A Country of Eternal Light and happy/ unhappy endings

Bride Of Frankenstein. Image: Universal Pictures

By Paul Dalgarno

In Frankenstein films, they usually miss out the novel’s framing narrator. His name is Robert Walton and the book we’re reading is a series of letters he’s writing to his sister in England, Margaret Saville, first from St Petersburg and then from the boat he’s captaining towards the North Pole.

Desperate for fame, terrified of failure, Robert excitedly recounts the stories he’s being told by a bedraggled Victor Frankenstein, who has been found – implausibly – alongside Robert’s ice-bound ship on a dog sled. Victor offloads the story of his life and the monster he’s created. Various people have also told the monster stories, which it has duly related to Victor, who then shares them with Robert, who then offers them to Margaret and us.

Image: Paul Dalgarno.

Passing on information without stories is hard. The basic building blocks (character, setting, plot, conflict, resolution) are as central to The Three Little Pigs as they are to War and Peace. But they’re also essential for gossip, architecture, fashion, memory, religion, humour, politics, friendship, history, philosophy, terrorism, music, theatre, accounting, games, film, parenting, dating, geography, finance, cooking, journalism …

Commonly, there’s a line drawn between non-fiction and fiction – the first being ‘true’ and the second ‘made-up’.

We feel we know the difference. With the destruction of the Twin Towers, we can (if we were alive and old enough) remember it happening. If we go to New York, we can see where the towers once stood. Unfortunately, that incident wasn’t made-up. But the story, even as it was unfolding, partially was. As always, we looked for patterns and previous experiences to compare it with – hence the vox pops of rightfully horrified people saying it was ‘like a disaster movie’. What we learned, on the most basic level, was that it could happen – because it had.

Why is Hansel and Gretel still a tale we tell young children, and they enjoy, a couple of centuries since it was set in print by the Brothers Grimm? Is it fanciful that a house would be made of gingerbread? Yes. Is there truth to the notion that adults might abandon their children in a time of famine? Yes. And that – whether it’s breadcrumbs or by other means – children should hone their instincts of self-preservation? Also yes.

For good reason, science has developed checks and balances to ensure (or try to) that the truths it uncovers are not made-up, but science is no less dependent on story. Sir Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity – long since usurped by Einstein’s general theory of relativity – lives rent-free in our minds thanks to the story of him observing an apple falling from a tree, something most of us have seen or can easily imagine. 

The celebrated six-word short story attributed to Hemingway – For sale: baby shoes, never worn – is a long-read when compared with Einstein’s far punchier E = mc2. Both rely on storytelling and our own – or other people’s – ability to work out what’s going on. Both say something that, on a primal level, seems true. We are experts in panning gold from even the muddiest, murkiest stories – outdone only by those clever and devious enough to manipulate us with them for personal gain.

Science is grounded in the principle of replicability: apples always fall downwards, the sun always rises in the east. But so is fiction, memoir, and poetry. When a poet like Maya Angelou writes lines like ‘You may trod me in the very dirt/ But still, like dust, I'll rise’, we don’t need that to be literal for it to be true, or for the sense of its truth to be replicated many millions of times over.

When an author like Muriel Spark peppers a novel with a phantom phone-caller who keeps telling the characters  ‘Remember you must die’, the truth is as real as the atom.

In trying to explain his desire to explore the world, Robert Walton in Frankenstein writes to Margaret that ‘There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.’ Whether it’s Mary Shelley, Marie Curie, you or me – stories are what get us closer to understanding, or at least to knowing there are others asking similar questions.    

Paul Dalgarno is the author of A Country of Eternal Light (Fourth Estate). This article was first published in the Sunday Herald Sun, February 2023.