Poor Things (1992)

This Frankenstein re-imagining (I realize that word was created by marketing for bad movies but it seems appropriate), with seasoning from various other Victorian tales of the gothic/fantastic, gives a radically extended role to the monster and his (in this case, her) narrative, which was the only part of Shelley's original I really liked anyway. The core story is full of charm and humor and faux-Victorianism and delightful weirdness, though it's very much a cartoon. Not just in its medically impossible premise but in numerous instances of strange hyper-romanticized behavior -- characters proposing marriage almost at first sight, screaming so loudly that they can be heard for miles around, that sort of thing. Given that such excesses are common but not pervasive, it's never quite clear what level of realism we should expect out of the story at any given moment. But it's still lots of fun.

On the basis of that core story, I'd give the book maybe 4 stars at most. However, the core text is not the entire book. It is surrounded by a frame story which calls its accuracy into question. As many other people have commented, the whole thing feels a lot like Pale Fire -- we spend most of the book reading what is heavily suggested to be the work of an eccentric, delusional-or-mendacious hack. In Pale Fire, though, Charles Kinbote's unreliability is entirely conveyed through internal evidence -- we realize he's a hack because he comes off as one (albeit one who can write real pretty). Archibald McCandless, the author of the core story in Poor Things, doesn't exude incompetence the way Kinbote does, and the only internal evidence for his unreliability is the cartoonish quality of the events he relates. This makes the "McCandless is wrong" interpretation almost as hard to believe as the events McCandless relates, because it's hard to connect the sensitive, likable voice of the core text with the rather pathetic man described in the frame narrative.

This is a (small) defect, but it is necessary, because it allows McCandless -- unlike Kinbote -- to charm the reader and thus enlist them, almost against their will, for his side. The core story, in its fanciful unreality, would be a very light confection on its own. But as it started to disperse, near the end, into an intractable mess of worldly facts, I found myself desperately wanting it back. This joyously silly book ends, surprisingly, in a tone of sublime melancholy. The value of all that cartoon silliness and light is in the fact that you can't have them! A realer feeling than realism alone can offer. ( )

BkC 154

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Description: With its tantalizing reminders of Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Lewis Carroll, this is an up-to-date nineteenth-century novel, informed by a thoroughly twentieth-century sensibility. Set in and around Glasgow and the Mediterranean in the early 1880s, it describes the love lives of two Scottish doctors and a twenty-five-year-old woman who has been created by one of them from human remains. A story of true love and scientific daring, it whirls the reader from the private operating rooms of late-Victorian Glasgow through aristocratic casinos, low-life Alexandria, and a Parisian bordello, reaching an interrupted climax in a Scottish church. It contains many unsanctified weddings, but hardly any perversions, and, as The Spectator put it, "an unexpected final twist doesn't make the novel seem trivial but, on the contrary, gives the vivid melodrama a retrospective gravity. You become aware that this odd book has been a great deal more than entertaining only on finishing it. Then your strongest desire is to start reading it again."

My Review: Arch. Witty at times, fall-down funny once or twice. But when I think of this book, as I seldom do, the word resounding through my head is, "Arch."

There is something of the old-time gay subculture campiness, now fast disappearing in this day of mainstreaming, gaybies, and marriage equality on the march, about this erudite man's hommage to the Gothic romantic classic Frankenstein. NB I did not just imply Gray is a gay man. It's an irreverence for the venerated objects of culture, an inside-outing of tradition, that seems to me less and less to be found, to the great impoverishment of culture in general. Gray has done that here, has in this book sexualized the myth of Frankenstein's monster in a kind of appreciative send-up of both the sexual obsession of modern readers and the repression-through-action of Victorian ones. The exotic Mediterranean locales, specifically the louche climes of Alexandria, the successor to then-Austrian-ruled Venice as the wickedness capital of the world, make the story feel of the time. The aura of sinful wickedness is period as well.

The narrative, and its ending, are 20th-century approved...and probably the best bit of the book.

