Book-Bingo: Dracula by Bram Stoker
I am slightly hedging here - I did only read Dracula this year though technically it came before I decided to do the bingo. That being said, I have thoughts and feels! about this book so I'm counting it for the "One word title" square.
I have read versions of Dracula before and I actually own a paper copy of the book from a classics series by Penguin ( I think) that I honest to god could not even look at because it scared me. In my defence, I was about 12 with a hyperactive imagination and I tried reading it during a bout of insomnia. I never actually sat down to read through the whole book but I have seen enough adaptations and Dracula is such a pop culture phenomenon that I was honestly not expecting that much from the book. cleolinda has talked about this on her LJ a bit.
Then, in the course of picking up Chuck Wendig's The Kickass Writer on Amazon, I spotted a free version of Dracula and decided to pick it up. I was starting to come down with the Christmas cold at that point and I wanted something I could read between the bouts of fever.
I have read Victorian/Edwardian novels before and I was braced for this to be a typical Gothic novel which honestly, I find very hard to keep reading through. Fanfic has spoiled me for this; I can't read page after page of melodrama with female characters who leak their agency right out of the ovaries as soon as the hero shows up. I know, I know, this is reflection of the socially acceptable values of the era but it honestly wears me down very fast and I stop wanting to read after only a few chapters. I find that I'm waiting for the twist in the tale and, particularly with female characters, I'm shouting at them to get off this rail and go be awesome elsewhere.
Dracula is actually a surprisingly good read. Not just 'for a gothic novel' but it is actually a very good read for a novel. I can suddenly understand how this book endured so long. Even with the major reveals spoiled, I was hooked by the pacing and the steady build of tension. There were a few points that I would consider weak - Van Helsing is something of a deus ex machina for example - are just weak, not actual failings.
The diary section with Jonathan is done very well, I thought. Jonathan is established from the first as an intelligent and observant man by being assigned the duty to meet with Dracula in the first place. His diary reads as very true to the young, ambitious Englishman of the era with the racism and classism that entails. What I found interesting was that throughout his journey, there is a suggestion that Jonathan is not a reliable narrator. His condescending attitude towards the 'peasant superstitions' of the local people who turn out to be entirely right to worry very nearly proves fatal.
Also, I found the way Jonathan's character is shown to the reader through his diaries to be very interesting. Jonathan starts out viewing this as a minor inconvenience made worthwhile by the opportunity to prove he is reliable. The early entries of his diary have the tone of this being something tedious that he just wants to get over with as fast as possible. He is more concerned with his appearance as an agent of his employers and his engagement than he is with the ominous landscape he is travelling through.
Dracula, as we are introduced to him, managed to still come as a surprise to me despite being practically an Avatar of popular culture at this point. I'll go into this a little more later but what I was most struck by was how human Dracula is. He very clearly does not raise any significant red flags with Jonathan who seems to think that he is a fairly typical member of the traditional gentry with a few minor eccentricities.
Stoker actually does a very good job portraying the slowly creeping realization that something is horribly wrong and Jonathan's initial belief that the Count will protect him makes a lot of sense in the Stockholm Syndrome sense. Another thing that I liked is that Jonathan honestly struggles to find a rational explanation. It takes more than one strange encounter before he believes that the Count truly is something supernatural.
I also liked how Dracula's wives were portrayed. They are never, that I can remember, named but they add a haunting flavour to the castle. They are portrayed as entirely demonic in a way that Dracula actually isn't. The women are more abandoned to the animalistic aspects of vampirism and I wonder if that is a reflection on why Dracula chose them i.e. weaker wills that were easily dominated and manipulated or if it's more about Dracula's autocratic control where the limits are set and enforced by him, robbing the wives of any free will? If anyone knows or can point me to a book focusing on them, I would read the hell out of that!
The incident with the baby in the sack and the mother who comes to search for it is a very masterful depiction of how the Count's nature tends towards the sociopathic. He kills both without any remorse, as expected of a monster, but the way in which he does shows the reader very clearly how little value he places on any life but his own. Humans are cattle and tools and he does not even care enough to torment them unless they show signs of being a threat to him.
