Dracula by Bram Stoker
After agreeing to play Dracula for the sixth birthday of Doug Ehring’s daughter Sophia, I thought I’d go back and read the original. I’m pretty sure I read some abridged version or other when I was a lad, but I’d never slain the whole monster. I’m now most of the way through doing so, however, so I can offer the following report: Bram Stoker is a truly terrible writer.
I’m willing to ignore the overwrought and repetitive descriptions (furious beasts of awe-inspiring terror and whatnot), and I think I might even forgive the fact that the various epistolary voices all sound the same. (Except, it must be said, for Seward–the asylum doctor–who occasionally throws in some vaguely medical terminology to authenticate himself.) I cannot forgive, however, the narrative inconsistencies and logical gaps that the most childlike of editors should have caught. Lacking an omniscient narrator, Stoker needs to have people around to witness the unwitnessed, so crowds are posted on cliffs in the midst of storms, even though paragraphs later they are all said to be shuttered in their homes. Speaking through the mouths of characters who know less than he does, Stoker cannot contain himself, as when Mina, who admits to knowing nothing about the sea, talks of ships “bending to their scuppers.” She knows what scuppers are? In a singe journal entry a character talks of Van Helsing as if he has never met him (saying “if it turns out the man is of the quality Mina describes” or something of the sort) and then a couple of sentences later he proceeds to describe his own long encounter with the man which clearly made quite an impression on him. Within the period of a few short hours, Van Helsing and Mina have an Exeter to London epistolary exchange, which it seems would be quite impossible unless email made an appearance earlier than anyone has imagined. Finally there is the fact that the few utterances Van Helsing makes in his native tongue appear to be in German. (Deutsch, Dutch, what’s the difference?)
Apparently Stoker wrote many books, most of which have been lost in obscurity. That this one survived is, I suppose, a testament to the fact that in Count Dracula Stoker found a completely captivating character and that vampire myths are just incredibly cool. It certainly isn’t because Stoker is a writer worth remembering.
June 9th, 2008 at 2:13 am
GRARRR Stoker makes me MAD. I tried reading the novel on the train through Romania but never finished it. He never visited Transylvania, and although I suppose it aint his fault that the majority of people equate Romania with blood-suckers, the whole thing has shifted fact completely out of the picture.
Brasov is one of my favourite towns in Romania. I love imagining Tsepes and his golden chalice in the middle of the town square. The mist lies low over the foot of the mountain and the streets are cobble-stoned. When it rains, the roads mirror the dark sky as it looms over the fourteenth century building that houses the tourist office. I tried to go on a tour to Bran Castle but required more people, so I just went myself. A word of advice: duck your head. The ‘vampires’ seem to have been dwarfs.