Dracula

Having ignored my own recent advice after reading Princess Casamassima by Henry James to 'beware verbose Victorians', I finally picked up Dracula this week. This is my third book for the 2016 TBR Pile Reading Challenge.

I've had a paperback copy of Dracula by Bram Stoker awaiting reading since we visited Whitby Abbey last year. The ruins were so creepy, even on a sunny day, and I loved remembering our visit and being able to envisage the relevant scenes as I read. I did already vaguely know the plot, but don't think I have ever read this book before, not even in a child's classics version. Thinking about it, perhaps there isn't one? For what essentially is a pretty short story, this is a long book. However, once I got into the convoluted style, I found that there was a swift enough pace to keep me interested. It is very dated in attitudes, particularly towards women who are relentlessly patronised throughout, and the characters are each of a type rather than realistic individuals, however where Stoker excels I think is in his wonderfully evocative descriptions of places and actions. I was captivated by many of the scenes and found myself wishing I had read Dracula years ago!

First of all: I read this in draculadaily.substack.com/about form. I highly recommend this approach because the pacing in real time adds a lot of tension. But it does also mean that I didn't read it in exactly the order that the author put the text in.

In some ways this is a great book. There's a reason why Stoker's vision of the vampire has become so dominant in pop culture. And the format--a series of letters and journal entries--works very well, even if sometimes one has to suspend disbelief about how the characters found time to write thousands of words on the most action-packed days.

But it's also deeply flawed in ways that reflect very poorly on the author. It's super racist and very sexist--even by the low standards of the era it was written in--and Stoker insisted on writing various accents even though he was terrible at that, and apparently some of the best place-description passages were essentially plagiarised from travel guides. And at times I really struggled with how intensely the Dracula character maps on to antisemitic tropes of the time: the strange outsider from Somewhere East who drinks the blood of innocent Christians and must not only be defeated but hunted down wherever he flees to.

I am glad I read this, but I'll be happy to never read another page by Bram Stoker again.