BOOK OF THE DAY
Frakissstein by Jeanette Winterson review – an inventive reanimation
Johanna Thomas-Corr
Mon 20 May 2019 07.00 BST
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| Jeanette Winterson |
“Artificial intelligence is not sentimental – it is biased towards best possible outcomes. The human race is not a best possible outcome.” So says Professor Victor Stein, a TED-talking tech visionary, who is exploring the future possibilities for humanity, from cryogenically preserved bodies to emulation, a process that would allow science (or so the fantasy goes) to upload the contents of our brains. Victor, a well-preserved fiftysomething who possesses “that sex-mix of soul-saving and erudition”, has attracted the attention of Dr Ry Shelley, a transgender medic who is supplying the professor with body parts for his lab experiments.
Ry, who narrates half the story, began life as a woman called Mary but now lives with “doubleness”. They (Ry’s preferred pronoun) have had their top half “done” as a man but not the bottom. “I am liminal, cusping, in between, emerging, undecided, transitional, experimental, a start-up (or is it up-start?) in my own life,” they explain. The testosterone injections have left Ry with an elongated clitoris (two inches), which allows for some thrilling sex with Victor, who insists he’s not gay, merely fascinated by the trans doctor’s altered state. “Think of yourself as future-early,” Victor tells Ry, insisting that the world of AI will not be a world of labels – “and that includes binaries like male and female, black and white, rich and poor. There will not be a division between head and heart, between what I feel and what I think.”
Meanwhile, in a secret nuclear bunker under Manchester, Victor is puzzling over how to turn the human brain into pure data that can then be downloaded into a variety of forms: animal, vegetable or mineral. Much like the gods, who were not limited in shapes they inhabited.
“I don’t feel safe around Victor. Excited, enthralled, but not safe,” Ry says. They are not reassured by Victor’s choice of business partner either – a Welsh sexbot salesman by the name of Ron Lord (a riff on Lord Byron), who sells tiny-waisted, big-bosomed robo-rides that “fold up like a Brompton bicycle!”
These characters are all modern avatars of those we encounter in the novel’s parallel plot set in the 19th century: Mary Shelley, her noble but hopelessly impractical poet husband, Percy Bysshe, and his pompous, mansplaining friend, Lord Byron, who will sleep with anything that moves (in this case, Mary’s shrill stepsister, Claire). Byron argues that Adam being born of Eve means the “life-spark is male”. Mary believes women are the life-givers of humankind and her insights provide the novel’s most philosophical, lyrical writing. But she’s also very funny. Listening to her husband recite The Masque of Anarchy, she says: “Frankly there is a limit to being read aloud to, especially when there is no wine in the house.”
Frankissstein is a book that seeks to shift our perspective on humanity and the purpose of being human in the most darkly entertaining way. Winterson shines a light on biotech and says: “Look over here, everyone! Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” What she is seeing is that evolutionary time is speeding up and that survival of the fittest now means survival of the smartest. And we are close to a future in which humans are no longer the smartest beings on the planet.
It sometimes seems as if Winterson has tried to synthesise three years’ worth of New Yorker articles. In AI and trans bodies, she has chosen subjects that overlap but don’t easily intermesh, and the attempt to graft them together feels laboured. Certainly, the urge to say some something politically significant hangs over the book. When, in a relatively trivial act of reinvention, Mary’s stepsister changes her name from Jane to Claire, Mary says: “Why should she not remake herself? What is identity but what we name it?” That’s a bit of a simplification of the fraught issue of self-identification.
Thankfully, Winterson’s prose is more animated by curiosity than by any particular agenda. She throws together disparate characters in a way that’s reminiscent of AM Homes, while her puns and send-ups of contemporary culture have a lot in common with Ali Smith. Winterson, I think, writes with a great deal more snap. It’s fun to be in her company. And I wasn’t expecting fun. I was expecting something self-conscious (the less said about the title, the better) and self-important.
Moreover, in Ron the sexbot salesman, she has created a character so gloriously well observed that he nearly overpowers the whole novel. Every time he made an appearance, I found myself vibrating (for want of a better word) with laughter. Ron eventually goes into partnership with an African American evangelical Christian called Claire, who wants to use the same business model to manufacture “bots for Jesus”. As a vision of the future, it seems pretty plausible to me.
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