HORROR: JOHN CONNOLLYreviews the New Annotated Draculaby Bram Stoker edited by Leslie S Klinger
MY FIRST EXPERIENCE of the character of Dracula, in common with a great many people, I suspect, came not through Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, but via the medium of film. As a very young boy, staying with my best friend's family at a holiday home in Rush, I can recall watching Dracula, Prince of Darkness, with Christopher Lee as the Count, when it was shown as the first part of the BBC's regular Saturday night double bill of Hammer horror films.
It gave my friend nightmares, and caused him to wet the bed, which I still consider to be quite an achievement on Christopher Lee’s part. (Incidentally, I was never allowed to watch very much of the second films on such double-bills, in part because they were always on too late, but largely because there tended to be more female flesh on display. I know this because my dad told me, although he claimed never to have bothered watching them. I can only assume that a friend had warned him against them.)
It was said of the Earl of Rochester, the notoriously debauched Restoration writer, that he was a “great poet of the second class”. In a similar way, Dracula is a great novel of the second class, a book that is significantly better than the sum of its parts and, indeed, the rest of its author’s output, to the extent that at least one contemporary critic was moved to speculate on whether or not Stoker had actually written it at all.
Stoker was by no means an outstanding writer, but he did produce one entirely successful book. That book was The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions, which left a little to be desired in terms of plot and action – Stoker himself described it as "dry as dust" – but was regarded as the definitive work for those with inclinations of the petty sessional variety. Meanwhile, a number of his novels can be found under the Penguin Classics imprint, and thus provide some justification for the suspicion that, having run out of genuine classics to print, Penguin is wilfully confusing "classic" with "old". The Jewel of Seven Stars, a tale of Egyptology and resurrection, is tedious and confused, while The Lair of The White Worm, a novella usually packaged with Stoker's short stories, is both terribly odd, and oddly terrible.
Stoker's reputation as a novelist, therefore, rests on Dracula. The plot is reasonably straightforward. Jonathan Harker, a young lawyer, journeys to Transylvania and is held captive by the vampiric Count, who then travels to England and begins to prey upon Lucy Westenra, a friend of Harker's fiancée, Mina Murray, and, in turn, on Mina herself. The heroes, led by the vampire hunter, Van Helsing, discover the truth about the Count's nature, and set out to destroy him.
Despite murmurs to the contrary, Draculais very far indeed from being a bad novel, or even a mediocre one, although it is flawed. The prose is adequate – no better or worse than many romance novels of the time. The structure, involving diary entries, notebooks, and transcriptions of phonographic recordings, is awkward, and occasionally careless. (Arguably, too, the English form of the epistolary novel had never quite recovered from the early body blow inflicted by Samuel Richardson's 18th-century novel Clarissa, a book that does for letter-writing what Dracula does for bats.)
It is not a book in which nothing happens, but some things, including Dracula’s predation upon Lucy Westenra, happen rather too slowly, and Van Helsing’s response to Lucy’s difficulties seems to involve a lot of back-and-forth between England and the Netherlands that saps some of the tension. It is also difficult to read more than a few lines of Van Helsing’s ramblings without developing head pains, as in the following: “We have been blind somewhat; blind after the manner of men, since when we can look back we see what we might have seen looking forward if we had been able to see what we might have seen. Alas!” Alas, indeed.
AND YET DRACULAfully merits its classic status, and not merely because so much of what subsequently became integral elements of vampire literature were first gathered together, and popularised, in Stoker's novel. Dracula is a dream-like construct, a book of images and impressions, and long after doubts about prose and plotting have faded from the reader's mind, those images, some of the most potent of them involving children, continue to linger: Jonathan Harker being terrorised, not entirely unwillingly, by a trio of female vampires, and their attentions being diverted by an infant in a sack tossed to them by the Count; the infant's mother, pleading for its return, being torn apart by wolves; the undead Lucy Westenra gliding through a cemetery, a child clutched to her breast as she prepares to feed upon it. No horror novel, either before or since, has so many haunting moments that would be worthy of recall were they not already impossible to forget.
Stoker also recognises the sexual threat at the heart of the vampire myth, a component that had previously been dealt with in a similar way by another Irishman, Sheridan Le Fanu, in his story Carmilla. Le Fanu’s tale is suffused with lesbianism, but Stoker is more explicit still, touching upon rape, both male and female, and even, when the Count is found in Mina’s bedroom, her mouth pressed to his bleeding chest, oral sex. That eroticism was largely absent from earlier vampire fiction, or remained relatively unexplored, and a clear path can be traced from Dracula through the novels of Anne Rice and their elegant revenant, Lestat, all the way to Stephanie Meyer’s modern Twilight series, now so popular with teenage girls, although Meyer’s books are, on one level, little more than Mormon arguments for sexual abstinence disguised as vampire stories.
Much of this is touched upon in The New Annotated Dracula, a work of scholarship that is immensely detailed and beautifully illustrated, although perhaps better suited to those who have already read Dracula in more conventional form, as the accompanying notes are often so fascinating as to prove a serious distraction from the main text. There are miniature essays on trepanning (the drilling of holes in patients' heads, an early form of neurosurgery); 19th-century refrigeration techniques; the history of cycling; the influence of tea shops on female emancipation; and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a detailed entry on blood transfusion, in which we learn that in 1492, when Pope Innocent VIII suffered a stroke, blood was taken from three 10-year-old boys and administered to the pope orally in an effort to save him. The boys did not survive the procedure, and the pope died anyway. The book also includes Dracula's Guest, a short story originally intended to form part of Dracula but which was subsequently excised and published separately in an altered form, and a history of the titular vampire on stage, screen, and page.
Is Dracula deserving of such lavish critical attention? Undoubtedly, just as it is worthy of its selection for this year’s Dublin: One City, One Book initiative. I have now read it four times, and each reading has revealed something new, but this reading, aided by Klinger’s often quirky notes, has been the most rewarding since I first opened the book at university. Few characters in literature have the potency of Dracula, a figure capable of endless reinvention, of becoming a carrier for the new fears of successive generations, from TB and syphilis to Aids, an undying metaphor for infection, disease, and sexual desire.
For this alone, Stoker has earned his own immortality.
John Connolly's latest novel, The Reapers, is published by Hodder Stoughton