Mary: Or The Birth Of Frankenstein by Anne Eekhout

 

Mary: Or the Birth of Frankenstein by Anne Eekhout.

Translated by Laura Watkinson.

Published 2nd November 2023 by Pushkin Press.

From the cover of the book:

There is a beast inside her, a monster. It wants to scream, it wants to tear things apart.

1816. Mary, eighteen years old, is staying in a villa on Lake Geneva with her lover Percy Shelley. She is tormented by his infidelities; haunted by the loss of her baby daughter.

Then one evening with friends, as storms rage outside and laudanum stirs their imaginations, Lord Byron challenges everyone to write a ghost story, and something fierce and wild awakens in Mary.

Memories surface of the long, strange summer she once spent with a family in Scotland, where she found herself falling in love with the enigmatic Isabella Baxter. She learned tales of mythical beasts, witches and spirits. And she encountered real monsters - both in the rocky wilds, and far, far closer to home...

Illuminating the past like a flash of lightning, this brilliant reimagining of the birth of Frankenstein takes us into a feverish world of waking dreams-where grief mingles with desire, and the veil between beauty and horror grows thin.

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1816. A heady summer finds eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin staying in a villa on Lake Geneva with her lover Percy Shelley, their baby son, and her narcissistic step-sister Claire. In company with the infamous Lord Byron and his friend Dr John Polidori, this should be a time for freedom and creativity, but Mary is haunted by memories of her dead daughter and tortured by anxiety over Shelley's infidelity. Increasingly uncomfortable with some of the bohemian values that seduced her, Mary feels a darkness stirring within her that demands to be set free.

One stormy evening, while the group use laudanum laced-wine to let their imaginations and desires come out to play, Byron sets them a challenge to write a ghost story. In her over-wrought state, Mary begins to remember an eerie summer four years ago, and draws on these memories to create a story like no other... 

Part reimagining of the time in 1812 that Mary spent among the Baxter family in Scotland, and part exploration of how she began writing her classic horror tale, Frankenstein, in 1816, Eekhout moves between the two summers with slow-burn magic to create an intriguing twist on the Mary Shelley story. 

In the 1812 sections, Eekhout runs riot with fictional storylines about folklore, witchcraft, secret laboratories, grotesque figures from freak shows, sapphic love, and whispers of murder, to weave a delicious Gothic tale. Eekhout then, quite brilliantly, uses Mary's memories and her experience of the deeply unsettling relationships in the Baxter household to embroider what we know of the time she later spent on Lake Geneva plagued by ghosts, to explain how this complicated young woman was inspired to write a masterpiece. 

There is an intoxicating essence to this novel, which proves to be highly addictive. Eekhout heightens this feeling with fever-dream like scenes fuelled by alcohol, laudanum, and passion that completely consume you. You never really know how much of what Mary sees is real or imagined, but prepare to be drawn in, held spellbound, and genuinely frightened all the same. I also really enjoyed how Eekhout cleverly floods the novel with the very themes of life and death; science and religion; beauty and horror; and love and loss, which echo through Frankenstein itself. 

I think this is the most compelling book I have read about Mary Shelley yet, in the way it speculates about the passions that drove her and the complexities of her personality. I offer up high praise to the translator Laura Wilkinson too, who has clearly done an exceptional job preserving the intensity of atmosphere and emotion throughout. This is an absolute must for anyone interested in the unconventional life Mary Shelley led, the brilliance of her mind, and the quite astonishing novel that sprang from her imagination.

Mary: Or the Birth of Frankenstein is available to buy now in hardcover, ebook and audio formats.

Thank you to Pushkin Press for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review, and for inviting me to take part in this blog tour.

About the author:

Anne Eekhout is an award-winning Dutch novelist. Mary: or the Birth of Frankenstein was inspired by the teenage years of Mary Shelley, and is the first of her nivels to be published in English. It is currently being translated into fourteen languages.

About the translator:

Laura Watkinson is a full-time, prize-winning translator from Dutch, Italian and German. She lives in Amsterdam.