Book Review – C E McGill - Our Hideous Progeny 2003 Doubleday Press.

Spoilers

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This could have been called ‘Niece of Frankenstein’ as that is essentially who Mary (not Shelley) is. Sadly there is no true monster in the book. Mary, aided and thwarted by her debt saddled husband, and his evil creditor, aims to be a scientist in a World dominated by men. (Many of the leading scientists of the day are involved, notably Richard Owen, the man who first used the word dinosaurs. Charles Darwin briefly appears though only after his voyage on The Beagle, as his evolutionary theories were not announced for another decade.

Book Cover for Our Hideous Progeny

Mary discovers her Uncle’s papers and gets ideas about following in his footsteps, but she has no desire to create a humanoid from corpses. She wants to resurrect an Ichthyosaur, but more than three quarters of the book passes before she gets started on it and even then it gets little to do.

Much of the story is Mary facing opposition to her wild theories, learning bit by bit the extent of her husband’s financial difficulties, and her increasing affection with her sister-in-law.

After many smaller creatures die, Mary does get to making her Ichthyosaur which behaves mostly like a dolphin, (she has added mammalian dolphin flesh to the amphibious fish-lizard hybrid). As she prepares to reveal it to the scientific community, the beast is stolen by a rival intent to pass it off as his own, leading to an absurdly slow train chase robbed of any true tention and drama.

The narrative is often broken up by lengthy discourse on science, the way women are down-trodden and hints of something more sapphic. The promised Gothic Frankenstien sequel is so diluted away it could be totally removed from the text and still leave the remainder behind. An extremely disappointing work. It tries to say a lot, and much of it important, but ends up saying virtually nothing.

Photo taken by me.

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Arthur Chappell