Frankissstein Paperback – 8 Oct. 2020

I came at Frankissstein with some trepidation and approached it only because of its Booker longlisting. I have always imagined Jeanette Winterson to be an agenda led writer who would not be writing for readers like me.So I was quite surprised to find two (three?) lively and playful narrative streams interweaving with one another. One was the writing of Frankenstein - a story I already knew but it seemed to be written in an approachable way. The second narrative set in the present day/near future had the manufacturer of artificially intelligent sex dolls sharing his plans for creating true AI with Ry, a transgender journalist. The possible third narrative was a metafictional strand where Mary Shelley encounters Frankenstein in the real world.On the surface level, this is all jolly japes, perhaps indicating that Frankenstein became bigger than Mary Shelley herself and developed a life of its own. The novel seemed to have a number of great and fizzy ideas that unfortunately never quite came together.But there is also a major reservation I have. I know that a number of feminist writers have an issue with transgender - they only admit fellowship to those born biologically female. In Frankissstein, there seems little need to make Ry transsexual unless it is to make some oblique parallel between creating an artificial person (Frankenstein’s monster) and creating a woman. And as such, I will acknowledge that it is a viewpoint, but not one I would care to pay to read. If this is the real point of the novel (and I fear that it is), then it undermines some entertaining prose; is anachronistic; and is also a wee bit cowardly in doing it through innuendo and thereby requiring counter-arguments to first articulate the proposition that Winterson would presumably deny she is making.Three stars for the writing, but this left a nasty aftertaste.

This book, based on Mary Shelley’s, Frankenstein, has two narrative streams. The first, follows the circumstances around Mary Shelley’s creation of the book Frankenstein. The second centres upon the narrative of a transgender doctor, called Rye, and their relationship with the AI specialist Victor Stein. It poses two questions. What will a future, dominated by AI look like? And, will that future hold a place for women? Along the way, it looks at; Bodily autonomy, gender, sexuality and performance.This book is an interesting read, but there’s very little new stuff here. Winterson is being Winterson. We have her standard stylistic tics, combining a modernist structure with a lyrical, almost Victorian writing style. After a lifetime of reading this author, her writing feels like a comfortable blanket rather than a shocking ride. In addition, the stories, and themes of this book have been covered time and time again. There have been many tales of the creation of Frankenstein and many retellings of the Frankenstein story.In addition, there have been many books dealing with AI. The science fiction canon is full of them. Writers, such as; James Tiptree and Madeleine Ashby have all looked at issues around AI. This is not to say that there is no room for another book. It is just that the themes feel familiar.However, Winterson’s focus on the main transgender character and her emphasis on women’s future give this work a slight edge. It’s always nice to get something new from this author, but this work didn’t blow me away.

Although not a particular fan of Jeanette Winterson I had been meaning to get a copy of this to read it, as it looked like it could be quite good. Fortunately, it was better than I expected and is full of ideas. Winterson shows off her wonderful inventiveness with this, as we follow a tale that marries the hard science of our modern world, and the Romantics of which the original Frankenstein owes its inception to.As we flip between different periods so we read of Mary Shelley and the concept of her famous book, along with life as it was experienced by her, and then we read of Ry Shelley, who as we find out more about, we see and read more of their sexuality. The link between everything in this book falls to one Professor Victor Frankenstein, who we see is a real person and very much on the cusp of scientific breakthroughs. Here then we read of the reality of how far we have gone in the way to bringing back the departed, and how far we still have to go. This also raises more philosophical points, such as what is life, what is reality, and do we even need a body, or just a working brain?Taking in many issues that will become more discussed over the next few years, I also enjoyed the riffs on Brexit, and of course sex. Although most people try to skirt the issue, at the end of the day it will be the sex industry that will be pioneers in the robotics industry as they will obviously fund and develop the robot as a household pleasure toy (although there will probably be a few mangled dicks along the way). There are a lot of elements that make up this book, even down to religion, and thus a lot to take in, but it all seems to come together quite seamlessly, and is easy to read. I should think that this could well become popular with book groups, as there is just so much to discuss and contemplate within these pages.