Dracula's plan to murder Jonathan did confuse me a little. I couldn't see how this benefited Dracula at the time, though it was properly explained a little later. I did like how methodical and careful it was; the Count first isolates Jonathan, locking him out of the crypt while the Count and his wives sleep so he is not a threat. This is done from the outset, proving that the Count does not trust anyone and that his pride, while it is definitely a weakness, is not making him stupid. The Count stealing children while in Jonathan's clothes also seemed a little ridiculous to me - after all, the locals must know that Dracula has been active long before Jonathan came anywhere near their area - but as Dracula's plan unfolded, it made more sense. He wasn't setting Jonathan up to be lynched - all he wanted to do was make the villagers wary of the Englishman so if Jonathan escaped before the Count could kill him, there would be nowhere safe to hide. I did love how angry it makes Jonathan that the Count is scattering such a trail around him even as it turned the screws of fear a couple of notches.
Jonathan's desperate attack on the Count and the dramatic end to the diary are very well done. I do like how killing the Count (or at least giving it the old Eton try) doesn't actually make Jonathan's position any better and that Jonathan realizes being stuck with the women is a more immediate danger than playing deadly intrigue with the Count did. Most of all, why I like this section is that Jonathan is showing his agency as a character. He strikes down the Count and launches himself off into the wilderness with only the barest hope that he will escape but he does it because he must do something. There is a savage glee in having 'killed' the Count and his narrative voice reflects the hot-headed rush of victory, buoying him up for the last dangerous escape.
It leaves the reader on a cliffhanger regarding Jonathan's fate - even I wasn't totally sure that he survived. I spent a while frantically trying to remember how many adaptations he survived in. This was actually a little tricky given the modern trend of focusing on Dracula/Mina as the primary relationship in modern shows and films. Jonathan has been relegated to the also-ran nice guy in a lot of modern tellings.
We pick up with Lucy and Mina and a collection of correspondence. The Lucy and Mina friendship is one of the better female/female friendships I've read which is a depressing reflection on a lot of modern books. The affection between them is very plausible and I like that neither of them is too dramatically idealized. They both have tendencies towards the paragon but again, the beauty of the narrative style is that this can be explained by unreliable narration. We only hear about them from each other or from the men that they are friendly with; all of whom would arguably be looking through rose-tinted glasses. We don't generally nit-pick our best friends to their faces or with shared friends, after all.
Lucy is clearly established as a beauty with prospects that put her above Mina, another thing that modern adaptations had not prepared me for. A lot of adaptations treat Lucy as cannon fodder from the beginning but the book actually goes to some lengths to establish her as a gentle, pretty girl with friends and admirers who has a lot going for her and a life worth fighting for.
There is a lull in which we get introduced to the main characters for the second half of the book which feels a little slow at first. It's only later that these threads start to come together. Dr Seward is one of Lucy's admirers who is introduced to us as such but he will prove to be another narrator and the doctor overseeing the asylum where Renfield is being kept. He is interesting because Stoker uses a new technology - phonographic recordings - as the means by which Dr. Seward keeps his diary and later, Mina will type these spoken records up, thus letting characters access knowledge that the reader has had for a while. Likewise, Mina's typing is brought up early as something that she is doing so she will be a help to Jonathan when they marry. The meta-textual reason is that there must be a way in which all the different narrators are combined but it doesn't come off that way.
We also get introduced to Mr Morris, another rejected suitor and her actual fiance. Stoker is carefully lining up his dominos so when the Count does at last arrive, we aren't distracted by fortuitous coincidences but can just be swept along for the ride. Dr Seward makes some mentions of his mentor Dr. van Helsing long before the plot needs him and again, the trust and understanding between them is well-established by the time Dr Seward is calling for aid.
Reinfield honestly took me by surprise. I had the idea that he was a very active henchman, someone who had struck a compact with the Count and was acting for his interests while the Count was on his way to England. Instead, Reinfield seems to be the proverbial canary down the mineshaft, succumbing to the Count's influence long before the Count becomes a threat in any real sense. He is also an oddly sympathetic character, portrayed as weak or sick rather than evil or fundamentally bad. He is the one who invites the Count into the asylum but he also dies when he tries to keep the Count from preying on Mina, dying as a redeemed man. As it is, Dr. Seward's narration paints him as someone with genuine mental difficulties who fits into the general mould his doctors expect. Like Jonathan, Dr. Seward is not looking for nor expecting anything irrational in his paitent but the reader can see the signs long before our heroes do.
