By Christopher Bram
Review by Arijit Gupta
‘Father of Frankenstein’ is a fictional biography of James Whale – an iconic Hollywood movie director. Penned by a renowned American novelist Christopher Bram, a name hard to be missed in the global LGBT literature community, Bram’s novel is considered a uniquely executed fictional work which has brought an imagined story out of a real person’s life. While the timeline of the plot spans merely one week, the author has keenly taken the liberty to dive in several indelible memories of the Protagonist’s mind. The plot portrays the last week of the James’ life and his eventual death. His mysterious death has been nagging the world for a long time (and still is!) and that precisely is the basis of the plot.
I should confess that I felt lost at the start of the book, mostly due to my ignorance towards James Whale and the movies he had directed. But by the time I was finished, I realized that the story was indeed engrossing, much revealing with occasional sarcasm laced narrative, and in fact was touching (especially towards the end). Written in a simple dialect of American English, the author has poured in some remarkable images from James’s early life in his native continent as well as his immaculate tenure in Hollywood, and this gives the book a classic feel. With a third person narration in present tense, the author looms into the past both through the narration and through James’ reminiscences. The plot has other important characters – both fictional and real life – such as Clayton Boone or Clay, Maria and David. Clay holds almost the same weightage as James does, and his portrayal is done in such ways that he sounds as real as James. Also, one can easily distinguish the novel is much different from other LGBT works; the story and its classic finesse makes it blur the boundaries of gay-straight readership.
The novel is the basis for the Hollywood movie God and Monsters (released in 1998), and after the success of the movie the novel was renamed as Gods and Monsters. The movie had bagged several awards including the award for best screenplay in Oscar awards. Though the screenplay was a modified and improvised version of the novel, it is certain that the central theme and the same emotions had been delved in the film with same impressive ways.
With a poignant way of story-telling, the book has brought out very detailed nuisances of an old and ailing (gay) person for whom death seems to be better than his painful life.
