42. The Sustainable(ish) Living Guide: Everything You Need to Know to Make Small Changes That Make a Big Difference, Jen Gale
Another book that appears to have been cobbled together from a series of blog posts. Not brilliantly written but still a useful resource, bringing together lots and lots of small- to medium-size changes that individuals and families can realistically make in order to live more sustainably. Certainly I came away with several pages of notes of things we will try.
43. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Having been disappointed by Dracula earlier this year, I wasn't particularly interested to read this until someone posted a favourable review earlier this year (I'm so sorry, search isn't working well for me but I think it must have been Fortuna as I can see she has it on her list). And I'm glad to report this was much better and worth reading as a novel not just as a period piece!
Famously, this is the story of a brilliant scientist who creates life then regrets it. Shelley's Frankenstein, unlike the Hollywood/popular culture version, is a young man, who, following the death of his mother (BIG CONNECTION TO AUTHOR'S OWN LIFE KLAXON HERE) buries himself in his research, collecting body parts from graveyards and building a "creature". When he succeeds in bringing the creature to life, he is terrified and runs away. Frankenstein's account is cleverly nested as the middle layer of a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, so we see him through the eyes of others, including his own creation. While Frankenstein is a bit of a drip (he has three modes - rushing towards danger without heeding the consequences, complete denial "no, no everything's fine and normal, nothing to worry about" and fainting - what is with all the fainting?!) there's more than enough going on to propel the story forward. The best bit for me was the creature's account of what happens to him after Frankenstein abandons him, newly created.
Many of the ideas in the book are very much of their time: the question of what makes "man" (IS the creature human? and if not, then what is he?), the exploration of language acquisition, experience of nature, strength of feeling and emotion and the development of morality - I'm no great expert on the Age of Enlightenment or the Romantics but this feels very much like their territory (not to mention all those sublime landscapes, soaring alps etc).
But it feels very modern too in many ways. Scientific innovation has continued at an ever increasing pace since 1818, and we continue to look with a mixture of awe and horror at some of the things that we have created. We build things then we lose control of them. This is frequently described as being "the first novel about AI" - which leads me neatly on to......
44. Frankisstein: A Love Story, Jeanette Winterson
Where to start with this one? This is a novel so stuffed with ideas that it sometimes fails to hang together - but maybe that's deliberate (more than one critic has compared its structure to Frankenstein's creature, stitched together from disparate parts).
There are two main stories here. One is an (initially realistic, later rather more fantastical) evocative and involving account of Mary Shelley's life, told in the first person and opening during that famous wet summer that she and Percy spent at Byron's villa near Lake Geneva, when the idea of Frankenstein was first conceived. By exploring Shelley's life, Winterson can tease out the many influences and connections that she spots in the original novel, whether literary, personal (the experience of having a premature baby who died shortly afterwards - in fact three of the Shelley's four children would die in childhood) or political (a connection that I hadn't made, but OF COURSE both of the Shelleys were involved with radical politics, and this was the time of the Luddites and the fears that working people would be replaced by machines). This last point is cleverly picked up and expanded when Winterson's fictional Mary, much later in her life, meets Byron's daughter Ada and is shown Babbage's famous difference engine (Ada is credited as the author of the first computer programme, as well as writings about what machines might and might not be able to do, subsequently the subject of much debate by others such as Alan Turing - and the earliest computers were, of course, built on the principles of weaving looms).
The second story is a rather strange modern echo featuring a charismatic, TED-talking scientist called Victor Stein, a transgender transhumanist doctor called Ry Shelley and a sex doll manufacturer called Ron Lord. And if you're like me, you read this and think it sounds insufferable - silly, clever-cloggsy and pointless, right? Well, sort of, except Winterson writes really well, so for long stretches this story is genuinely interesting, funny and unexpectedly moving. And also, she lets you in on the joke. She drops in sly references to Dan Brown and Doctor Who to show you that she knows how silly this all looks from certain angles. I'm not saying this works all the time - I have to say I got a bit fatigued by it all about two-thirds of the way through - but it's surprisingly nowhere near as bad as you might think.
Winterson's two entrepreneurs, Stein and Lord, are both looking at how science might change the relationship between our bodies and our selves - Lord's dolls, of course, are all body and no self, but he wonders whether they might not actually be better companions than other human beings; while Stein is involved with research into whether people's brains might be preserved after death, without need for bodies. Out of this body/self question, Winterson draws out interesting questions of sex and gender: Byron is dismissive of women's abilities while Mary, daughter and devoted reader of one of the most famous early feminists, wonders Are we made differently at the core? Or is difference nothing but custom and power? And if men and women were equal in every way in the world, what would women do about the dead babies? . A woman attending Stein's talk asks how women will exist in the virtual future, if it is being created by men. Some readers have found problems with Ry being trans, suggesting, I think, that this is a bit of a cheesy attempt to jump onto a topical bandwagon, but for me it's an obvious way to explore questions of whether body = self (there's also another cheeky Winterson wink to the reader as the pushy journalist, Polly, tells Ry "Trans is hot right now"). With this issue currently being debated in such a polarised and uncompromising way, I found it really refreshing to read something that walks a middle path, though sadly and inevitably this means lots of shouty reviews on Goodreads from people who feel that Winterson is being disrespectful or transphobic. Here's a quote which I liked:
Once out of the body you will be able to choose any form you like, and change it as often as you like. Animal, vegetable, mineral. The gods appeared in human form and animal form, and they changed others into trees or birds. Those were stories about the future. We have always known that we are not limited to the shape we inhabit.
Ultimately this is a busy, funny, and slightly mad book absolutely stuffed with ideas, allusions, quotations, and connections. Sometimes it's ridiculous and in other places it can make you cry. It made me think A LOT, and I rather think I am going to bold it :)