Review: Cleopatra and Frankenstien
What to do when your manic-pixie-dream-wife turns out to be a complex person with thoughts, feelings, and flaws.
This article contains mentions of self harm and suicide, as well as spoilers for the novel; please use discretion.
“Who knows what you will be? You are still becoming.”
I’m conflicted about this book. Fifty pages in, I was convinced it was a masterpiece worthy of five-out-of-five stars. However, this “perfect rating” fell apart for me during the last third of the book (which stands in direct contrast to other reviews, which have claimed the final third to be the best part of the novel). Nonetheless, I am still of the opinion that this novel was exceptional: a beautifully written story where somehow both nothing and everything happens, a tale of flawed, vain New Yorkers stumbling through the mess of life, and a character study of characters you can’t help but hate. I found myself highlighting numerous passages, consistently in awe of Coco Mellors’ strong voice and poetic prose, a feat especially remarkable for a debut novelist.
An aspect of Cleopatra and Frankenstein that I adored was how the story was told from multiple points of view, entirely from people in Cleo and Frank’s inner circle. It really helped immerse me in their larger story, showing both how they saw themselves and how others saw them. However, I did not enjoy Eleanor’s chapters and felt they took away from the plot, especially with the odd shift to first person narration. As a fairly minor character, I was confused as to why she was granted first person point of view over Cleo or Frank. Similarly, it was puzzling — and at time frustrating — that her chapters were the longest, while large gaps in Frank and Cleo’s stories are left unaccounted for. I think if there was a bit less of Eleanor and a bit more of Cleo, I would be more confident in giving this book a perfect score.
While Eleanor’s chapters seemed to drag on what I considered unimportant, other chapters felt too short, giving too little detail to the pivotal points in Cleo and Frank’s relationship. The first time I felt this way was when Frank killed their sugar glider, Oh Jesus How I Adore You. Before this incident, Cleo and Frank’s relationship had already begun to sour, with Cleo begging him to stop or reduce his drinking, and Frank defiantly refusing to do so. He originally got the pet, a small animal similar to a flying squirrel, to keep Cleo company while he was out of the house. She immediately fell in love with the creature, taking special steps to make it more comfortable in their home. Then, on a drunken return to their apartment, Frank accidentally flushes Jesus down the toilet. I found this event a major characterizing moment for Frank: it reveals him to be a middle-aged man-child who is destroying his own life with an inability to take responsibility for his actions. In future chapters, Cleo alludes to the fact that he did not even tell her outright what happened to Jesus, and instead allowed her to tear apart the apartment looking for her before coming clean. I do wish that Mellors allowed us to linger in this event and the days that followed a bit more; the fallout seems very important to their failing marriage, and I wish it wasn’t glossed over.
“Their whole marriage, she had submitted to other people’s versions of her, retreating into the shape of their desires.”
At it’s core, Cleopatra and Frankenstein is about two people — both exceptionally privileged, vain, and selfish — who are not accustomed to being loved, and go searching for it in all the wrong places. Both have substance abuse issues, though Frank’s is more profound, and Cleo struggles with clinical depression — a diagnosis inherited from her deceased mother. From the beginning, their marriage is set to fail. Their large age gap alone (Cleo is 25 to Frank’s 40-something), is ominously foreshadowing. Additionally, Frank idealizes Cleo, to the point where she becomes frustrated she cannot become the person he thinks she is. Towards the end of the novel, she considers that “their whole marriage, she had submitted to other people’s versions of her, retreating into the shape of their desires.” She is constantly described as beautiful, ethereal, and a light in his life; meanwhile, she is struggling with increasingly dark thoughts, which eventually lead her to self harm.
Her suicide attempt is another huge turning point in their relationship. I found myself immensely frustrated with Frank’s selfishness in the face of what should’ve been a call to action. His reflections upon finding her bleeding out center himself; how could she do this to him, why didn’t she consider that he would find her, that he was traumatized by her actions. All of his thoughts discarded the fact that she was deeply unwell, and had been for a long time, unnoticed by him. When he did attempt to recognize her struggles, he overcorrected into the opposite direction, leaning heavily into pity and considering her as a fragile object, a porcelain doll to be cradled, rather than a human being to be cared for. I empathized so much with Cleo, and cannot imagine how it would feel for my husband to make himself into the victim after witnessing my struggles. During a conversation in which Frank victimizes himself and avoids culpability, she balks that “she wanted someone to tell her who to be. Frank was a forty-four-year-old man. Why was the onus on her to fix him?”
Fast forward to the end of the novel, where we see Cleo in an artist residency in Rome. She shows Frank her art installation centering her suicide attempt, and his subsequent reaction somehow made me hate him even more than I already did. Returning, in his mind, to the moment he found her, he feels profound anger. Faced with these uncomfortable feelings, and still unable to understand his role in them, Frank yearns for his mother, but “not his actual mother … but his real mother, still unfound, the woman who could truly take care of him. He wanted Eleanor.” I nearly screamed when reading this passage, which revealed his Madonna/Whore complex in devastating detail. At first, Frank wanted a young, beautiful bride, something to show off like a shiny trophy to his equally vain and misogynistic friends. But when this didn’t work out, and he realized Cleo is in fact a complex, flawed individual, rather than an idealized version of a woman, he ran to Eleanor.
He then contrasts himself and Cleo with Eleanor, remarking that “Eleanor’s not like either of us … She grew up feeling safe and fiercely loved … The people who did get that love, they grew up to be different from us.” Although still largely self-deprecating, this sentiment is a central theme of the novel. Cleopatra and Frankenstein is a portrait of the messy personal relationships of selfish, flawed people, who at their core, believe themselves to be unloveable, and the complicated mess and shattered relationships they leave in their wake. Although the ending was sort of anti-climactic, I appreciate Mellors for tying up loose ends and for leaving our two protagonists with a semi-happy ending.