Frankenstein as an historical, urban Gothic psycho-thriller - Peter Ackroyd''s rendering of Mary Shelley''s classic in The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein
Abstract
Peter Ackroyd is one of the most acclaimed and prolific of contemporary British historical writers. His fiction exemplifies the genre of historical metafiction, which employs, apart from the eponymous thematisation of the writing process itself, many of the typical postmodernist narrative techniques such as intertextuality, generic hybridity, blurring of the borderline between fiction and historiography by mixing fictitious characters and events with real ones, and open or otherwise inconclusive endings.
However, there are two more idiosyncrasies that can be traced in Ackroyd''s novels: the first is the author''s fascination with London and his subsequent representation of the British capital as both a setting and a theme; the second is his interest in the obscure, enigmatic and occult, through which he expresses his persuasion that irrational forces should never be underestimated when we attempt to comprehend the world around us. Both of these tendencies can be found in The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008), where Ackroyd reassumes his palimpsestic narrative strategy, which he earlier used in The Great Fire of London (1982) and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), and reworks the story of Mary Shelley''s Frankenstein (1818).
Ackroyd''s version is set predominantly in London and develops, and toys with, Shelley''s hint of a doppelganger, transforming thus the romantically exotic original into an historical, urban Gothic psycho-thriller. The aim of this paper is to explore the mechanisms of Ackroyd''s rendering and to show that the genre of the Gothic novel still provides inspiring and revivifying material for the contemporary historical novel.