When used in a review, the term “ambitious” tends not to refer to a book that is brilliant or superlative, but rather an author’s making an admirable effort at something a little different…and falling short of the mark. But, honestly, who doesn’t prefer an ambitious, yet flawed book to one that’s solid but otherwise unremarkable?

Chris Priestley’s Mister Creecher is one such book in that what makes it notable is what it aims to achieve rather than what it actually does. The novel runs alongside the narrative of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, picking up at the point where Victor Frankenstein is travelling through the UK in an effort to meet his creation’s demands that he construct a mate for it. In Shelley’s original, Frankenstein is beset by fears that he is being followed by the creature, and it’s this that Priestley takes up in Mister Creecher. We’re introduced to young Billy, a teenaged thief living a life of poverty and brutalisation on the streets of Dickensian London, as he frisks the pockets of a chap lying dead on the ground. Only, as it turns out, said chap isn’t quite as dead as he seems (deadness is a gradeable adjective when it comes to Frankensteinian monsters).

Fortunately, when he regains consciousness, Billy’s would-be victim is not especially inclined to get his own back at Billy. Rather, he defends Billy against Billy’s cruel and callous boss and offers the boy a job that involves stealthily following two men–Victor Frankenstein and his childhood friend Henry Clerval–as they travel through the country on a mission that is as-yet unknown to Billy, but which will be familiar to those who have read Frankenstein.

From this point onwards, the novel largely takes the form of an eighteenth century road trip novel, only without the fun given to the genre by the Beats, and with a few maudlin injections of inspiration from the romantics and the gothics. (There are, also, plenty of cameos, with Mary Shelley stopping by for a bit, and a few more puzzling references to Bradbury and Kafka, who presumably arrived courtesy of HG Wells’s time machine, though there’s no mention of this last.) There’s something about it all that feels so very futile, although perhaps given the premise this is unavoidable. After all, what would be the point of the story of Frankenstein’s monster if it weren’t beset by hopelessness and inexorable tragedy?

And, indeed, it’s these elements that make Mister Creecher interesting, although if I’m to be honest the novel really only works for me on a thematic level, with the inelegant prose and weak characterisation thwarting the book’s efforts to become a philosophical companion piece to Shelley’s remarkable work of moral and existential examination.

As in Frankenstein, one of the key dilemmas is the nature of humanity and what makes someone human. Priestley seems to argue that whether someone can be labelled human or not is a multifaceted and not necessarily logical problem. Frankenstein’s monster, for example, lacks a name (in this book it takes on the title of Creecher, or so Billy discerns from his companion’s mumbling of “creature”). The importance of naming for legitimisation, identity and monitoring is something that has been postulated and experimented with a good deal over the years: namelessness quickly defers subhuman status to an individual or group of people, and then accords additional problems such as the assigning of gender (Creecher becomes an “it” in Billy’s mind).

But humanity is not just about names. It’s a whole mess of things that Billy and Creecher spend the book exploring, each with his own ingrained prejudices. It seems, though, that no matter how Creecher endeavours to humanise himself, his efforts fall short. Being human, it seems, is something that one just is, rather than something one can become: Billy notes at one point with disgust that Creecher has no navel, and this is something that highlights his inhuman entry into the world. And, indeed, it seems that Creecher’s physicality–he is a man of giant size, with something not quite right in his countenance, in his carriage, or his gestures–is a key element in setting him apart from others.

His appearance, of course, precedes everything else, so no matter his efforts to become someone worthy, he will always be othered. Creecher speaks French, a learned language, while Billy speaks non-standard English, and yet Billy is more “human” than Creecher. Creecher is a bibliophile, seeking to teach himself of human emotions such as love by working through the literary canon, while Billy pooh-poohs the notion of reading. Creecher is sympathetic and thoughtful, endeavouring to help others and eschewing violence to the point of both pacifism and veganism. Billy, on the other hand, has no qualms about stealing, lying or resorting to violence.

But perhaps what stands most in the way of Creecher’s humanity is the fact that he is trying so very hard to be human. Where Billy is at ease when called all sorts of foul things or when treated poorly, Creecher takes such things as an affront, and this indicates that he himself is not yet accepting of his own humanity, that it’s a construct that he is attempting to build just as Frankenstein set about building Creecher’s physical form. And yet, Creecher is intent on having Frankenstein create a mate for him. The very idea seems almost unfathomable given Creecher’s pacifist, removed stance: creating a mate requires not only the mutilation of the dead, which in itself can be seen as a violent and sacrilegious act, but also the bringing into the world of another who will have to suffer through the exact same woes as Creecher. It’s a painfully selfish act (although one could argue that selfishness is at the heart of being human), and one has to wonder at Creecher’s motives. Does he hope that having someone with which to share his existential agony will help lessen it? Does having another like him prove that he is not an anomaly, but rather a new type of being that’s legitimate in its own right?

Mister Creecher, though not executed as well as I’d hoped, raises a number of fascinating questions, and this, combined with its tie-in to Frankenstein and Dickens’s Oliver Twist (I won’t give that one away), makes for an intriguing read.

Rating: (good)

With thanks to Bloomsbury Australia for the review copy

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Other books by Chris Priestley:

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