I take off an entire star, though, for the sheer wearing endless sameness of the arch tone. Put that eyebrow back down, sir! Uncrook that pinky! Alas, he never does. 'Tis a pity. ( )

An odd and entertaining novel—part Frankenstein, part Pygmalion, part Portrait of a Lady. The epilogue puts an interesting spin on things, making me wonder how the novel would have read had it been at the beginning. ( )

The friend who gave me this novel has a long track record of introducing me to unusual and well-written books and their authors (amongst others to William Boyd and Haruki Murakami) and Poor Things was no exception. At its core are three engaging, weird and wonderful characters, Godwin Baxter, a reclusive medical genius, a doctor, Archie McCandless and Bella Baxter, the protégé of the former and object of love for the latter. To avoid giving too much away I won't go into detail about the plot, but it starts almost as a 19th century gothic medical horror story but unfolds to be a quasi-political tale of liberal values, particularly in relation to the role of women, in the deeply conservative world of wealthy Victorian Glaswegians. Though primarily set in Glasgow, along the way the slums of Alexandria and a brothel in Paris have important parts in the story. Poor Things is an exceptionally imaginative book that that well worth reading. ( )

Original review from December 2003

After weeks of dithering over whether to read this month's book club novel, when I couldn't find a copy at the library or a charity shop, I succumbed just before Christmas and I'm glad I did. "Poor Things" won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, but I hadn't heard of it before it was nominated for the book club. It's a strange story told in an old-fashioned style and I found it very enjoyable.

Alasdair Gray claims in the introduction that this book isn't a novel, as he is just editing an old manuscript that he had come across. This is an old-fashioned conceit, that I have mostly come across in Victorian tales of mystery and horror, and I think it works well in this case. The 'editor' has included the manuscript complete with pictures, a letter from the original author's widow claiming that it is a tissue of lies and some notes on 'historical' places and happenings in the manuscript.

The Glasgow setting was vividly drawn and I was left wondering how much of it was a true description of the Victorian city and the ferment of medical and scientific experimentation and how much was invented. That is always a mark of a good horror story in my opinion.

Updated after re-reading in January 2013

As Baxter unlocked his front door I thought I heaard a piano playing The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond so loud and fast that the tune was wildly cheerful.He led me into a drawing-room where I saw the music being made by a woman seated at a pianola. Her back was toward us. Curly black hair hid her body to the waist, her legs pumped the treadles turning the cylinder with a vigour that showed sh enjoyed exercise as much as music. she flapped her arms sideways like a seagull's wings, regardless of the beat. She was so engrossed that she did not notice us.

I've always liked books that are the equivalent of 'found footage' films, and this is one of my favourites. Although it contains various very unlikely events, "Poor Things" is supposedly a gothic-tinged non-fiction account by Glasgow doctor, Archibald McCandless, but it is accompanied by as letter from his widow who says it is pure fantasy and she can't understand why he wrote such a hurtful book. The first time I read it, I read the book in order, with Victoria's McCandless's letter coming at the end, but this time I read her letter first, so that I would be sure to notice the discrepancies she mentioned when reading her husband's account, one of which sent me off to look up the history of the pianola on-line.

So I went to the piano and played one of the simpler songs of Burns. It may have been The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond, but I did not use the treadles of the pianola roll. I played with my fingers, and the timing was perfect. Besides, I distinctly remember that we acquired the pianola in the year of the Queen's diamond Jubilee, 1897. I don't think the instrument had been invented before then.

This is a grotesque gothic story with lots of illustrations, and well worth reading more than once, as my opinion on who is telling 'the truth' has entirely changed after this re-read. The first time I read it, I thought that Archie was telling the truth and that Victoria was in denial about her true origins. But this time, having read Victoria's letter first, especially her description of how her husband laughed to himself about the book during the last weeks of his life, I decided that Archie's book was a fantasy, written to revenge himself upon an extremely unconventional and unfaithful wife who never really loved him, since by her own admission Victoria's behaviour was not that of a normal middle-class late Victorian woman. ( )