Monday, December 16, 2013

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Yes, I picked up Dracula as a Halloween re-read and yes it’s almost Christmas. What can I say? As embarrassing as it is to admit, time gets away from me. That’s one of the many hazards of being Distractible by nature.
 


It’s never too late, however, to say that I still love Dracula. This is a real vampire story: no sparkles, no love affairs, just a self-serving, powerful, manipulative, undead monster with terrible abilities and a bloody agenda. While Dracula is far more emotional in nature than most English novels I’ve read, those emotions are limited to reasonable terror, horror, despair and genuine affection among the protagonists.

Dracula is an adventure story told in the form of journal entries, correspondences and recordings by most of the main characters. The tension steadily builds in the day-to-day accounts which are supplemented with a few newspaper reports, and the overall effect is a special kind of believability, even when things become supernaturally weird. Knowledge is power for our heroes and they use a rational, scientific approach to the discovery and attempted destruction of the vampire count.

The style of story-telling is fun to read and Stoker has done it with some skill, since each story-teller has his or her own voice. There are many cumbersome passages, however, as Stoker relays some accounts, including a long quotation in a newspaper report, in the supposed dialect of the speaker. I find phonetic spellings of local vernacular difficult to get through, and in many places I wish he would just have written everything out in Oxford English and let me use my own imagination as to what it sounded like. In many cases I had to rely on the good notes that came with my digital edition of the novel in order to understand what a quoted character was saying. I suppose the dialect adds color and realism to the story, but I, unfortunately, just find it hard to read.

I don’t really buy into all of the symbolism of suppressed sexuality that’s been read into Dracula by scholars who just don’t want to enjoy a good suspense story. I suppose that’s been the source of so much of the modern take on the vampire in current literature. I really don’t buy into that, either, but there is one scene toward the end of the novel in which Van Helsing contemplates the role of physical and supernatural beauty in the power of the vampire. He has come across the coffins of the vampire women in Dracula’s circle, servants of the count, but immensely powerful in their own right. The commentary is laced with dialect, since English is not Van Helsing’s first language, but it is nonetheless a moving passage.

 

She lay in her Vampire sleep, so full of life and voluptuous beauty that I shudder as though I have come to do murder. Ah, I doubt not that in old time, when such things were, many a man who set forth to do such a task as mine, found at the last his heart fail him, and then his nerve. So he delay, and delay, and delay, till the mere beauty and the fascination of the wanton Undead have hypnotize him; and he remain on, and on, till sunset come, and the Vampire sleep be over. Then the beautiful eyes of the fair woman open and look love, and the voluptuous mouth present to a kiss – and man is weak. And there remain one more victim in the Vampire fold; one more to swell the grim and grisly ranks of the Un-dead!...

 

No matter how you feel about vampires, then and now, this is a good, well-written suspense story for anyone who wants an old-fashioned thrill in their reading entertainment.


A Year of Books I've Read Before

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