«Dracula», Bram StokerA book called Dracula that is 10% Dracula

Ten per cent Count

The novel is made of other people’s papers. Jonathan Harker keeps his journal in shorthand, Dr. Seward speaks his diary into a phonograph, Mina and Lucy write each other letters, and between them come newspaper cuttings, telegrams and a ship’s log. Seward writes the most, 39% of the text, then Jonathan and Mina. The Count has no papers of his own in this file: everything we know about him was written down by the people hunting him.

I counted the scenes the Count himself is in: where he is seen, heard, or met in someone’s account. That came to 16,347 words out of 160,220, or ten per cent of the book. Three quarters of it falls in the first four chapters, at the castle. Nineteen chapters out of twenty-seven get by without him at all.

Coachman, porter and chambermaid

At the castle, though, he is everywhere. He meets Jonathan at the door, carries his bags himself, lifts the cover off the dish at supper himself, and one day Jonathan finds him making his bed. From which Jonathan concludes that there are no servants in the castle, and the coachman who drove him over the pass was the Count too.

And at the castle the Count talks a great deal: about London, about English solicitors, about his own race, which held back the Turk for centuries. Only he never eats or drinks, and when Jonathan is shaving, there is no one in the mirror behind his shoulder. The Count calls the glass a foul bauble of man’s vanity and flings it out of the window.

Six chapters without a name

After the castle something odd happens. From chapter seven to chapter twelve the words “Count” and “Dracula” do not occur once. Yet these are the very chapters in which he sails to England and kills Lucy.

He is always somewhere near, only nameless. In the log of the Demeter a sailor sees on deck a tall, thin man, not like any of the crew. When the ship is driven ashore at Whitby, an immense dog leaps off it. At night Mina sees something long and black bending over the sleeping Lucy, with red, gleaming eyes. And Renfield senses him coming, and calls him simply the Master.

Best of all is the scene at the zoo. A newspaper interviews a keeper, who remembers a visitor: tall, thin, a hooked nose, a pointed beard going grey, red eyes. The visitor stroked the old wolf’s ears and said he had made pets of several. That same night the wolf broke out and smashed Lucy’s window. The keeper never worked out who he had been talking to. The reader did at the first description.

Victory by paperwork

The hunters do not win because they are stronger. In chapter seventeen Mina sits down at her typewriter and types up everything: Jonathan’s journal, Seward’s cylinders, the letters, the newspaper cuttings. “In this matter dates are everything”, she says, and puts the papers in order. That file becomes the plan of the hunt: through letters, delivery notes and diaries they trace where the Count has taken his fifty boxes of earth.

The Count sees the danger. Breaking into Seward’s study, he burns the manuscript and throws the wax cylinders on the fire. It does him no good: “Thank God there is the other copy in the safe!”

At the very end Jonathan admits that hardly one authentic document is left, only typewriting. The novel literally is that file. That is why the Count barely speaks in it: it isn’t his story, it’s the case against him.

Five speeches in twenty-three chapters

After the castle the Count takes the stage four times. In Piccadilly Jonathan sees him grown young and can barely stand. In chapter twenty-one the men burst into the bedroom and find him with Mina: he is forcing her to drink his blood from a wound in his breast. A chapter later the hunters lie in wait for him in his own London house. And in the last chapter he lies in a box, and has fewer than two hundred words left.

After the castle he speaks five times: in a whisper to Renfield, three times to Mina and once to the hunters, all in two chapters. In twenty-three chapters, 374 words. The rarer he appears, the more frightening each line.

My favourite encounter is in the house in Piccadilly. Jonathan strikes at him with his Kukri knife and slashes his coat, and banknotes and gold pour out of the gap. The Count dives under Jonathan’s arm and, before throwing himself through the window, grabs a handful of money from the floor. Van Helsing draws his conclusion at once: if he takes the money, he is afraid.

Verdict

Read it. Not for the cloak and the fangs, you know those from the films, but for the way the novel is made. Stoker frightens you with what isn’t on the page: you hardly see the Count, so you recognise him in every tall, thin stranger. And a file of diaries, letters and cuttings reads today like a found-footage film.

One point off for Van Helsing’s English. He says things like “he fear time, he fear want!”, and keeps it up to the end. Translators smooth it over. I had no translator.