There is a sailor in Whitby who seemed like an interesting character - I say 'seemed' because Stoker gives a nearly perfect example of why transcribing accents for an entire conversation is so painful and jarring for the reader. I kept having to stop and puzzle out what the man meant which is even more difficult when he uses slang and turns of phrase that have fallen out of use in modern speech.
The Count arrives in a suitably dramatic fashion and we find out about the terror of the crew during the voyage retrospectively which is very well done and builds the captain of the ship as a good and noble man without making him a paragon.
I'm going to stop here to talk a bit about the Count's plan and what I meant when I said that the novel makes Dracula a lot more human than I had expected it to. In Dracula, the Count is portrayed as a proud, arrogant man with a supernatural hunger. He doesn't come across as genuinely alien but rather, he reads like a sociopath. He is proud, cruel and occasionally petty but the book does a much better job of giving him a motive and reason to leave his castle.
According to the novel, Dracula has spent several centuries living in his native land and effectively ruling unchecked. Transylvania is close to Constantinople which was the great power as Rome diminished. This has changed by the nineteenth century so Dracula's ambitions mean that he wants to move himself to England, then the centre of the developing global culture. Dracula doesn't make this decision lightly and he goes to extraordinary lengths to make his move as secret and smooth as possible. He buys property through various lawyers - each ignorant of the others - and he keeps Jonathan alive to teach him about the language and culture of England so he can fit in. He spends money in large amounts but he has been collecting gold for centuries and the money is never wasted.
When he finally does come to England, he doesn't bring just one coffin of earth - it is revealed that not only must he sleep there but during the daylight hours, he is powerless to change shape unless he's standing on his native soil - instead, he brings a shipful of boxes of earth. He has bought a lot of properties and scatters the earth there so he is never far from a refuge if he needs one. He is clever enough to have made these plans and it will take an entire group including a titled Lord, two respectable doctors and a lawyer to hunt him down. This isn't a supernatural demi-god, this is a proud and greedy warlord who has all the time he wants to plan and perfect his campaign.
His feeding on Lucy is another example of Stoker knowing how to rachet up the tension. The reader knows what is going on but the way the characters try valiantly to find a rational explanation while Lucy gets weaker and weaker keeps the tension high. I did like the blood transfusions even if modern medical knowledge calls BS on the likelihood that all four men are compatible donors. Lord Alfred not knowing that the others had donating and commenting at the grave side that he felt it had been a marriage of sorts made me wince.
Jonathan resurfaces and I liked that the logistical confusion over this left Mina out of the funerary arrangements because she simply didn't know. It fits with the world and as a modern reader, I found it a little shocking to think that it was possible to entirely miss a lingering death and funeral arrangements so easily.
There is a bit of a confusion as the various plot threads begin to collide but it is Lucy's new life as a vampire that brings together the group that will ultimately hunt down Dracula. The pacing of the hunt is superb - Stoker doesn't linger on the long boring bits but he does include them in enough detail that the reader doesn't ever feel that the characters are just sitting around doing nothing. Whenever they are sitting around, it's usually fuming in impatience while they wait for the information they need to come.
The initial success leads to Dracula infecting Mina and starting another countdown to disaster. The two personalities of Mina and the vampire she could become are well shown but Stoker doesn't linger on them. We get reminders - most notably through the hypnosis-aided tracking of the Count after they successfully drive him out of England.
The narrative breaks into two threads with van Helsing and Mina going to the castle and the scene with the holy circle and the women killing the horses is genuinely chilling and there is a frantic feel to the final chase with the hunters and the reader wondering if the Count is going to find yet another way to escape which comes to a final terrific climax.
Sadly, the postscript feels tacked on and rather rushed. There is a real feeling that Stoker is just tying up a few loose ends to give a perfect happy ending - in a very real sense, the story dies with the Count and the last section just feels forced. There is mention of all the men marrying new wives without any explanation as to who these women are or why. It felt a little too much like the epilogue to the Harry Potter books - the author skipping a whole chunk of narrative to rush us right into the Happy Ever After.
That said, this was a genuinely interesting and engaging book with powerful, interesting female characters which I would recommend to anyone with a Kindle or time to track down a hard copy.
