Too Much Of A Good Thing

Finished reading Bram Stoker's Dracula this morning. I realised the other week that I've had a copy of it tucked away on my shelves for a long time - in a Pelican paperback, intended for younger readers, though unabridged. I'm not someone who can readily be accused of what the Japanese term tsundoku, the hoarding of unread books, since pretty much every book I own has been read cover to cover, or very heavily perused, assuming it isn't something intended for reference purposes. But there are one or two exceptions that feature on a list I've been steadily reducing in number over the last four years or so. Strangely the copy of Dracula didn't get to feature on the list, and I'm not sure why. Possibly I regarded it as somehow beneath my dignity to include something intended for kids, but this makes little sense since the novel itself isn't children's literature and almost qualifies as a 'classic'.

Anyway, I've now read Stoker's novel and I don't think it can be meaningfully seen as a work of distinct importance regardless of how vampire stories have come to comprise a thriving genre of their own. That isn't to say it's a poor novel - it has enough craft about it to be seen as a sturdy, workmanlike piece. But it lacks the mythic power of Frankenstein, which is a surprise given the inherent power of the vampire archetype. Yes, it exploits that power to some effect, but it's easy to imagine this being done better. That explains, I think, why movies with their roots in Stoker's novel invariably make major structural alterations to the storyline.

The thing that irritated throughout my reading was the wearisome insistence of each narrator on the virtues of their various friends and loved ones. I suppose this can be related in potentially interesting ways to the transgressive aspects of the text: I'm thinking here of the undercurrent of sexuality in the direct encounters of Jonathan, Mina and Lucy with the Un-Dead. These are extremely brief in terms of actual descriptive text devoted to them (essentially one or two paragraphs for each) but the implications in terms of the moral schema of the novel are fascinating. I sense the anxieties generated are reflected in the growing and vaguely off-putting religiosity of the text. Unfortunately, though, Stoker fails to handle those anxieties with any subtlety and the relentlessly drab equivalent of current day virtue-signalling gets more than a bit much.