Mary Shelley · 1818 · overland

Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, begun at eighteen in a wet summer on this same lake. Victor Frankenstein builds a living man out of charnel-house pieces at Ingolstadt, runs from it the moment it opens its eyes, and spends the rest of his life being walked backwards through his own geography by the thing he abandoned. The route is a pendulum: Geneva to Ingolstadt and back for a murdered brother, up to the Mer de Glace where the Creature tells its side, back to Geneva, down the Rhine to England and the Orkneys to build a mate and destroy her, cast up on an Irish shore accused of a friend's murder, home to a wedding night he has fatally misunderstood - and then out, east and north, past the Black Sea and into the ice, pursuing a creature that is only ever as far ahead as it wants to be.

1. 1
   Geneva

   Victor Frankenstein's home on the lake, and the still point the whole book keeps returning to. He leaves it at seventeen for the university, and every disaster afterwards drags him back here.

2. 2
   Ingolstadt

   Two years shut in a solitary chamber collecting bones from charnel-houses. On a dreary November night the thing opens its dull yellow eye, and Victor runs out and leaves it. Everything else follows from those seconds.

3. 3
   Geneva

   He does not go straight to England. A letter brings him home: his brother William has been strangled outside the town. Arriving at night in a storm, he sees a figure among the rocks and knows what it is. Justine hangs for it.

4. 4
   Chamonix

   Sick with guilt, he goes up the valley of the Arve into the mountains. On the sea of ice below Montanvert the creature comes bounding over the crevasses to meet him, and asks to be heard. The whole middle of the novel is told here.

5. 5
   Geneva

   Home again, and briefly, having agreed to make a second creature. He puts it off for months. His father, mistaking the delay, proposes he marry Elizabeth at last.

6. 6
   Strasbourg

   He goes to England to do the work, with Henry Clerval for company and neither of them saying why. They meet the Rhine here and take a boat down it.

7. 7
   Rotterdam

   Down the Rhine through the gorge and the ruined castles, the happiest passage in the book, and Shelley gives it to Henry, who has no idea what his friend is travelling to do. From here they take ship for England.

8. 8
   London

   Letters of introduction, philosophers, chemical apparatus. Victor gathers what he needs for the second creature and dreads it, putting off the work as long as he can.

9. 9
   Perth

   North through Oxford and the lakes to Scotland. At Perth he leaves Henry behind on a pretext: he will not do this where anyone can see, and goes on alone to the islands.

10. 10
    Orkney Islands

    A hut on a remote isle, three inhabitants, and the half-finished creature on the table. Watching the first one grin at him through the window, Victor tears the thing to pieces, rows the remains out to sea, and returns to find Henry strangled on the shore.

11. 11
    Ireland

    Blown off course and washed up on an Irish coast Shelley never names, straight into the hands of people who have just found Clerval's body and want to know who did it. Two months in gaol and a fever before he is acquitted.

12. 12
    Paris

    His father comes for him, and the two take ship for France. 'We landed, and proceeded to Paris.' Victor recovers here, overtaxed and ill, before the journey home and the wedding his father has arranged.

13. 13
    Geneva

    He marries Elizabeth at last, carrying pistols and a dagger, certain the creature's promise - to be with him on his wedding night - is a threat aimed at himself.

14. 14
    Evian

    The wedding night, at an inn along the lake. He searches the house for the creature and hears Elizabeth scream from the room he has just left. He had misread the promise entirely: it was never about him.

15. 15
    The Black Sea

    The hunt. Victor pursues the creature out of Switzerland and across the continent, described in gestures rather than an itinerary, down the Rhone and by sea, with the Black Sea the one fixed point Shelley names before the wilds.

16. 16
    Arctic Ocean

    Ice, and a sledge, and a man nearly dead on a floe. Victor tells Walton the whole story and dies of it; the creature comes aboard to grieve over him and goes off across the ice to burn itself. Neither of them ever gets home.