“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” ― Mary Shelley

Victor Frankenstein checks into the hotel in Evian-les-Bains without much formality, shown to his nuptial chamber by an underfed child, a boy begrimed and pungent who only bathes during the summer months when the waters of Lake Geneva reach tolerable temperatures, and even then does so more out of playfulness than any particular adherence to a regime of hygiene. Close behind, all bustling skirts and heady perfume, follows Elizabeth, Victor’s wife of just a few hours. Theirs is an unconventional relationship. Orphaned as a child, Elizabeth was adopted by the Frankenstein family and brought up as a sister to Victor.

Watch them climb the dark stone staircase, a staircase as cold and as damp as a well. Watch them climb towards their room, no longer as brother and sister, but as husband and wife.

They arrive on the second floor, slightly out of breath, passing, and briefly but silently noting a water closet at the end of the corridor, to be shared with fellow guests. But for the moment the Frankensteins are the hotel’s only residents. The boy waits at the room’s doorway, not crossing the threshold, then slinks away into the shadows, leaving only his lingering odour.

The room is small. A bed. A basin. The ceilings are commendably high, perhaps the only redeeming feature. The sectioned panes of watery glass look down into an inner courtyard. Victor flings open the windows to let in fresh air and the last remaining light of day. Sparrows chirp and forage on the gravely dusty ground below. Blood-red roses, set in a circular bed, are surrounded by some sort of low and nondescript bush Victor can’t immediately identify. Box perhaps. Maybe privet. Is there even a difference? Exceptional biologist though he may be, botany is not Victor’s forte.

Jump forward two hundred years.

Now, by one of those implausible quirks of fate to which I seem to fall prey, I live in the room where Victor Frankenstein hoped to spend his nuptial night. The old building is no longer a hotel and is classed a Monument Historique. It has been through many reincarnations over the centuries, from chateau to rooming house, to ruin, to hotel, to ruin again, and now as something else, an apartment building of sorts, though it is also still called a chateau. The municipal council of Evian-les-Bains owns part of the ground floor, a vast salon that lies dusty and idle, where once-upon-a-time some Important Agreements were signed. A huge ornate fireplace fills one wall. The wallpaper is too much, or fabulous, depending on your perspective. Les gouts et les couleurs ne se discutent pas. Colours and tastes cannot be debated. The eye wants what it wants.

While much of the former glory has been restored elsewhere in the building, my one-roomed studio seems to have resisted most, if not all, attempts at improvement. The high ceilings have been retained. The aqueous window panes still bear pour marks and bubbles left by some ancient glazier, smearing and blurring the view, perhaps the same artisanal glass Victor Frankenstein looked through. But not for much longer. In a flurry of hyphenation, and a desire to adhere to France’s new insulation codes, my landlord promises the windows will soon be replaced by energy-efficient argon-filled triple-glazing. It will undoubtedly improve the soundproofing, and hopefully help lower my exorbitant heating bills. But the removal of such unique antique handmade glass will be a shame. I hope the old windows find a new life elsewhere, recycled perhaps as fronting for a pseudo-antique kitchen cupboard or cabinet. Red roses still grow in the inner courtyard. Sparrows still chirp and cheep. I watch them pick at the invisible insects that seem to infest a towering pine that might once have been a transplanted Christmas tree.

A few decades ago the chateau stopped being the hotel depicted in old black and white postcards and fell instead into a state of decrepitude. My octogenarian neighbour, who bought an apartment upstairs at the time—at a tiny fraction of its current exorbitant lakefront value—tells me there was only running water during the summer months. The electricity wires he ripped out and replaced during renovation were raw copper wrapped in waxed cotton insulation, electricity from a pre-plastic age, wiring from an all-too-brief interregnum.

It is easy to take electricity for granted, to assume that we have it now, that despite its invisibility we may claim it as tamed, at the service of our electric lives. An existence without it seems almost unfathomable. Yet it has been barely a century since electricity was domesticated and brought pet-like into the home. Large numbers of the world’s population still have no access to electricity, while many of those that do only have it intermittently, unreliably. Those of us with a more stable supply are increasingly at the mercies of market forces. Invisible power and invisible hands.

If we are to assume that humanity and civilization will remain an enduring presence on this wet lump of rock gliding through space then it would be fair to say that we are still very much in our electric infancy. We have learned how to harness it, how to produce it, but we still do so quite badly, destroying the ecosphere and the atmosphere with toxic gases produced by burning things geology long kept safely beyond our rapacious grasp.