Originally posted here Please comment there using OpenID.
I have read versions of Dracula before and I actually own a paper copy of the book from a classics series by Penguin ( I think) that I honest to god could not even look at because it scared me. In my defence, I was about 12 with a hyperactive imagination and I tried reading it during a bout of insomnia. I never actually sat down to read through the whole book but I have seen enough adaptations and Dracula is such a pop culture phenomenon that I was honestly not expecting that much from the book. cleolinda has talked about this on her LJ a bit.
Then, in the course of picking up Chuck Wendig's The Kickass Writer on Amazon, I spotted a free version of Dracula and decided to pick it up. I was starting to come down with the Christmas cold at that point and I wanted something I could read between the bouts of fever.
I have read Victorian/Edwardian novels before and I was braced for this to be a typical Gothic novel which honestly, I find very hard to keep reading through. Fanfic has spoiled me for this; I can't read page after page of melodrama with female characters who leak their agency right out of the ovaries as soon as the hero shows up. I know, I know, this is reflection of the socially acceptable values of the era but it honestly wears me down very fast and I stop wanting to read after only a few chapters. I find that I'm waiting for the twist in the tale and, particularly with female characters, I'm shouting at them to get off this rail and go be awesome elsewhere.
Dracula is actually a surprisingly good read. Not just 'for a gothic novel' but it is actually a very good read for a novel. I can suddenly understand how this book endured so long. Even with the major reveals spoiled, I was hooked by the pacing and the steady build of tension. There were a few points that I would consider weak - Van Helsing is something of a deus ex machina for example - are just weak, not actual failings.
The diary section with Jonathan is done very well, I thought. Jonathan is established from the first as an intelligent and observant man by being assigned the duty to meet with Dracula in the first place. His diary reads as very true to the young, ambitious Englishman of the era with the racism and classism that entails. What I found interesting was that throughout his journey, there is a suggestion that Jonathan is not a reliable narrator. His condescending attitude towards the 'peasant superstitions' of the local people who turn out to be entirely right to worry very nearly proves fatal.
Also, I found the way Jonathan's character is shown to the reader through his diaries to be very interesting. Jonathan starts out viewing this as a minor inconvenience made worthwhile by the opportunity to prove he is reliable. The early entries of his diary have the tone of this being something tedious that he just wants to get over with as fast as possible. He is more concerned with his appearance as an agent of his employers and his engagement than he is with the ominous landscape he is travelling through.
Dracula, as we are introduced to him, managed to still come as a surprise to me despite being practically an Avatar of popular culture at this point. I'll go into this a little more later but what I was most struck by was how human Dracula is. He very clearly does not raise any significant red flags with Jonathan who seems to think that he is a fairly typical member of the traditional gentry with a few minor eccentricities.
Stoker actually does a very good job portraying the slowly creeping realization that something is horribly wrong and Jonathan's initial belief that the Count will protect him makes a lot of sense in the Stockholm Syndrome sense. Another thing that I liked is that Jonathan honestly struggles to find a rational explanation. It takes more than one strange encounter before he believes that the Count truly is something supernatural.
I also liked how Dracula's wives were portrayed. They are never, that I can remember, named but they add a haunting flavour to the castle. They are portrayed as entirely demonic in a way that Dracula actually isn't. The women are more abandoned to the animalistic aspects of vampirism and I wonder if that is a reflection on why Dracula chose them i.e. weaker wills that were easily dominated and manipulated or if it's more about Dracula's autocratic control where the limits are set and enforced by him, robbing the wives of any free will? If anyone knows or can point me to a book focusing on them, I would read the hell out of that!
The incident with the baby in the sack and the mother who comes to search for it is a very masterful depiction of how the Count's nature tends towards the sociopathic. He kills both without any remorse, as expected of a monster, but the way in which he does shows the reader very clearly how little value he places on any life but his own. Humans are cattle and tools and he does not even care enough to torment them unless they show signs of being a threat to him.
