Frankenstein

Few novels made me question the meaning of responsibility as persistently as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. As a landmark of romanticism, the novel combines emotional intensity, sublime landscapes, scientific ambition, and profound anxiety about human isolation. Victor Frankenstein, driven by intellectual pride, discovers how to create life. Yet the moment his creature opens its eyes, he recoils from what he has made and abandons it.

What follows is not simply a tale of horror. The creature enters the world innocent, sensitive, and eager for affection. Through observation, it learns language, history, and human feeling, but every encounter teaches it that appearance determines acceptance. I found these passages especially moving because they reveal how cruelty can shape a being more decisively than nature. The creature’s violence is terrible, yet Shelley never allows me to dismiss it as a mindless monster.

Victor, meanwhile, became increasingly frustrating to me. He recognizes the consequences of his actions but repeatedly chooses secrecy, self-pity, and escape. His refusal to accept responsibility destroys those closest to him. I was struck by the contrast between his grand ambitions and his moral weakness. He wants the glory of creation without the burden of care.

The shifting narrators gave the story greater emotional complexity. Walton, Victor, and the creature each long for understanding, and all three suffer from loneliness. Their voices made me reconsider who deserves sympathy and whether suffering can excuse revenge. I admired how Shelley avoids easy answers.

The natural settings also stayed with me. Mountains, glaciers, storms, and frozen seas reflect the characters’ emotional extremes. These landscapes created moments of beauty, but they also emphasized how small and fragile human beings are beside forces they cannot control.

For me, Frankenstein remains powerful because its central conflict feels modern. It asks what creators owe their creations, how society produces outsiders, and where ambition should stop. I finished the novel with more compassion for the creature than for Victor. The book disturbed me, but it also left me deeply impressed by its intelligence, emotional force, and enduring moral urgency. Its questions continued to echo long after I closed the book.

I wasn't expecting to like this book anywhere near as much as I ended up doing! The story as told in the book is much more interesting than the limited image of it that's got in to popular culture, and this was my first encounter with the whole thing. It's so much more about deeply flawed Victor Frankenstein (TLDR: our reading group kept using the term "main character syndrome") than about the mad science process. And while the creature is far from likeable, his portrayal has genuine pathos, even though most of what we hear about him is secondhand through the recounting of someone who hates him.

There are several impressively strong resonances to the modern world, between the general lack of ethics in tech and the current wave of "AI" hype. And of course big self-centred men who think that extreme success in one sphere gives them licence to behave as badly as they like in others.