Mary Shelley knew electricity. She would have been familiar with the names of the Italians Volta and Galvani. She possibly knew cagey Faraday personally, and almost certainly knew of him. It’s likely Faraday at least knew of Shelley too, through mutual acquaintances. He possibly even read Frankenstein, or was familiar with the gist of the story. Yet Mary Shelley never clicked on a light switch, never plugged in a toaster. Never listened to radio, never watched television, never channel-hopped (discounting the English Channel), never surfed the internet or charged a smartphone. We have come a long way since Mary Shelley visited Evian-les-Bains, and electricity has too.

*

I hadn’t planned on moving to Evian-les-Bains. I had a very different life, a hot sweaty tropical life in Malaysia. Then a virus stole my livelihood and I needed a Plan B. But the virus nipped Plan B in the bud. Two years of lockdown with close to zero revenue created a certain urgency. Plan C involved some soul-searching and wringing of hands and a professional winding back of the clock, reviving previous experience to take on a hospitality job very similar to one I held thirty years before. Needs must, as they say. I would have stocked supermarket shelves. Pride was swallowed, suitcases were packed. Not quite back to Square One, but somewhere in that same general neighbourhood.

Back we go, travelling swiftly through time, back, peeling away the decades, the centuries, back, back to 1815, to the tropical Southeast Asia I just left.

It starts with a rumble, almost sub-sonic, more felt than heard. Then with an eardrum-damaging roar Mount Tambora blows its top, sending a gigantic column of molten and evaporated rock shooting skywards, filling the stratosphere with ash clouds and sulfuric aerosols that during the following weeks and months progressively spread over the planet, dimming the sun, increasing the dominion of darkness. How much nefarious impact that dark pall had over Europe’s agriculture is still a subject of debate. France, in particular, was reeling from the effects of the Napoleonic wars, which likely had at least as great an impoverishing effect as any volcanic-cloud-induced crop failure.

Fast forward. Pause, very briefly. 1989. Maybe 1990.

I have just left Dublin and am living in London. It is my day off. I am wandering around the Tate Gallery, taking in Turner’s skyscapes, his depictions of the fiery rusted russet sunsets invigorated in texture and colour by Tambora’s sky-propelled ash.

Forward again. Pause. 2010.

Eyjafjallajökull— aka Iceland’s E15 eruption— briefly paints skies Turneresque once again.

Back, again, yes, we must.

Similar moody skies were the backdrop to Mary Shelley’s late-teens. 1816 was a summerless year of clouds and black rain. They set off for mainland Europe, Mary and Percy and diet-skinny George Byron. They board a creaking ship, disembark, then travel mostly by carriage over bumpy rutted roads, following routes set in stone by Romans. They hole up in a villa just outside Geneva. It rains. Incessantly. To stave off boredom they read each other ghost stories, then dare themselves to come up with ones of their own. The dark weather inspires a dark tale. A spark of an idea, galvanized by experiments in electricity that set dismembered frogs’ legs a-twitching in macabre post-death dance. If flesh could be reanimated, thought Mary, and followed that thought, inventing Sci-Fi before Verne, before Wells, though they all too often get the credit, probably because they were men.

Mary Shelley disliked Evian-les-Bains. She described its inhabitants as some of the most miserable starved people she had ever encountered. These days Evian, as the town is often referred to for short, is more affluent and famous. Or at least the name is famous, emblazoned across two billion bottles a year, most of them plastic, spread all over the planet. Water is life. But it is also a good business model, good in this instance defined in neo-liberal terms. Naïve backwards spelled.

Though it is still quite small, the steep-streeted town has grown since Mary Shelley’s days. On the banks of Lake Geneva, it is a liminal place. Switzerland is half-an-hour boat ride to the opposite shore. The main road that runs lakeside taken in either direction leads to Switzerland as well. Half the houses are boarded up for most of the year, secondary residencies of the rich and filthy-rich. Parisians and other citadins from elsewhere in France, but lots of Gulf money too, fossil fuel money. The president of Abu Dhabi inherited a huge palace that sprawls over many prime lakeside acres, and a second smaller lakeside palace that sprawls more discreetly nearby. Evian is to the Emiratis what Himalayan hill stations once were to the British Raj. In summer the town’s second language is Arabic. Some visitors avail of freedoms denied at home, casting off veils, not only figuratively letting their hair down. Some cite the climate, the scenery, the pure water and fresh air, as antidotes and contrast to the hot sand-blasting winds blowing from ancestral desiccated deserts against glass airconditioned towers. Others are drawn by the thrill of the spin of the casino’s roulette wheel, centrifugal forces reversed. Or the reassuring proximity to Swiss banks. Or lure of Switzerland’s licensed brothels. All these occasional residents and parttime hedonists boost local businesses, but drive prices up as well, as do hundreds of full-time residents who commute to Switzerland for higher wages.

