Wormwood Theatre

This is a book that I admit I had never actually finished before. I’d read about halfway twice, and put it down, and not picked it up again; I’d always get to the part where small children started turning up with wounds in their throats. This time I read it all the way through, and it was quite an adventure.

The start is slow, despite it being set in Dracula’s castle. The whole book is written in letters and journal entries, and Jonathan’s journal, like the man himself, manages to be rather dull. Just over halfway through, the action picks up, and things become tense. I feel like it’s more a thriller than a horror, but that may be a modern view of it.

I enjoyed it very much. Oh, there are problems – most of the characters have much the same writing style, for one, and when one knows the story, it does seem to take a long time to get going. But when one tries to forget that one knows the story, it is written rather well. It builds like a mystery, and one imagines contemporary readers might have been absolutely riveted to the page. It’s a shame that we know the story so well, now; to the modern reader it could so easily be frustrating, or even laughable; when you know the outcome, the great mystery of it all seems silly. But the action, such as it is, is still rather thrilling.

The characters are rather pleasing for the most part. They all love intensely, even their rivals, even strangers – yet I do not find it vexing. Jonathan is rather dull, but Seward is thoughtful and sensitive, Quincey fiery and brave (we really see far too little of him). Van Helsing is avuncular, warm, exhuberant; he has an odd way of talking, which started off charming enough, but late in the book, when is speeches became longer and more convoluted, I found myself growing annoyed with him.

The show-stealer is Mina Harker, née Murray. I must admit I had not expected to find a female character in this book who was so well-rounded; Lucy Westenra is the delicate flower, prone to swooning, and I had expected her to be rather typical of all the female characters, but Mina surprised me. She is charming, wise, sharp-witted, strong-willed, brave and loving. She makes herself useful. She is practical and productive, thoughtful and clever. She doesn’t ask others to do what she’s perfectly capable of doing herself. Of all the characters, she has the most bright ideas, the best plans. When the men are despondent, or thinking only of action, she with a smile will sit down and work out the best course of action, and then, like a kindly schoolteacher, explain it to her zealous protectors.
Mina thinks of women proposing to men as something that is only a matter of time, and indeed an element of fashionable behaviour that is surely just on the horizon. She thinks nothing of running about a graveyard alone at night in search of a friend, or of rushing to help her when she finds her at last with a dark figure bent over her. Mina is not particularly concerned with fighting for women’s rights because she seems of the opinion that women’s rights are in the immediate future and will fall into her lap because that is how things are meant to be. And I love that perspective from a woman in the 1890s.

It’s really quite a modern book, in its way. Some phrases pop out at one and you can’t help but be a little surprised to find them in literature so early. Mina uses the simile “like a cat’s tail when Puss is on the war-path” which is rather delightfully colloquial. Apparently Mark Twain used it in 1880, but I was still pleasantly surprised to stumble across it in Dracula.