Book #9 for 2023. So I’ve finally read Dracula (yes, I know, I’m a bad goth). I do find it a bit odd that I’ve seen a number of screen versions of the story—the Universal and Hammer series, the Coppola version, the BBC version from 1977 (I have the older Mystery & Imagination version too but haven’t watched it yet), even Jess Franco’s version, plus of course Nosferatu ’22 and ’79*—but had never actually read the book. Or, to be more precise, had never finished it.
I think I got it in the early 90s (fairly sure I still have that paperback) and for reasons I no longer remember I never actually read the whole thing through. I have memories of getting as far as the destruction of vampire Lucy but no idea why I stopped there. Was I bored? Was I finding the book simply not very good? Cos let’s face it, it’s not exactly a literary masterpiece. I suspect its status as an iconic classic of the genre is less due to its own inherent merits than it is to its various screen adaptations, particularly the 1931 version with that Lugosi fellow, which I don’t think is a particularly good film… it starts great but goes kind of rapidly downhill, in which it’s not actually unlike the book. First four chapters with Jonathan Harker in Dracula’s castle—fine. After that it’s a slog through various characters’ journals and other notes, of which they all seem to have plenty of time to write no matter how serious the situation.
Dracula is a fairly long book (just under 500 pages in the edition I read), certainly the longest I’ve read in ages, and not a lot really happens in it; the pacing is kind of ponderous (the action taking place over several months; I think the multi-narrator structure doesn’t help much), the characters are barely cardboard, the dialogue full of late Victorian melodramatics, and the count himself is, frankly, absent from most of it. He’s lurking somewhere in the background at all times, but he takes very little direct part in things. Something about it feels kind of small despite Dracula being a threat potentially to the whole world. And, frankly, the character of Renfield makes more sense in the Browning/Freund film where he replaces Jonathan Harker’s character.
It’s good, I just don’t think it’s great; I think I respect its historical importance to the genre more than anything. I wish I could find the 1901 abridgement Stoker himself made for a paperback edition which some think was an improvement. At any rate, after 30-odd years I finally finished it (longer than it took me with Ulysses), and am now in a position to also finally read the Swedish/Icelandic and Turkish knock-offs/rewrites. It would’ve been too foolish even for me to have read those before reading the original, after all…
* No, I haven’t seen the Dario Argento version except for clips. I suspect that requires a degree of masochism I rarely possess…
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