Dracula

This is probably going to sound like blasphemy to most but, in my opinion, Dracula is, as a novel, overrated. The novel reads almost as if it was written in two parts. It reads as if a 300 page sequel has been hastily tacked onto the 50 page novella that is Jonathan Harker’s journal of his trip to Transylvania and possible escape from Dracula’s castle.

As a novella, Harker’s journal cannot be faulted, it has tone, pace, and a sense of brooding menace. However, the rest of the novel does not live up to it. The way that Dr Seward, Arthur Holmwood and Quincy Morris meet is contrived, to say the least, and the short shrift that Quincy gets as a character presages his ‘red jumper’ status in the final struggle.

Not that Dracula himself presents much of a challenge. As a character he is weak, Stoker himself continually refers to his ‘childlike’ mind rather than the brooding genius of later genre writers. This is due to Stoker’s adherence to the psychological vogue of equating criminality with brain damage. Stoker’s Dracula is easily outwitted and outmaneuvered by the heroes with the assistance of the inadequately fleshed out van Helsing.

Nor is there a real climax to the novel, Dracula is easily defeated, his three female companions, so heavily built up in Harker’s Journal are dispatched with ne’er a word with the result that the reader gets the feeling of oh, well that was all rather straight forward. Because Dracula lacks such genius, his dispatch becomes that much less heroic.

Where Stoker shines however, is in the fact that this work, much like Tolkein, launched a thousand others that have followed built and improved upon the original and, for that, Dracula must have its rightful place as a landmark in the history of the novel.