Dracula's plan to murder Jonathan did confuse me a little. I couldn't see how this benefited Dracula at the time, though it was properly explained a little later. I did like how methodical and careful it was; the Count first isolates Jonathan, locking him out of the crypt while the Count and his wives sleep so he is not a threat. This is done from the outset, proving that the Count does not trust anyone and that his pride, while it is definitely a weakness, is not making him stupid. The Count stealing children while in Jonathan's clothes also seemed a little ridiculous to me - after all, the locals must know that Dracula has been active long before Jonathan came anywhere near their area - but as Dracula's plan unfolded, it made more sense. He wasn't setting Jonathan up to be lynched - all he wanted to do was make the villagers wary of the Englishman so if Jonathan escaped before the Count could kill him, there would be nowhere safe to hide. I did love how angry it makes Jonathan that the Count is scattering such a trail around him even as it turned the screws of fear a couple of notches.
Jonathan's desperate attack on the Count and the dramatic end to the diary are very well done. I do like how killing the Count (or at least giving it the old Eton try) doesn't actually make Jonathan's position any better and that Jonathan realizes being stuck with the women is a more immediate danger than playing deadly intrigue with the Count did. Most of all, why I like this section is that Jonathan is showing his agency as a character. He strikes down the Count and launches himself off into the wilderness with only the barest hope that he will escape but he does it because he must do something. There is a savage glee in having 'killed' the Count and his narrative voice reflects the hot-headed rush of victory, buoying him up for the last dangerous escape.
It leaves the reader on a cliffhanger regarding Jonathan's fate - even I wasn't totally sure that he survived. I spent a while frantically trying to remember how many adaptations he survived in. This was actually a little tricky given the modern trend of focusing on Dracula/Mina as the primary relationship in modern shows and films. Jonathan has been relegated to the also-ran nice guy in a lot of modern tellings.
We pick up with Lucy and Mina and a collection of correspondence. The Lucy and Mina friendship is one of the better female/female friendships I've read which is a depressing reflection on a lot of modern books. The affection between them is very plausible and I like that neither of them is too dramatically idealized. They both have tendencies towards the paragon but again, the beauty of the narrative style is that this can be explained by unreliable narration. We only hear about them from each other or from the men that they are friendly with; all of whom would arguably be looking through rose-tinted glasses. We don't generally nit-pick our best friends to their faces or with shared friends, after all.
Lucy is clearly established as a beauty with prospects that put her above Mina, another thing that modern adaptations had not prepared me for. A lot of adaptations treat Lucy as cannon fodder from the beginning but the book actually goes to some lengths to establish her as a gentle, pretty girl with friends and admirers who has a lot going for her and a life worth fighting for.
There is a lull in which we get introduced to the main characters for the second half of the book which feels a little slow at first. It's only later that these threads start to come together. Dr Seward is one of Lucy's admirers who is introduced to us as such but he will prove to be another narrator and the doctor overseeing the asylum where Renfield is being kept. He is interesting because Stoker uses a new technology - phonographic recordings - as the means by which Dr. Seward keeps his diary and later, Mina will type these spoken records up, thus letting characters access knowledge that the reader has had for a while. Likewise, Mina's typing is brought up early as something that she is doing so she will be a help to Jonathan when they marry. The meta-textual reason is that there must be a way in which all the different narrators are combined but it doesn't come off that way.
We also get introduced to Mr Morris, another rejected suitor and her actual fiance. Stoker is carefully lining up his dominos so when the Count does at last arrive, we aren't distracted by fortuitous coincidences but can just be swept along for the ride. Dr Seward makes some mentions of his mentor Dr. van Helsing long before the plot needs him and again, the trust and understanding between them is well-established by the time Dr Seward is calling for aid.
Reinfield honestly took me by surprise. I had the idea that he was a very active henchman, someone who had struck a compact with the Count and was acting for his interests while the Count was on his way to England. Instead, Reinfield seems to be the proverbial canary down the mineshaft, succumbing to the Count's influence long before the Count becomes a threat in any real sense. He is also an oddly sympathetic character, portrayed as weak or sick rather than evil or fundamentally bad. He is the one who invites the Count into the asylum but he also dies when he tries to keep the Count from preying on Mina, dying as a redeemed man. As it is, Dr. Seward's narration paints him as someone with genuine mental difficulties who fits into the general mould his doctors expect. Like Jonathan, Dr. Seward is not looking for nor expecting anything irrational in his paitent but the reader can see the signs long before our heroes do.
