Ackroyd wrote a remake of Mary Shelley’s famous story. He describes the London slums, taverns, theaters no less enthusiastically than the adventures of Victor Frankenstein, who decided to create a perfect man, but revived — with the help of miracles of galvanism — a freak.
Ackroyd wrote a remake of Mary Shelley’s famous story. He describes the London slums, taverns, theaters no less enthusiastically than the adventures of Victor Frankenstein, who decided to create a perfect man, but revived — with the help of miracles of galvanism — a freak. Together with fictional characters, quite real poets are brought onto the stage: Byron, Wordsworth, Southey. The concentrated solution of this historical-cultural commentary placed directly into the novel disenchants Shelley’s dense gothic and romanticism, but does not dissolve the key issues of her «Frankenstein». Should scientific knowledge be limited? Does the audacity of the human mind bring discovery or destruction? Ackroyd does not moralize, but does not turn a blind eye to these questions, transparently hinting that in the era of cloning they are no less relevant than two hundred years ago.
Astrel, Corpus, 480 pp.