Don't get me wrong. There are flaws in this story that, in any other book, would see me giving it less than five stars. Primarily the treatment of Victor F., who is as whiny and self-aggrandising and up himself as he can possibly be while still attempting to lay claim to the title of World's Biggest Victim (seriously, even the teenage girl hanged for a murder she didn't commit, who he refuses to even try and save, has it less bad than him - according to him, anyway. I disagree). Certainly at the end there's clear authorial intent to show Frankenstein as the most excellent of men, but then I remember 18 year old Mary, hanging out with her own set of hopelessly self-obsessed men by the lake, and I can forgive her stumbling there.

But still. Still! Frankenstein's creature is one of the most absolutely terrible, pitiable monsters in all of literature. He has shaped a genre, and the monumental influence of this text is deserved. For all Frankenstein is flawed, his monster is a work of literary art. How he developed intelligence and conscience, only to lose the last out of crushing loneliness and neglect, is really extraordinary - and extraordinary on a level that overshadows all the flaws in the rest of the text (I always end this book in wondering what, exactly, the creature is going to build that Arctic pyre from. Geography, Mary! Learn to love it, cause there's no wood growing at the North Pole.)