PanThe New Statesman (UK)... unlikely to win over many who enjoy the fiction of science ... Risks don’t always come off, though – and Frankissstein, an update of a morality story that has been continually retold for two centuries, fails to hit the mark. Like Victor Frankenstein, Winterson stitches together quite disparate parts. And, like his monstrous lightning-born creation, this book suffers from an identity crisis as a result ... In the cramming in of so many ethical and philosophical points of discussion, often by way of didactic and totally implausible dialogue, it feels as if Winterson is playing to the contemporary woke crowd ... The novel’s main question – what will happen to humans when they are superseded by more advanced forms? – becomes lost in scenes that have more than a whiff of Carry On Screaming! about them ... Perhaps Frankissstein is meant to be satire then, a novel inhabited by ribald characters, in which disbelief should be suspended – though surely not when Winterson is attempting a serious examination of gender fluidity ... too historically grounded to be an utterly contemporary story, neither funny nor reflective enough to work as satire, and its structure is chaotic. Tonally, the closest comparison is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but without a Tim Curry to be confused and amused by ... As with Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein one can’t help wonder whether the end result is quite what its creator intended.
