How badly prepared? In term of physicality, the protagonist is the ideal athlete for the work. In terms of what people call "operational security" -- I refuse to call it opsec in imitation of some military term -- he's really comically bad. He goes to the capital city, calls a confederate continents away and tells them that he's getting set up to kill the king: having someone overhear this call is the first bad step for him. He spends the rest of the book with a very bad case of talking to people, telling the cops before they arrest him that he's there to kill the king, telling someone later on that yes he's the person mentioned in the police reward, etc. Roberts writes pathos rather than heroics.
For this he, early in the book, gets a vivdly written torture/mutilation scene. A good writer should not really write a torture/mutilation scene. I can't recommend this book to someone who would be bothered by this.
But for people not bothered by this, this is still Roberts' most grimdark work -- not because of story after story of grim deeds, but for a general political hopelessness. The conceit of the book is that Frankenstein, because he is a nonhuman monster rather than in spite of this, has become king of the world. Roberts' Frankenstein (the monster, not the doctor) is even more monstrous and inhuman in his capabilities than Mary Shelley's: he is immune to bullets and can see the future. He rules the world with a sort of technocratic and amoral competence, forestalling rebellions with the aid of a Soviet-esque police service that does the aforementioned torturing, justifying his rule by economic planning and how otherwise people would be killing each other all the time. A backstory establishes that he started his rule by advising and winning military victories for Napolean during the invasion of Russia, using his foreknowledge to set up an aliance between France and Russia, and taking over once the merely human autocrats involved died of disease years later.
In this, sadly enough, he is all too human. The promotional copy for the book reads in part "It is a conventional position to consider the tyrant as a monster - to think of Hitler, or Mao, or Stalin as monstrous aberrations from the human norm. By making the monster the tyrant, Roberts invites us to think about how ordinary and how conventional such figures actually are." But -- other than a lack of sexuality and of general irrationality, the monster in this book is how any normal-human technocrat might be, if they happened upon physical immortality and an ability to see the future. The figures of human dictators still seem more monstrous. The Frankenstein in the book bounds in Romantic fashion through the snow and wilderness and observes sadly that the security services in order to be careful are still watching him from a nearby aircraft, there is no getting away from them. No really monstrous dictator who had phsyical immortality would stand for this.
The book is really a meditation on Hobbes, who wanted exactly this monstrous situation: an autocrat whose dictates had to be obeyed by everyone, because otherwise there would be civil war which was always worse. The figure of Leviathan stands in for the physical giantism of Frankenstein. This is all very well, but the book is missing that other characteristic figure identified with the death of kings when kings were still relevant: the anarchist. In the alternate history of the book, there was evidently no Marx or Marxist tradition, and the king is killed by an ethonationalist whose beliefs can't be taken seriously. Roberts signals this by putting in a speech about the ethnic ways of England and how now everywhere can be free, but in particular England with its particular places like Stonehenge, into the mouth of an Egyptian woman who apparently married into her ethnic connection. This happens all the time, but an actual free ethnonationalist England movement would immediately kick this woman out. The reader certainly can not believe that the torturing, murderous Frankenstein regime is good and also is not authorially set up to believe that the ethnonationalist partitioning that's going to take place later is good either. And it seems like if you're going to bring in modernist kings, you have to bring in the killers of kings: the comparison here is to Superman: Red Son, a graphic novel in which Superman lands in the agricultural heartland of the USSR rather than in Kansas, and which goes over a lot of the same ground. There Batman has to become an anarchist as a counterweight.
Why are there no anarchists in this? There are many references to the world lapsing into anarchy in the usual authoritarian sense, and there's a reference to Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (the protagonist has his conspiratorial contacts labelled in his phone with the month of their birth.). I suspect that Roberts, as an author, doesn't really take anarchism seriously except as an interesting and opposite counterweight to the far right (as with his first book, Salt, where the anarchist character is well drawn but apparently hasn't heard that anarchists think that sexual assault is not good.) But without this, the book lacks an element of essential hopefulness. Here is some anarchist agitprop that I got from Crimethinc this very day:
whether you believe that this kind of thing is good or not, there is the rendition of "France - Albania - Nepal - Italy - Spain - India - Indonesia", the sense of an international connection.
So since there are no anarchists, the book needs some kind of alternate universe world socialism. As an element of fanfic, I suggest a vanguard state socialist sect calling itself the Decapitators, who wish to keep Frankenstein's world rule setup essentially the same but remove the autocrat at the top. As a physicist I don't think much of supposed physical immortality that wouldn't resist a big explosion or a large piece of construction equipment: it ought to be possible to immobilize Frankenstein and guillotine him, thus linking the movemnt back to the left of the French Revolution, whose ideals Napoleon betrayed in the very adventure that in the world of the book brought Frankenstein to power. This would also tie back to _Land of the Headless_ and the concept of acephalousness, featured in some of his earlier work.
With all of this, what's particularly good about the book? The book is particularly good when it mythologizes the alternate universe rule of Frankenstein as poetically connected to the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley by drowning. Roberts, as an English professor, is on sure ground here. Mary Shelley is briefly mentioned as having many miscarriages and losses of children: in this world, she never wrote _Frankenstein_ and the book is haunted by this further loss, leaving her pursumably only remembered as a minor author and as Shelley's wife. I wish that Roberts had settled on this as the mystical explanation for the alternate universe of the book rather than on an SF-flavored one and a Matrix-y hint at the end.
I feel that I have to some extent let down the side by writing a review of a new book and not recommending it highly: usually I only write about books years later when it doesn't matter. I do think that this book was interesting, as I generally do with Roberts' work, and if someone has been discouraged from reading this one I recommend his book _The This_ highly -- I think that will be seen as his major work of this period.
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