TandeWrites

Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant teenage prodigy, wants his adult university peers to take him seriously. After suffering a public humiliation over his wild academic theories, Victor makes a bet with a fellow student: he swears he will find the secret to human reanimation to prove himself before all who mocked him. Failing, desperate, and running out of time, Victor does the unspeakable: he kidnaps a young man from a nearby village and destroys his body using radical, untried alchemy rather than science. Elias Hilfiker awakens, his voice gone, his skin stitched and scarred, and his community has exiled him. And Victor’s amateur alchemy unintentionally links the two strangers together, forcing them to constantly feel each other’s emotions.

Enraged by the mutilation of his life, Elias swears that he will seek vengeance on Victor at any cost. Meanwhile, Victor embarks on a journey to reverse–or outrun–the horror he’s unleashed. As they cross the European landscape, Victor bows before the weight of his sins while Elias uncovers the secrets of his own power in a world where he was once powerless.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review, and thank you to the author herself for the Google Docs version two years ago that I devoured in a day.

It is such a relief to be able to talk about this book in more detail after I fell in love with a first draft over two years ago. This book is K. Ancrum’s twisted love letter to horror and curiosity, and it’s unafraid to pay tribute to what I love so dearly about the source material (Victor Frankenstein being a whiny teenager). It’s a different take on the story in comparison to the Frankenstein renditions that we may already know, but the focus on what it means to be human and the cruelty of human ambition remains prominent. And I feel like Ancrum’s rendition dives more into Victor’s abhorrence and the way that he thinks, driven by this desire to be understood and proving himself to his peers, no matter the cost or the unforgivable acts he will commit. It’s a version of the story that focuses on the parts that readers may not remember. Most of us know the monster, the murders, and the ice. Fewer of us remember the elaborate speeches, the travel around the world, and the framework through which the story is being told to a horrified listener, and these half-forgotten moments are what Ancrum brings to the forefront of her reimagining.

He knew it was time to face the music; he knew Elias would come for him. The way Elias’s eyes burned as they stared at each other in the belly of Victor’s lab, Victor knew with certainty that he was about to be hunted.

Adam, Mine feels entirely different to anything she’s published before, but it’s still so unflinchingly her in a way that I will adore forever. This is a book where Ancrum took all of the skills that have made her previous books evocative, romantic, and exciting, and used them to make this book painful and isolating. There’s a lot of emotional chaos in it as usual, but all of it is punishment and devastation. Victor has a lot of scenes that could have functioned as a kind of bonding in another book, but here it’s a type of flogging: theatrical in its violence and well deserved. And the monster experiences the struggle of loss and a longing for death that’s as explicit as any romantic scene Ancrum has ever written, but not at all the same. Elias isn’t energised by his agonies; they drain him, and he drags them around like a ball on a chain. He spends the story mourning the life that he had lost and fighting the urge for vengeance that threatens to strip all the remaining softer parts of himself that made him his mother’s son. It’s especially important to me that Elias is disabled, as someone living in a body held together by painkillers and wishful thinking, and it’s no surprise that Ancrum has chosen to write about these fragile bodies. Her interpretation of Frankenstein’s “monster” is an eighteen-year-old village boy who is taken advantage of in the pursuit of a merciless stranger’s goals.

”If you had been born rough, perhaps you would know the price of work and what it means to have family, to bow before destiny in supplication. You could be a man at that age then. But you are a gentleman. And for men who do not have to grovel for bread, seventeen is a child.”

What I remember best about reading Frankenstein is that, before anything else, Victor Frankenstein is a boy. He’s seventeen, rich, arrogant, and merciless. He’s a talented child amongst adults at his university, and his desperate longing for approval from his peers sets him on a course he can’t—or won’t—turn back from. This acknowledgement of Victor’s youth is something I find lacking in most recent adaptations, so it warms my heart that Ancrum placed such emphasis on it. The scientists and alchemists Victor encounters throughout his journey take continuous responsibility for treating him as an equal in both intellect and life experience, and for gifting him knowledge he was not responsible or mature enough to treat with care. With this knowledge, he invents machines that would be miraculous for medicine at that time, but he ultimately uses them to create his “monster” and impulsively impress his peers rather than channel that ambition for the greater good.

“Manipulation of the human form is…dark arts indeed.”

“Do you have that same opinion on blood transfusions, a thing that would have been considered obscene last century, that has since saved thousands of lives?”

In this book, the lines between alchemy and chemistry are blurred, and there’s emphasis on how magic is untimely science. In a sense, Victor is right in the theories that lead to his public humiliation: he can and will succeed in performing metaphysical acts upon the body. There are also a lot of people who are as invested in this breakthrough science as he is, and the consequences of his pride and vanity (and the fact that they all hate him) stop him from joining them professionally. Frankenstein 1818 Victor uses lightning to raise a body from the dead, and this is the greatest example of blurring the line between science and magic, wisdom and witchcraft. Ancrum’s reimagining of that story just adds other very qualified people who know how to manipulate the spiritual energy in blood or rip a hole in your soul while leaving your body intact, and these people serve as an example of what Victor could’ve become if he used his talent for literally anything other than impressing his friends. And there’s poetic justice in this rich and pretentious version of Victor being bad at spiritual science and his “monster” (very smart, but undereducated and illiterate) being so good at it.

My only notable flaw with the book is how the non-linear timeline and jumps between Victor and Elias’ perspectives left me lost in a few chapters. They visit many of the same alchemists, and there are times when Victor shows up and discovers Elias has already visited, but we don’t see Elias’ visit until later in the book, and this felt slightly disruptive to my reading experience. My Kindle was also displeased with being asked to jump between my current page, a footnote, then back again, so there are some translations I missed out on.

Ultimately, this story is about how deciding to try to understand each other makes us into people with a capacity for love that respects the vulnerability involved in denying hate. It’s about the effort involved to heal the wounds we deliver out of carelessness and selfish cruelty.