Interview with Mackenzi Lee, by Y S Lee

For those who haven’t yet had the joy of reading This Monstrous Thing, Mackenzi Lee's debut novel is a re-imagining of the Frankenstein story set around the 1818 publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. 

 

Here's the back-cover bumpf:

In 1818 Geneva, men built with clockwork parts live hidden away from society, cared for only by illegal mechanics called Shadow Boys. Two years ago, Shadow Boy Alasdair Finch's life shattered to bits.

His brother, Oliver—dead.

His sweetheart, Mary—gone.

His chance to break free of Geneva—lost.

Heartbroken and desperate, Alasdair does the unthinkable: he brings Oliver back from the dead.

But putting back together a broken life is more difficult than mending bones and adding clockwork pieces. Oliver returns more monster than man, and Alasdair's horror further damages the already troubled relationship. Then comes the publication of Frankenstein, and the city intensifies its search for Shadow Boys, aiming to discover the real-life doctor and his monster. Alasdair finds refuge with his idol, the brilliant Dr. Geisler, who may offer him a way to escape the dangerous present and his guilt-ridden past, but at a horrible price only Oliver can pay. . . 

Inspired by Mary Shelley's classic novel, Mackenzi Lee's dark yet redemptive debut is part fantasy, part Gothic horror, and ultimately the story of two brothers who might just keep each other human.

Somehow, I don't think that description does the book justice. It ticks all the boxes but somehow doesn't quite convey the thoroughness of Lee's (no relation to me) re-imagining. Instead, allow me to say that This Monstrous Thing is one of the most exciting and enviable YA novels I read last year. I was delighted when Mackenzi agreed to talk to us about research, taking liberties with history, and the scandalous Shelleys and their circle.

Mackenzi Lee

YSL: I really love the novel’s premise: what if Victor Frankenstein was not driven by hubris and he didn’t abandon his hideous progeny? Instead, what if scientist and monster were brothers, bound together by love and guilt and grief (not to mention a string of lies and a thoroughly oppressive police state)? How did you arrive at this starting point?

ML: My novels never have a single inception point, so THIS MONSTROUS THING was borne from many different places. The first was my initial exposure coming to the novel through a stage production at the National Theater--I didn’t know anything about Frankenstein beyond what pop culture had taught me, and I was shocked by how different it was. I was especially struck by how much of a voice and personality and humanness the creature had--that seems to be the first thing modern culture has robbed him of. This initial exposure shaped my reading of Frankenstein when I finally picked up the novel, and definitely shaped how I approached my own story.

The second was hearing Frankenstein misidentified as the first steampunk novel, and thinking “Well that can’t be right...but that’s cool and someone should do it and maybe that person should be me.” The third is a lifetime of being the volatile older half of a pair of siblings.

My story evolved from there.

YSL: In THIS MONSTROUS THING, you give Percy Bysshe Shelley a cameo and make Mary Shelley a substantial secondary character. What kind of research did you do before you felt confident writing Mary Shelley as a fictional character?

ML: I did a lot of research--I felt a huge responsibility in portraying them, and was very nervous with how readers would respond to their characterization. The best research I did was reading Mary Shelley’s journals and letters from the time she was traveling the Continent and eventually ended up in Geneva, where she wrote Frankenstein. They gave me a sense of her as a person in her own words, and I related to her so deeply. Even though, when she was abroad with Percy, she was pregnant and he was married to someone else, she was only nineteen, just a few years younger than me at the time, and she struck me as a young person trying to find her footing in adulthood, in the shifting, larger world around her, and also find where she fit with the people around her. All things that, as a young twenty something myself, I felt very deeply. It reminded me of my favorite thing about history--that no matter how much society and technology and the world changes, people never really do. There are universalities that stretch across centuries.

YSL: When reading your portrait of Mary Shelley, I kept thinking of Joan Didion’s dictum: “writers are always selling somebody out.” How do you balance being fair to a historical figure and doing what is artistically necessary within the scope of your novel? ML: My favorite books are historical novels that portray real people as characters, but I’m often frustrated with how those real people are portrayed as either all good or all bad. History has written a verdict on the legacy that person has left and whether that makes them a good guy or a bad guy, and so we often forget they were real, multifaceted individuals with a lot of complex parts, making choices in the moment with no idea what the consequences of those actions would be. In writing Mary Shelley as a character in the novel, I wanted to portray her as someone with both huge potential for good and bad, same as the other characters in the novel, struggling with which of those qualities is going to define her, and struggling to reconcile with regrets in her past.

I’m also fascinated with real-life Mary’s inspiration to write Frankenstein--she says it came to her in a dream, but that dream was a product of the world she was living in, with its advancing science and enlightenment sensibilities and the questions those raised about the relationship between man and the divine. Part of my reason for writing my novel was wanting to know what that dream and Frankenstein would have looked like in an alternate, hyper-industrialized, mechanized 1818. Mostly cause I like mechanical stuff.

