 Her common-sense, Victorian morality and sense of propriety are in continual conflict with the yearning she feels for the attractive, charismatic, highly intelligent European Wagner whom she also admires because of their common love of Literature, Music, Science and his modern ideas about the place of a woman in society.
Reviewed by Lorraine Dobbie
Dracula, My Love The Secret Journals of Mina Harker
by Syrie James
Avon
2010, ISBN 978 0 06 192303 6 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 0 06 192303 6 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
Syrie James new novel, Dracula , my Love is an offshoot of the fictional story, Dracula by Bram Stoker. It works as a creation on its own by presenting the perspective and voice of Mina Harker and her friend, Lucy. With imagined scenes and dialogue, James has managed to flesh out the female characters from that novel and made them into living, breathing heroines. In particular, the novel focuses on Mina Harker’s journals which unlock the mystery of Mina’s early life, her courtship , her deep friendship with Lucy , her betrothal to Jonathan and the passionate attraction she has for the vampire, Count Dracula who transforms into Maximilian Wagner. Through the character, Wagner, James educates the reader about the legends and origins of Count Dracula and all the baggage that goes with being a vampire.
Mina is introduced as a vulnerable, twenty-two year old young woman, engaged to a young solicitor, who has a yearning to find the truth of her parentage as she was abandoned as a one year old at a London orphanage. She feels deprived because of her lack of parental love while growing up. Both Mina and her best friend Lucy (also newly engaged) while holidaying in Whitby, are each experiencing a longing for admiration from other men before they embark on a lifelong marriage to one man.
Part of the allure of this page-turner comes from the dark, sexual implications of Mina’s relationship with the charming Wagner and the sensual tension she experiences day and night as she struggles with deep guilt and lustful longing. The guilt stems from the obligation she feels for the life-long friendship, respect and deep affection she has for her fiancé, Jonathan and the intense physical attraction she has for Wagner. Her common-sense, Victorian morality and sense of propriety are in continual conflict with the yearning she feels for the attractive, charismatic, highly intelligent European Wagner whom she also admires because of their common love of Literature, Music, Science and his modern ideas about the place of a woman in society.
Wagner, through telepathic messages and violent dreams of a precognitive nature, manipulates both Lucy and Mina’s movements and emotions. They do not want to believe that associating with Wagner will wreak havoc on their lives and those they love. Even when Mina learns of all the horrendous events that Jonathan suffered when he was virtually imprisoned in Dracula’s gothic Castle in Transylvania and the events leading up to Lucy’s demise, Wagner is able to convince her that his actions were all misinterpreted. His seductive control is so powerful, that she does not even contemplate that his penchant for feeding off her blood could lead to her becoming a vampire also. Part of my enjoyment of the book and the character, Wagner, was how my interpretation of him was continually called into question. Was he genuinely in love with Mina and a noble person using his immortality to pursue knowledge and the arts or was he the anti-hero, on a mission to seduce and use Mina for his own evil purposes?
The story climaxes when Jonathan Harker (Mina’s husband) Professor Van Hesling (a Dutch brain professor) Arthur Holmwood (Lucy’s fiancé), Dr.John Seward and Quincy P. Morris (two former suitors of Lucy) embark on a quest to hunt down and destroy Count Dracula.
The novel is full of motifs of the era and the Gothic genre like Dracula transforming into a wolf, a black bird or a bat, references to Darwin’s Theory, Jack the Ripper, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Abbey ruins, legends of Saxon princesses, velvet and diamond neckbands and also the re-occurring Music of Tales from the Vienna Woods.
It reads like a tense filmscript begging to be translated to the screen. I would highly recommend the novel for Book Clubs, as a text for senior students as part of a Gothic genre study or to anyone wanting to read a well-written Gothic romance.
About the reviewer: Lorraine Dobbie works as a teacher/librarian in the Independent Learning Centre of a leading private Girls High School in Sydney, Australia. In this role, she teaches Research Skills and Literature appreciation. She has had a Literature unit of work published for teachers which used a novel study as a vehicle to teach Asian Studies in the English classroom. Her passion is to instil a love of reading to the students in her classes through the promotion of quality novels. She is a regular reviewer for Fiction Focus, an Australian magazine which is published by the Western Australia Dept. of Education. A recent book she reviewed, The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte by Syrie James inspired her to create a book trailer about that novel as a tribute to the Brontes. http://www.syriejames.com/videos.php She aspires to be a professional book editor/reviewer/trailer creator.
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