FICTION: The Casebook of Victor FrankensteinBy Peter AckroydChatto Windus, 296pp, £16.99
IN AN ERA of over-stretched biographies choked with trivial details, Peter Ackroyd recently managed to produce a wonderfully short biography of Edgar Allan Poe, which no reader can read without the reassuring conclusion that no matter how contorted, financially strapped or emotionally scarred their lives are, they are bound to be less tortured, bizarre and self-destructive than Poe's short existence, which ended after he was discovered comatose in a Baltimore tavern.
In death, Poe would be credited as the father of horror fiction, but Poe was still only a boy of seven during the fateful summer of 1816 when a bored Lord Byron suggested that his fellow guests in a villa overlooking Lake Geneva entertain each other by inventing ghost stories. Staying with Byron was the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; his lover, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, calling herself Mary Shelley but not yet his wife; Claire Clairmont, who was carrying Byron's child; and Byron's friend and doctor, John William Polidori.
Most certainly not staying there was Victor Frankenstein, because he had yet to be fermented from the imagination of Mary Shelley, inspired by a nightmare after their highly charged conversation had touched upon galvanism - where a muscle responds to an electric current - and the alleged experiments of Erasmus Darwin in trying to animate dead matter.
Victor Frankenstein may not have been present, but in the intervening two centuries his fictional character became more famous than his real creator.
Cinema has primarily been responsible, with every adaptation since 1910 nudging Frankenstein (and the monster he created) further away from the tragic student, invented by Mary Shelley as a man obsessed with scientific curiosity and a desire to aid humanity.
Yet no film ever attempted the imaginative liberties taken by Peter Ackroyd in this new novel that hijacks Shelley's narrative and brings us an alternative version by giving Frankenstein control of his own story. Here, Mary Shelley, her husband-to-be and Lord Byron all become characters existing side by side with this young Swiss amateur scientist, fascinated by the possibilities of electric power restoring life to the dead.
In this parallel world, Frankenstein takes the seat of Claire Clairmont in that lakeside villa. However, while the others are inventing their nightmares, he is dealing with the consequences of having his wish come true and transformed into a living - or at least undead - nightmare. The face that Mary Shelley glimpses is not a waking dream, but the creature that Frankenstein has brought to life in an experiment in London that has gone hideously wrong.
This is an intensely playful book, yet its cleverness keeps the reader at bay. It is hard to emotionally invest in any narrative that is partly a literary quiz, where you constantly watch an undoubtedly brilliant author doing imaginative three-card tricks - whether it be having Shelley's first wife Harriet (transformed here into an uneducated slum dweller) drowned by Frankenstein's monster in the Serpentine (where the real life well-educated Harriet committed suicide) or having the monster come to life in the disastrously resurrected body of John Keats, who dies of TB while still a London medical student.
It is wonderfully inventive and while Ackroyd delights in playing with real lives, he stays deeply faithful to creating accurate versions of real locations, especially London, whose streets and scents and heaving vigour have been finely chronicled in his non-fiction works. In bringing Mary Shelley's creation home, he supplies here his own vibrant backdrop of London morgues and dissecting rooms and resurrection men plying their trade along the Thames.
This deliberate playfulness - and, with it, serious questions about authorship, authenticity, and how writers not only borrow from their own experience but from a reservoir of other lives, real and fictitious, that are given equal validity within literature - is apparent throughout Ackroyd's fiction. It is there in his transportation of Milton to Massachusetts in Milton in Americaor his granting an extended life to Thomas Chatterton, the 18th-century teenage poet famous for his forgeries and his suicide, which becomes another forgery in Ackroyd's hands.
It has led to a remarkable oeuvre, hovering between history and imagination. Yet for all his skilled ventriloquism there is something soulless in this latest hybrid novel, where Frankenstein's earnestness keeps the reader at bay, where Mary Shelley is a bystander, Percy Bysshe Shelley a nitwit, and Byron more mad than dangerous to know. The novel only fully sparks to life in Frankenstein's exchanges with the monster he creates by playing at being God, a creature who places full responsibility for his crimes on his creator's shoulders and who, once made, refuses to go away.
There is one more twist on the final page that throws everything into a new perspective and that is the beauty of such re-imagined histories, the opening of imaginative possibilities, how no life is preordained, how memoir is always selective and truth rarely only has one version.
Ackroyd captures the intellectual ferment of the period, the seditious undertow of ideas about liberty and science and free conscience being fermented by poets (who are at once revolutionaries and dilettantes) alongside the underworld of poverty.
Yet somehow he never captures the horror and the pity at the soul of Mary Shelley's vision, for all the literary fireworks, ingenuity, brilliant contortions and haunting landscapes against which he lets his ideas play out, in a novel that is fascinating and yet oddly disengaging.
Dermot Bolger is a novelist and currently writer-in-residence in Farmleigh House. He will conduct a public interview with Paul Durcan and Brian Keenan in the Axis Art Centre in Ballymun at 8pm on Monday and, as curator of the Hourglass interview/ reading series, he will be in conversation with Hugo Hamilton in the Irish Writers' Centre on Tuesday at 7pm