YSL: In your Author’s Note you say, “there are facts that I ignored completely, because I am willing to play fast and loose with history in order to tell a better story”. But changing the closing date of the university at Ingolstadt is a very small thing, especially when you’ve invented an entire steampunk industrial revolution around it! Where do you draw the line when playing with historical fact? ML: Historical fantasy is such a weird genre--like you said, I feel totally confident making up a steampunk society and revolution that happens within it, but I didn’t feel like I could use the word dyslexic to describe the main character because that isn’t a historical term. Why get obsessed with the fact that words like cheeky and posh weren’t used in the early 1800s and spend a long time trying to find a substitute, but that same novel has cyborgs in it?

For me, what can and can’t be played with is never arbitrary. The historical details need to be informed by the alternate historical world you’ve created. I always let the fantasy elements that form the premise inform what I can take liberties with--I stick to true historical details that would have been unaffected by the magical elements I’ve added. For example, a hyper-mechanized cyborg population probably wouldn’t have influenced research into dyslexia, or cause the word posh to be coined a century earlier than it actually was. The fantasy that shapes that initial premise always informs what I’m willing to adjust and what I feel needs to stay true to history--when you’re deep enough in your world, it becomes instinctual.

As for details like changing the date of a university opening--those are the sort that keep historical writers up at night. No one knows them but us, but we feel honor bound to fess up to our fudging.

YSL: On Twitter you mentioned having read YOUNG ROMANTICS, Daisy Hay’s group biography of Shelley’s generation, as part of your research. (I loved the details you harvested from it!) What were some of the biggest surprises you encountered in your research? Are there any delicious anecdotes that didn’t make it into the finished novel?

ML: I love that so much of the Shelleys’ lives have been intertwined with myth and rumor and the celebrity gossip of the day, but also that so much of their lives read like the plots of Gothic novels. My favorite story that didn’t make it into This Monstrous Thing is that Percy Shelley had a disease which caused his heart to calcify, which wasn’t known until he died in a sailing accident in his 30s. And then they only discovered it because, when they burned his body, his heart was basically a bone and DID NOT BURN. Is that not the spookiest thing you’ve ever heard?! Whether it’s true or not, it’s so fitting for these Gothic writers. And, as the story goes, Mary Shelley kept that calcified bone heart for the rest of her life, in a drawer wrapped in her husband’s poetry.

I also love the story that Mary learned to write and spell her name--which was the same as her mother’s--by tracing the letters on her mother’s gravestone. So freaking spooky.

YSL: Could you share with us a couple of quotations or moments from the book that really encapsulate its aims and its atmosphere?

ML: I’m so fond of the first line, and I think it’s a pretty good example of the tone for the rest of the book: “My brother’s heart was heavy in my hands.”
 
Agreed! Despite the guarded optimism of the ending, I couldn't help wondering what kind of future was possible for Oliver Finch. I imagine that his heart will always lie (a little) heavy in Alasdair's hands.

Thank you so much, Mackenzi, for speaking with me about This Monstrous Thing. I can't wait to learn more about what you're writing next.

---
Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Agency mysteries, published by Walker Books (UK) and Candlewick Press (USA/Canada).

The History of the Future - by Eve Edwards

Over Christmas I chanced upon the original Starwars films (parts now called IV and V) being shown on TV.  These were the cult films of my school days - I collected the bubblegum cards and played games based on the world in the playground.

I can't show the Death Star due to copyright but here is Mimas,
a moon of Jupiter that looks just like it! Thanks to NASA.

'These are classics, so much better than the new ones,' I announced confidently to my fifteen year old son so we sat down to watch.

Oh dear.

Yes, they are much better than the more recent clutch of three, saved by a knowing humour missing from the solemnities of parts I-III, but I had forgotten just how stilted the love dialogue was in them - or maybe I didn't notice.  Add to that, I now see how much they reflect their era of late 70s, early 80s - they are a little history of what we thought the future would look like (though technically Lucas claims them for long long ago in a distant galaxy...).  Good (American) guys fighting an evil empire - the men's hair - the futuristic white Leia costume that somehow look like a Biba trouser suit - the 70s is everywhere - I'm sure you know what I mean.  Even the sexual politics is very much of its time - Leia a kind of Germaine Greer fighting for her rights among the masculine warriors while the Hollywood male (Harrison Ford) manages to quell her with a kiss.  I missed this as a kid but now wish Leia had kneed him in the place where he did most of his thinking.

That set me thinking how futuristic films and novels are so often the best way of accessing the preoccupations of the present.  To change my metaphor, they are a boiled down stock of all most intense flavours swirling around in society.  One of the first futuristic novels I can think of is Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826).