It was late January when I arrived in Evian. Bare trees. Blue skies. In Malaysia’s tropical heat winter had melted and blurred to a hazy memory. I hadn’t experienced a European winter in nineteen years. February was cold, but didn’t match my memories of what winter should be. I wore my new down jacket unzipped most of the time, gloves unused in my pockets. The temperature flirted with zero once or twice, very late at night, but never crossed that point. By March I ventured into the bracing waters of Lake Geneva and finally was cold.

Ten years earlier

Not imagining that I would be living relatively close by a decade later, I took a trip to Chamonix, riding the red train uphill to see the famed glacier, la mer de glace, the sea of ice. Like glaciers everywhere, it had seen better days. For this ice sea the tide was going out, and wasn’t coming back.

Two hundred years earlier

Mary Shelley saw the same glacier, in something close to its prime. She sends Victor’s creation into exile here, living in the starkly picturesque, but inhospitable landscape. Much of the glacier she knew is gone forever. The rest recedes at a rate of more than five metres a year, the microclimate of the valley now well above two-degrees warmer than when we see Victor and his banished creature meet again.

The creature craves companionship. Isolated, solitary, he is the sole example of his unholy species. Birthed through surgery and electricity; Through stitches and switches.

Creature hails creator.

“Hey Frankie,” he croons. “Do you remember me?”

Victor greets his progeny with murderous intent. Creature urges Creator towards dialogue, demands Victor ease his loneliness.

“Make me a companion,” pleads the creature. “I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”

Swayed by his creature’s pleas, Victor starts on the project, but ultimately abandons it, deciding his creature will have no bride.

Obviously, Mary Shelley made the authorial decision for Victor to abandon his second creation. No borrowing of ribs to make women in this myth. Shelley would not make monsters of women. Though she never calls Victor’s creation a monster either. If anything, she seems sympathetic to this artificial lifeform she has birthed.

Meanwhile, back at the hotel in Evian-les-Bains (in the damp high-ceilinged room I reluctantly call home) Elizabeth Frankenstein prepares herself for the first night of her honeymoon. Her brother-husband Victor, is skulking elsewhere in the building, armed and prepared for combat. The creature eludes Victor, crosses the threshold, sees and seizes Elizabeth and swiftly dispatches her. The Frankenstein’s marriage remains unconsummated. No sex, just death.

Frankenstein is a dark book. A book about electricity in an age of candle-flickering shadows. A book about power in the broader sense, about its responsibilities and consequences. Like Victor’s ill-advised choice to bring his creature into the world, we have collectively created something we cannot control. Instead of Tanobo’s volcanic Turneresque clouds changing the weather, we have geo-engineered the change of our climate through fossil fuels and an unhealthy hunger for unlimited power. We could, and do, seek electricity elsewhere, from the sun, the wind, the waves, harnessing and harvesting energy available on the surface without have to dig and drill underground. Too little too late. Oily overlords dictate delays, putting profit before people, money before life. The market makes pawns of us all, moving pieces with its invisible hand.

Like Victor Frankenstein, we must bear the consequences of such hubris.

Watch the ice recede. Watch surface erratics sink to rest on bedrock. Watch waves gnaw hungrily at coastlines. See crops fail, rivers, lakes and aquifers contract, see other rivers brew car soup. See hillsides aflame in the night, tightening fiery garotte rings around homes. Push away the darkness with the flick of a switch. Turn on the radio. Television’s mocking canned laughter. Grab the remote to try to change channel. Too late. The creature is already in the house.

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Marc de Faoite is a freelance writer and editor. His short stories, articles, and book reviews have been published both in print and online. Tropical Madness, a first collection of his short stories, was published in 2013. Lime Pickled and Other Stories, his second collection, was published in January 2023. Second Main/Second Hand—a bilingual collection of poems by French poet Michel Lagrange and translated by de Faoite—was published in January 2024. He can be found at www.marcdefaoite.com and on Bluesky @marcdefaoite.bsky.social‬