Mary Shelley’s life was not only fascinating, tumultuous and ultimately tragic as she loses both children and husband, it also played out among the major philosophical minds that shaped the Romantic age, of which Dwyer convincingly argues Mary Shelley was one. Her Frankenstein was very much a part of the revolutionary and republican debate her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and her father, William Godwin, engaged in, and which Mary, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron lived to the full, banished from polite society but sought after by free thinkers of the age. The philosophical discussion of Romantic ideas works very well when placed in the mouths of the people involved, far more believable than when espoused by Anna, even when the ideas are in fact the same.
But interesting as the philosophy is, the story works best of all as an historical novel. Dwyer brings each location to breathtaking life, from Godwin’s parlour, London’s artistic circles, Didiot in Switzerland where the Shelleys, Claire and Lord Byron live for a time, and Italy where the four live until Shelley meets his death at the young age of twenty-nine. I was completely immersed in their world, horrified at the inexorable march to Shelley’s drowning and believing the complex ways Mary’s relationships with her lover, her half-sister and her friend Byron evolved. At the end of Requiem, Mary Shelley stands as a fascinating character, well worth the historical spotlight.
And that makes the book ultimately successful, despite the relative weakness of the modern narrative strand. And if Dwyer doesn’t quite achieve all the ambitions she lays out in Requiem, the ambitiousness is nevertheless admirable — this novel asks you to think as well as feel, and that is a combination I have no problem recommending.
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