This is probably her most interesting novel after Frankenstein.  The scenario is a dystopian one of debates about monarchy and republicanism all swept away by a terrible plague that wipes out all but the lead character - The Last Man.  You don't have to think for very long to see how this reflects her era of the failing romantic spirit, the fears of everything being cancelled by death.  So many of her own generation were dead by then; on the larger political stage, France had gone from beacon of revolutionary ideas back to creaky old monarchy.  The mid 1820s had seen a banking crisis (sounds familiar?) and Mary Shelley was living a marginal existence trying to raise her son.  No wonder all the best days seemed in the past.  (The  human world ends in 2100 by the way; from the increasing alarming pace of climate change, maybe she knew something when she picked that date? Or is that just my 'spirit of the age' showing?)

Next major work I thought of was The Time Machine by H G Wells (1895).  Much better know, you are probably aware that this captures the ripples of the Darwinian evolutionary debate with a society that has divided in to useless, pretty Eloi and underground predators, Morlocks.  There are also fascinating reflections influenced by the Marxist debate of where class and society is going.

And then there is Zamyatin's We (written 1921) - one of the best reflections in the Russian revolution even though it is sci-fi. And George Orwell's 1984 (1949) - we haven't come to the end of the lessons that teaches us, have we?  The examples are popping up everywhere now I am looking for them.

So that leads me to the rather pleasing conclusion that to understand the past we need to be familiar with the future.  I'd love to hear you thoughts as this is a huge topic and I'm sure you'll have your own gems to share.

A Treacherous Likeness by Lynn Shepherd. Reviewed by Adèle Geras

Before you go on reading, do click on this link and especially on the little film at the end of the description of the book. Lynn Shepherd herself speaks for 8 minutes and tells us very well and engagingly all that we need to know about the book before we read it. It's a much better way of discovering what it's about than any synopsis I could provide.

http://www.constablerobinson.com/?section=books&book=a_treacherous_likeness_9781780331676_hardback

Also before I begin, I will show you the three main protagonists. First, Percy Bysshe Shelley himself, Romantic poet, husband, lover, father and all round...well, I'll leave you to decide for yourselves and won't try and influence anyone. As a poet, he was one of the truly greats. "Ozymandias" I regard as one of the best poems ever. I love "Ode to the West Wind." I love "The Skylark." But one thing Lynn Shepherd's book brought home to me was that because we never studied him at school, I know very little about him and have actually read very little of his work.

This is his second wife, Mary Shelley, author of 'Frankenstein,' daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.

And here is Claire Clairmont, who travelled to Geneva with Percy and Mary and who figures large in the story.

Last year, a very good novel by Lynn Shepherd, called "Tom-All-Alone's" introduced us to a late nineteenth-century detective called Charles Maddox. He's everything you could wish for in a hero and when I think of him, I have someone like Benedict Cumberbach in my mind. (Actually I have BC in my mind when I'm doing a lot of my mental casting but that's another story!) She wove a tale of murder into the spaces left by Charles Dickens in "Bleak House" and the whole concept struck me as a brilliant idea.

Here the writer takes the well-known facts about the composition of "Frankenstein" (the ghost story telling night in the villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, everything that's documented about a ménage à trois that makes modern sexual mores look like a vicarage tea-party) and she manages to inject into the material an element of enormous mystery and suspense and a hypothesis that is both startling and plausible for everything that happened to these real people.

To do this as effectively as she does, Shepherd makes use of a technique that is a bit post modern, and which, it must be said, might annoy some readers. I loved it, though and I think it works in a very clever way. She's chosen to be there, in her own person as the writer of the novel, in a way alongside the story, commenting on various things; remarking on what is going on from a 21st century perspective. She does this unobtrusively and somehow the warp and weft of the narrative manages to hold and sustain these interjections.

There are a lot of letters, documents, accounts by one character or another at the beginning of the book and this, in addition to the 'case' that Charles Maddox is undertaking, makes the start of the novel one in which you have to keep your eye on the ball. But once it gets into its stride, there's no stopping it and the whole thing is a roller coaster of a ride. Both the characters from the past (Shelley's youth) and the present of the novel, set much later, are right there with you, and you care about every single one, especially Charles's elderly great-uncle, the first detective in the Maddox family.

On page 250 of the book, I found these words and because they describe everything so well, I am quoting them here. "He (Charles) thought he had the measure of these three - thought he had understood the coils of attraction and repulsion that threatens to drown them all in a wreckage of hearts, but it seems he is wrong: there are darknesses here for which even his experience cannot find a like."

I hope that lots of readers who visit this blog will enjoy "A Treacherous Likeness". I loved it.