I was expecting better. While Frankenstein is a monster movie these days, the book is often called the first science fiction novel. If so, we are using a broad definition, whereby any ability labeled "Science!" counts, as opposed to him saying that he animated the monster through "Magic!"
Victor Frankenstein learned how to impart life to inanimate matter. To demonstrate his work, he decided build a man, larger than man but perfect in form and stature. He was powerful of bearing but terrifying of visage, and even his creator fled before him. Now it is out there, somewhere, alone, knowing only fear and hatred.
This is where your warning against science notes that Frankenstein was the name of the man, not the monster, but who was really the greater monster? And you arch your eyebrow, as if this were a devastating rhetorical point.
Victor himself is the archetypal scientist as man with learning but not wisdom. He lacks the foresight to see the effects of his actions, or even the basic intelligence to consider that there might be effects, even in the near future.
The only problem with the monster is that he is hideously ugly and eight feet tall. Sitting, with a mask, he could probably get on well enough. Victor seems not to have noticed the uncanny valley until he finished the monster and saw it moving. During the previous two years, its being ugly had not struck him, but upon seeing it alive, he ran and hid in his bed. When it followed him and opened the bed-curtains, he fled the house.
Victor came back the next day to find his home empty, no monster. And here is where Victor lost me: he rejoiced. He created a massively powerful, eight foot tall man, ugly enough to make his proud creator flee the building, oh and that is its first memory, and it disappeared in the night. And this is good news? This could become a problem. Putting it out of mind for two years cannot help. It took a stronger version to get him to ask, "What happens when I flip the switch?" for as much as a page.
Not that he flips a switch. The typical American picture of Frankenstein, derived from film, is little like the original (see also Pinocchio). There is a sense in which Victor is a mad scientist who they laughed at at the academy, but it is more that he is exhausted by his creation and that he entered school with a misguided early education. There is no Igor, no castle in the mountains with lightning harnessed to power the monster. Victor does not triumphantly shout, "It's alive! Alive!" The monster is not a lumbering, "fire bad" golem with stiff joints.
Instead, the monster is a supple creature, strong as a gorilla, nimble as a lynx, and sure-footed as a goat. He speaks immaculate French. His self-image is largely based on Milton's Satan, the monster having found a copy of Paradise Lost.
This is another bit that I found frequently jarring. Frankenstein was written before the use of idiomatic speech in novels. When Jane Austen characters speak in perfectly poised epigrams, it works just fine. It may be a little stilted, but high society can have its high diction. When Frankenstein's monster sounds like a more articulate Elizabeth Bennet, we have an issue.
It is also jarring because of the frame story. The story is being told by Victor in the first person, but this is his recounting to the captain of a ship, whose presence is invisible for most of the book. This gets somewhat nested when the captain is writing down Victor's story of the monster's story of a Frenchman's reading from a book. These people have great memories. There are also letters that make no sense in the context of the setting. "Let me tell you the story of how you met this person who you lived with for the past five years." This is a help to the reader, who has no idea who Justine is, but it is a bit much exposition for a letter written between family members. Maybe she assumes that he has a poor memory, despite the above, or maybe it is common pre-Victorian letter writing verbosity.
Am I harping on details? They are demonstrative of the full problems, or at least problems as they seem to the modern reader. We all respect the Model T, but you would not want to drive a flivver today. Which is funny, given that Pride and Prejudice is older and has stood up better to the test of time.
Upon reflection, the two books are not so different in their pacing and structure. Frankenstein has more bloodshed, but we still have the languid letters, the days in the country, the time spent on journeys. If anything, it lacks Pride and Prejudice's upbeat pace, instead mixing long blocks of exposition with long blocks of despair.
If you like pre-Victorian navel-gazing and despair, this is exactly the book you are looking for. A frequent pattern: ten to twenty pages of worrying that something horrible is going to happen; something horrible happens; everyone relevant is dumbstruck, shocked, or driven to delirium; ten to twenty pages of anguishing that something horrible happened; repeat.
Sometimes these combine to do nice things with foreshadowing, particularly when worries leap across cycles of foreboding-disaster-mourning and when the narrator breaks the fourth wall to make good use of the frame story. Victor knows that he is speaking to someone in recounting his tale, and that comes through at times. He refers to events yet to come, and the story could only have been better for more of it. The whole book has an air of this: since we start with the captain picking up Victor, and having seen a bit more, we know where the story is heading and what Victor's impression of the experience is.
More awareness from the point of view character, fewer blocks of exposition, saner dialogue: my requests to an author long dead. And now I have the strange urge to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
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