Offers a bold new framing for questions about where we draw lines: between queerness and heterosexuality, the natural and the unnatural, and the imaginary and the real ... The narrative unfolds in hypnotic language steeped in fantasy and allusion, poetically translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson ... Eekhout suggests throughout the novel that the beast, which Mary continues to see, could be the offspring of her own fantasies ... With unusual deftness, Eekhout blurs the lines between the facts of Mary Shelley’s life and the world of the novel ... This fictional excavation of a lesser-known episode in Shelley’s life feels true to her memory.
She has set herself the task of conjuring the workings of Mary’s outrageous imagination as the first inklings of an idea take shape. Few novels have successfully suggested the murky swirl of impulse, instinct and experience behind real examples of great literary achievement ... But the business of novel-writing is often messy and tedious. Here, reading about it can also feel like hard work ... As we move between events at Cologny and the equally highly colored Dundee subplot, Mary and her companions seem increasingly stiff and unconvincing, trapped both by the sensational furniture of the novel...and the flatness of the writing ... The novel expends considerable effort to show that Mary’s great act of creativity, like that of Victor Frankenstein, came when she began to piece together all manner of strange and horrifying material. But whether Eekhout truly animates Mary, as Mary Shelley herself animated both Frankenstein and his creature, is a little less certain.
A nuanced, beautifully atmospheric portrayal of a young woman’s intense inner life, foreshadowing Frankenstein’s themes of grief, loneliness, and the desire for love.
