Victor Frankenstein and Ash Wednesday

What can a writer  do with another writer's  novel- one that's already a classic? How does one improve on such a masterpiece? And why try?

Curiosity led me to want to read novelist Dean Koontz's Frankenstein novels quite a while ago. I finally gave it a whirl about ten days ago- and last night, I finished the fourth and most recent of them, Lost Souls. Koontz's answers to the questions posed in the first paragraph are that he updates the legend to the present day- not by making the whole story contemporary but by picking up where the story left off. and bringing it up to the present day.  In doing so, he makes a powerful and cogent comment on the direction in which our society seems to be heading.

The premise of the novels is that Mary Shelley actually merely wrote down a story she had heard somewhere- a story that was fundamentally true, although the events actually took place in Austria rather than in Transylvania. Victor Frankenstein- the real Victor Frankentstein-  has survived, and in the two centuries since his struggle with his supposedly final  encounter with original creation has improved his techniques many times over, infusing himself with the longevity and hardiness he has infused into an army of his own creations, with which he proposes to take over the world, exterminate the human race, expand his empire to the stars, and rule the universe as a virtual god. His is an ideology of rigid, utter materialism, of doctrinaire atheism combined with a ruthlessly intolerant and rigid determination to suppress all thought of a transcendent order in the universe, or any code he or his creations are bound to obey beyond their own wills.

Or, rather, Victor's own will. The alternative to serving God is not freedom after all, but bondage- and Koontz makes that point quite eloquently.

Koontz- a devout Roman Catholic- makes more of  the concept of free will than either the Bible in the spiritual realm or the best and most benign contemporary psychology in even the purely mundane really has room for. But by any reckoning, Victor Frankenstein's world is a ruthlessly totalitarian one. His creations exist to serve him, and him alone. He has created them stronger and more physically resistant to injury or assault than most humans, but programmed in such a way that their autonomic nervous systems shut down and they instantly die if they simply hear a simple phrase uttered in his voice.

Without going into too much further detail, Frankenstein- the monster's creator- has, in the two intervening centuries become a monster himself, an intimate over the years of Hitler and Stalin and Mao and the other great mass murderers of the modern era, many of whom have funded his work and shared his ideology in principle, even if he has kept them in the dark as to its final goal. He, like they, is a Utopian- himself a creature who has denied his Creator and sought to take His place, seeking to remake the world in his own image. Frankenstein- especially in Lost Souls- is the ultimate Post-Modernist. He is Nietzsche on steroids, a self-proclaimed Übermensch for whom the only law is the will to power.

But Frankenstein's monster- the original one- has also survived, and while Frankenstein himself has become a monster, his monster has, over the years of pain and anguish and sorrow, learned compassion and humanity. He expresses doubt early in the series as to whether, due to his unique origin, he has a soul. He finally comes to realize that he does- just as surely as his creator has lost his.

Deucalion, the former monster calls himself now- after the son of Prometheus, who stole what belonged to the gods alone and presumed to yield it to human use. He has spent many of his years in monastaries, struggling with his place in the universe and of the meaning of existence. And it seems that his creator's Creator had an agenda where Deucalion was concerned from the very beginning; the lightning bolt which gave him life also gave him an intuitive understanding of "the quantum character of the universe" which bestows on him some very strange capabilities. And this gift has its purpose. With the knowledge of his human creator's survival  has come an ironic realization for Deucalion:  like Frankenstein himself, it is his destiny to defy his creator in the service of Another.

We actually glimpse that Other in the third book of the series, Dead and Alive.  It is an exercise in the  theology of the Cross which places Him exactly where the One Who bore the cross for His own creations would put Himself on behalf of Victor's. It is in his encounter with the unnamed Christ (in a role guaranteed to make the reader uncomfortable in a profoundly salutary way) that Deucalion realizes that despite his own blasphemous origins, he is loved and valued by his creator's Creator, who has given His "grandchild" both a destiny and a mission far different from what Victor ever imagined.

As Hurricane Katrina bears down upon the city, Deucalion joins forces with New Orleans homicide detectives Carson O'Connor and Michael Maddison- a woman and a man who, at the story's beginning, decline to acknowledge that they've fallen in love with one another because to do so would no longer allow them to work together as partners- to confront Victor's plot as it begins to come to fruition. Koontz later wrote that he could not bear to inflict on post-Katrina New Orleans the further horrors of Victor's agenda, so he changed the plot in mid-series; the crisis is temporarily averted just as the hurricane hits, and the story's local changed for the second trilogy of the series, of which Lost Souls is the first book. In the process, Koontz manages to make explicit the ultimate fate of our presumptuous cleverness, and the destiny of all the works of man wrought in definance of his Maker- or in an attempt to somehow replace Him.

So what does all of this have to do with Ash Wednesday?

Everything.

We are all Victor Frankenstein, ready to declare God dead and ourselves His successor. The Old Self even in the Christian wants to honor no will but its own. Our collective Frankenstein has asserted itself to bring about a culture in which precisely the values for which Victor Frankenstein stands are in the ascendency. Materialism and ethical relativism are in vogue as they never were even in the days of the Enlightenment. Even Christians do not know their own souls, because the do not know the Faith. They are too busy constructing a Frankenstein's monster of cheap sentimentality and emotionalism and pop theology which they try to substitute for the Faith Once Delivered.

We see the Enemy for what and who he is in Koontz's thoughtful series, and it is not an accident that Koontz dedicates the third book in that series, Dead and Alive, to C.S. Lewis. Koontz's Frankenstein is, in a very real sense, a work of apologetics which compels us- not only the unbeliever, but the unbeliever in the believer- to acknowledge as, in the words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

And we are all Deucalion- redeemed by a love willing to become what we are, and to bear even the most blasphemous of our burdens and our brokenness and our bondage, to become what He is, in order that the sacrilege which penetrates to the heart of our very being may be made holy and given purpose and meaning.

All sin is idolatry. At its heart, every violation of the other commandments is a violation of the First. Strange as it may seem, Dean Koontz's Frankenstein strikes me as very appropriate Lenten reading. We can see ourselves in Victor Frankenstein- if, like Deucalion and unlike Victor himself, by God's grace we can acknowledge that have souls.

Not only that, but we can see where we, as a society, seem to be headed if we continue to forget the God that Victor denies, and adopt Victor's values as our own. And we can hear the call to repent, and to be human instead- to be as Deucalion, born in iniquity but redeemed by One on Whose love and forgiveness we had no claim.