot recommend this book to anyone. I suspect that the book continues to be read today largely on the strength of its popularity in the era of its publication 
