Sam Segan

It seems apt to call Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein a pastiche, in both content and form. It’s about the future of transhumanism–the idea that we can create immortality for our consciousnesses beyond our bodies–and its roots in the dream of Frankenstein. Winterson’s scope encompasses different genres, melded with abandoned: there’s postmodern satire; there’s romance; there’s historical fiction, and a close history of Mary Shelley. It’s fitting, then, too, that one of the novel’s protagonists, the scientist Ry, is trans and nonbinary (using the pronoun “he/his”). His lover, the scientist Victor Stein, muses that Ry’s nonbinary identity prefigures some future transhumanism: an existence as brains uploaded to the Cloud, without bodies or gender identity at all.

The book opens in the past, with Mary Shelley at Lake Geneva in 1816. Readers follow her as she embarks on the project that would be Frankenstein. It then flashes forward to a “Tech-X-Po” on robotics attended by the second protagonist and viewpoint character, Ry. He draws the connection for us rather baldly: “It’s why we’re here […] Frankenstein was a vision of how life might be created–the first non-human intelligence.” Ry is also there to interview Ron Lord, who makes sex bots. If that sounds a little flip for a novel engaged in weighty topics, it shouldn’t: themes of sex and love underlay the whole of the book. Without love, Winterson implies, why would we wish to live forever?

The scenes set in present day, centered around the expo, feel almost cartoonishly satirical, with shades of Tom Wolfe. There’s a lot of dialogue, much of it very funny. There’s a religious character, Claire, who strikes up an unlikely partnership with the sex-bot manufacturer, Ron Lord. Lord himself is a fascinating character. He is, in some ways, a naif: his reaction to Ry’s gender identity is simple confusion leavened with unmalicious bigotry. He accepts Ry gradually, after some persistent misgendering. Similarly, he bumbles into profundity in his explanation of why people want sex-bots and what they want from them, and what it means for the future of humanity. There’s a refreshingly feminist perspective from a journalist at the expo, who debates what sex-bots designed by primarily cis male engineers might do to society. Her concerns, though, seem swept aside in the unstoppable rush forward, toward progress. These characters each express distinct viewpoints, but they come across as little more than mouthpieces for those views; it’s an entertaining read, but Winterson sacrifices character for idea in her scenes set in the modern era.

The reader is treated to emotional connection once again when we meet Victor Stein, the enigmatic scientist who becomes Ry’s lover. He is also obsessed with immortality, and uses Ry to help him obtain human body parts for his experiments. The parallel drawn to Mary Shelley’s protagonist is clear and intentional. Winterson’s juxtaposition of past and present, as well as some of Victor Stein’s explicit dialogue, put it to us that there is something prefigured about humankind’s yearning toward this particular sort of immortality. It is a wish that has lain latent for centuries or even millennia, waiting for its technological vehicle. Christian mythology, the Platonic realm of the Ideal–these concepts of transcending the physical indicate that human beings have prefigured its attainment.

Less abstractly, we watch Mary Shelley grapple with the deaths of her children and husband. In the modern era, Ry contends with transphobia, including a violent incident. The tragedies of the characters’ lives, though, don’t take up the meat of the narrative. They’re incidental, as if the whole book were being written by an AI trying to synthesize human feeling.

The story takes a turn for both the creepy and the meta-fictional as it winds toward a (somewhat inconclusive) conclusion. Fictional characters might be real. There might be a contemporary scientist working his own ghoulish resurrection. In one dramatic scene, our characters find themselves trapped in an underground room as water begins to rise… but there’s no need for spoilers. The beating heart of the novel, or rather its lightning-strike, is in the ideas it explores. It is not a perfect book, but it is a deeply affecting one. If you want to lie awake at night thinking of the future of humanity, the future of gender and indeed selfhood, and the implications of sex dolls with sentience… if you loved the Black Mirror episode “San Junipero”… Frankisssteinis for you.

In E.R. Ramzipoor’s novel The Ventriloquists, a cadre of Belgian resistance journalists risk their lives to lampoon Nazi propaganda. Almost unbelievably, the story is based on a real part of history: a group of the Belgian resistance really did get together to write and distribute a false version of the Nazi-led newspaper Le Soir. Most of them lost their lives for the project. All of the text from the satirical paper reproduced in the book is authentic. Some characters are composites of or riffs on real people; some are made up from whole cloth, like the narrator, a young girl disguised as a newsboy who acts as the story’s anchor. We enter the story when we meet the newsboy, now an old woman reminiscing about her history. If all of this sounds complex, it is, but Ramzipoor juggles it deftly, helped by glittering prose, snappy pacing, and a keen sense of humor.

World War II has been so studied, so overexposed, that it’s become a very broad canvas for different artists to assay—still life, with Nazis. It’s a genre in itself, which isn’t bad: we’re left with little need to fill in the context behind what we read. Ramzipoor acknowledges the nature of her endeavor through one of her characters, the titular ventriloquist, who at one point in the delightfully twisting plot has to mimic the voices of Winston Churchill and FDR in order to goad an RAF commander into bombing their city. “His job was usually to reconstruct a voice from a whisper; now, he felt as though he was reconstructing shouts from an echo.” Ramzipoor, too, writes about one small corner of what is one of the most echoed and magnified periods in history. She benefits from the wealth of media surrounding the period she addresses. The characters’ wry, sharp dialogue and its sometimes slapstick sensibility owe much to the legacy of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. I noticed the book’s sense of humor because it’s at odds with today’s memetic one. It’s very much of the 1940s, and it’s very funny.

The Ventriloquists also gives us something that would have been only subtext in times past: a queer relationship at the heart of the story. Better yet, it’s a relationship in which queerness doesn’t make up the central drama. Instead, the conflict in the relationship is over a question of morality in war, not the forbidden nature of gay love. Likewise, the young narrator’s crossdressing isn’t treated as an essential conflict; it only becomes one at a single point in the plot. Instead, it’s an interesting facet of a character, a sign of gender fluidity that’s realistically accepted by most others in the story. These themes do not feel forced, but instead feel like a true part of history, a part that is too often elided in fiction.

As for the plot, it’s a rollicking, twisting, turning adventure that’s almost unbelievably complicated, and hangs together on a delicate frame of multiple-point-of-view narration. There’s a gay Jewish man imprisoned and forced into collaboration with the Nazis, a marginally sympathetic Nazi partisan, and a dashingly quixotic satire-writer. There’s a smuggler/prostitute, not part of the historical record, but rather a composite of characters too often stricken from that record. There are real names from history, like the linotypists who gave their lives to print the satirical paper. And, of course, there’s the protagonist, the young girl-as-newsboy. If I had any quibble with the book, it’s that the multiple points of view take some time to coalesce. The characters don’t feel distinct until about 150 pages into the 544-page book. But that’s a minor issue, and it’s well worth your time to get past the bumpy beginning.

More than anything, I love how apt it is to write a book about the power of writing. A group of writers really did give up their lives in the service of satire, and it’s always made clear that the project is not just for the aggrandizement of the resistance. Instead, it’s meant for the Belgian people. Ramzipoor takes a moment out of the text to celebrate the heroism of ordinary people of the sort who do not often find fame, like a postal worker who smuggles yellow stars out of the post office rather than distribute them to the Jews of her town. Rampizoor’s attention to the small details missed by larger tellings of history animate the book, and it’s the light of her perspective that makes it something worth reading, which will stay with you long after you’ve put it down.

The Ventriloquists
By E.R. Ramzipoor
Park Row Books
Hardcover, 9780778308157, 544 pp.
August 2019