Dracula is so famous that it’s amazing to read it and find out just how bad it is. It is told through a series of entries in the protagonists’ diaries, and through their letters. All of them seem to be trying to outdo each other for sheer tedium.
The characters include the uptight Jonathan Harker and his prissy fiancé Mina Harker, the irritating Lucy Westenra and the utterly ridiculous Dr van Helsing. Each one of them writes in a turgid, monotonous and repetitive style and, since it’s hard to believe that this is deliberate, it must be that this is also Stoker’s style.
Dracula himself is off-stage for far too much of the novel and the effect that this is presumably designed to bring about – the mystery of the unknown – is just replaced with lassitude.
Everything about Count Dracula is preferable to the boring lot who try to destroy him. If I were him, I’d have hatched a plot to rid the world of their priggish Victorian virtue too. The blurb would have you believe that Dracula is a searing examination of Victorian sexuality, but in fact it’s no such thing. Whatever sexual content there might be is overshadowed by the torpor induced by the writing, and is there anything less sexy than boredom?
There have been some terrible film adaptations of Dracula, but the big benefit of those is that they only take a couple of hours to get through. Reading Dracula was one of the most tedious experiences of my life.
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One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.I completely agree James, Dracula is a truly terrible book. Corny, melodramatic, overblown, boring and drawn-out. Have you read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? Also awful.
Some of the films that came from those two books are great, though. Stick to the 1930s, mind, unless you just want a couple of fun hours set in an unspecified bit of eastern Europe that looks a lot like the countryside near Pinewood.