How strange is life; this span that is our daily reality, yet daily countermanded by the stories we tell.
Frankissstein sizzles with ideas and well-turned phrases and intertexuality; it is historical fiction and a love story (or two) and a prescient parable for own times; it is timely and timeless and I lost myself within these pages. Jeanette Winterson put so much into this book that it probably is too much, and some scenes went so over the top that her point seems lost in the stratosphere, but I can't help but admire what she went for here; on a shelf of boring same-sameiness, Frankissstein certainly stands out. I can see why the Man Booker jury put this on their longlist, but as much as I loved it, I can also see why it didn't make the shortlist. Did I mention I loved it?
The gentlemen laugh at me indulgently. They respect me up to a point, but we have arrived at that point.The book begins in (and hops back and forth to) 1816, at the famed Swiss holiday home in which Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. This opening is gorgeously wrought – the love story between Mary and Percy Shelley, the fireside debates with Lord Byron and the others of their party, the daemon of creativity that seizes Mary's brain; all beautifully captured – and as much as these sections are set in the past, with discussions on the locus of identity, gender roles, and exploitative Capitalism, Winterson sets the stage for her themes to rhyme throughout the ages. In the present, we meet Ry Shelley (a woman-to-man transgendered doctor) who meets and falls in love with Victor Stein (a visionary scientist seeking to free consciousness from the body in order to achieve immortality) and his business partner Ron Lord (who is at the leading edge of the sexbot industry). Rounding out the group from the present who are doubles for those in the past are Polly D (like Byron's physician, Dr. Polidari) – a Vanity Fair journalist trying to get an interview with Stein – and Claire (like Mary's stepsister, Byron's lover) – an evangelical Christian who is against Stein's work of freeing a mind/soul from its body, but who can nonetheless see the value in Lord's sexbot work: what could do more to lead a lonely Christian away from sin than such a willing and incorruptible partner?
I am part of a small group of transgender medical professionals. Some of us are transhuman enthusiasts too. That isn't surprising; we feel or have felt that we're in the wrong body. We can understand the feeling that any-body is the wrong body.There are so many obvious parallels between Shelley's story and Winterson's – one mad scientist attempting to put the animating spirit into a slab of meat, the other attempting to carefully remove it, all while unwilling to imagine the monster he might unleash – but having the main character of the modern sections be transgendered allows us to ask questions that are more fundamental to our experience as humans: Are we more than the bodies we're born into? If we reach the Singularity and humanity exists as pure consciousness, will sex or gender play a role at all? And for that matter: as “sexbots” become more human, will it be possible to abuse their bodies? Do they even have gender? Throughout the conversations in the past and the present, these questions and many more are considered, and it all made for interesting reading.
I like reading. It's the only way to understand what's happening in programming. It is as though we are fulfilling something that has been foretold. The shape-shifting. The disembodied future. Eternal life. The all-powerful gods not subject to the decay of nature.Frankissstein is a goldmine of literary allusions and references. I was glad that I read Frankenstein (and the graphic novel biography of Mary Shelley, Mary's Monster) last year, allowing me to recognise much about this story and its creation. Winterson also throws in everything from Pygmalion and Shakespeare (not surprising that it's The Winter's Tale she references when that's the play she reimagined in The Gap of Time), to some millenias-old Gnostic gospels which, in their substance, seem to prefigure binary code and the freeing of consciousness. The poets wax poetical and feminism is discussed through the lens of Virginia Woolf's work and that of Mary Shelley's own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. In scenes that I found fascinating, Mary Shelley is called to the infamous Bedlam mental hospital, where a man claiming to be Victor Frankenstein himself begs her to set him free: whether author or scientist, it would seem, we are forever responsible for the fruits of our creation, and this is a heavy burden indeed. On the other hand, there is much funny in Frankissstein (even if I thought that much of the sexbot material went unnecessarily lowbrow, that's its own kind of warning for our future), and consistently, it entertained and gave me much to think about. What more could I want?
Man Booker Longlist 2019:
- Margaret Atwood, The Testaments
- Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier
- Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer
- Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport
- Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other
- John Lanchester , The Wall
- Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything
- Valeria Luisell, Lost Children Archive
- Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities
- Max Porter, Lanny
- Salman Rushdie, Quichotte
- Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
- Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein
Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.
