Bram Stoker - Dracula

Alas! Dracula is over, and all is quiet. Too quiet! My newfound friends - Jonathan Harker, Mina Harker, Dr Seward, Renfield, Professor Van Helsing, Quincey Morris, and Lord Godalming - departed as swiftly as they got the party started a week ago.

In my Oxford World Classics edition, the series editor Maud Ellman introduces Dracula as a "bad" novel, pointing out the lurid phrases, continuity errors, and lack of character development. But these departures from reality are what make Dracula one of my Greatest Books of All Time. What makes people think verisimilitude is a good thing, I'll never know. After all, don't we read fiction because we despise reality? I know I do - that's why I live in worlds like Robin Hobb's or Arthur Conan Doyle's. I only wish I had more of Dracula.

Like Frankenstein (which I am waiting for Jon to finish!), Dracula is formatted like a dossier or casefile, so the story is told through letters, diary entries, recording transcriptions, rail timetables, telegraph messages, newspaper clippings, etc. I LOVE THAT. Things never get boring because you get a switch in perspective every few pages; besides, none of the human characters are boring. They are all people you want to hang out with.

If you look beyond the story - which is of course elementary - boy meets girl, boy bites girl, girl turns into Un-Dead, everyone freaks out for 200 pages - the real obsession in these pages is - you'll never guess! - technology. 

Bram Stoker was obviously some kind of writing & communications tech nerd. Not only was every possible form of modern communication represented in the dossier, characters actually compare their tech with one another. 

With her professional eye, Mina Harker makes a cool assessment of Dr Seward's phonograph journal: it makes a poor record, because you can't easily find entries chronologically. She takes his cylinders away and types them up on her typewriter. Later someone (I think it was Godalming, because he bleeds money) gifts her a travel typewriter, which she is very excited about - quite inappropriate given the circumstances i.e. crossing the continent chasing after the Count at breakneck speed. 

Okay, fine, it's mainly Mina doing the nerding out. She is the best character and probably Stoker's avatar. At one point she lays out the casebook and re-reads everything and does a step-by-step logical deduction as to Dracula's whereabouts. <3 Sorry, you know how I get with girl detectives. 

Speaking of girls, the two women in the book - Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra - are incredibly well portrayed. Bram Stoker writes women like Pedro Almodovar - just spot on. (Now that's verisimilitude.) This was a pleasant surprise. I was expecting 2 anaemic women playing out the virgin/whore dynamic, as with the Coppola film version of Dracula, but Mina and Lucy in the book were affectionate, kind, playful, moody, and - probably most importantly - had strong desires of their own.

Hell, even the side characters in the book are superior to the film. I loved Van Helsing (always making things awkward with an inappropriate quip), Dr Seward (always complaining about being fucking tired and drowning in work), Renfield (wait for the bit where he talks philosophy), and Quincey Morris (favourite character after Mina - just too good!).

Wait, I didn't mean for this to be a film vs. book comparison. Anyway, I loved both. But the book more, definitely.