There is a sailor in Whitby who seemed like an interesting character - I say 'seemed' because Stoker gives a nearly perfect example of why transcribing accents for an entire conversation is so painful and jarring for the reader. I kept having to stop and puzzle out what the man meant which is even more difficult when he uses slang and turns of phrase that have fallen out of use in modern speech.
The Count arrives in a suitably dramatic fashion and we find out about the terror of the crew during the voyage retrospectively which is very well done and builds the captain of the ship as a good and noble man without making him a paragon.
I'm going to stop here to talk a bit about the Count's plan and what I meant when I said that the novel makes Dracula a lot more human than I had expected it to. In Dracula, the Count is portrayed as a proud, arrogant man with a supernatural hunger. He doesn't come across as genuinely alien but rather, he reads like a sociopath. He is proud, cruel and occasionally petty but the book does a much better job of giving him a motive and reason to leave his castle.
According to the novel, Dracula has spent several centuries living in his native land and effectively ruling unchecked. Transylvania is close to Constantinople which was the great power as Rome diminished. This has changed by the nineteenth century so Dracula's ambitions mean that he wants to move himself to England, then the centre of the developing global culture. Dracula doesn't make this decision lightly and he goes to extraordinary lengths to make his move as secret and smooth as possible. He buys property through various lawyers - each ignorant of the others - and he keeps Jonathan alive to teach him about the language and culture of England so he can fit in. He spends money in large amounts but he has been collecting gold for centuries and the money is never wasted.
When he finally does come to England, he doesn't bring just one coffin of earth - it is revealed that not only must he sleep there but during the daylight hours, he is powerless to change shape unless he's standing on his native soil - instead, he brings a shipful of boxes of earth. He has bought a lot of properties and scatters the earth there so he is never far from a refuge if he needs one. He is clever enough to have made these plans and it will take an entire group including a titled Lord, two respectable doctors and a lawyer to hunt him down. This isn't a supernatural demi-god, this is a proud and greedy warlord who has all the time he wants to plan and perfect his campaign.
His feeding on Lucy is another example of Stoker knowing how to rachet up the tension. The reader knows what is going on but the way the characters try valiantly to find a rational explanation while Lucy gets weaker and weaker keeps the tension high. I did like the blood transfusions even if modern medical knowledge calls BS on the likelihood that all four men are compatible donors. Lord Alfred not knowing that the others had donating and commenting at the grave side that he felt it had been a marriage of sorts made me wince.
Jonathan resurfaces and I liked that the logistical confusion over this left Mina out of the funerary arrangements because she simply didn't know. It fits with the world and as a modern reader, I found it a little shocking to think that it was possible to entirely miss a lingering death and funeral arrangements so easily.
There is a bit of a confusion as the various plot threads begin to collide but it is Lucy's new life as a vampire that brings together the group that will ultimately hunt down Dracula. The pacing of the hunt is superb - Stoker doesn't linger on the long boring bits but he does include them in enough detail that the reader doesn't ever feel that the characters are just sitting around doing nothing. Whenever they are sitting around, it's usually fuming in impatience while they wait for the information they need to come.
The initial success leads to Dracula infecting Mina and starting another countdown to disaster. The two personalities of Mina and the vampire she could become are well shown but Stoker doesn't linger on them. We get reminders - most notably through the hypnosis-aided tracking of the Count after they successfully drive him out of England.
The narrative breaks into two threads with van Helsing and Mina going to the castle and the scene with the holy circle and the women killing the horses is genuinely chilling and there is a frantic feel to the final chase with the hunters and the reader wondering if the Count is going to find yet another way to escape which comes to a final terrific climax.
Sadly, the postscript feels tacked on and rather rushed. There is a real feeling that Stoker is just tying up a few loose ends to give a perfect happy ending - in a very real sense, the story dies with the Count and the last section just feels forced. There is mention of all the men marrying new wives without any explanation as to who these women are or why. It felt a little too much like the epilogue to the Harry Potter books - the author skipping a whole chunk of narrative to rush us right into the Happy Ever After.
That said, this was a genuinely interesting and engaging book with powerful, interesting female characters which I would recommend to anyone with a Kindle or time to track down a hard copy.
Originally posted here Please comment there using OpenID.