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The Lady of the Shroud

Bram Stoker

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Aug 28, 2008 Werner rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, action-adventure

This is another book I started reading, as a kid, at somebody else's house and didn't get a chance to finish (long story!). It's taken well over 50 years for me to get around to tying off this "loose end" in my reading experience, but I've finally done so. As my rating indicates, though, the result was underwhelming.

Bram Stoker, of course, owes his world-wide fame to his authorship of Dracula (1898). Given that reputation, the title of this novella (published 11 years later, in 1909), plus its s This is another book I started reading, as a kid, at somebody else's house and didn't get a chance to finish (long story!). It's taken well over 50 years for me to get around to tying off this "loose end" in my reading experience, but I've finally done so. As my rating indicates, though, the result was underwhelming.

Bram Stoker, of course, owes his world-wide fame to his authorship of Dracula (1898). Given that reputation, the title of this novella (published 11 years later, in 1909), plus its setting in a fictional Balkan country and the actual references to possible vampirism in roughly the second fourth of the book, combine to create the reader expectation that this is another work of vampire fiction. It's no spoiler to say that it's not (and might protect some readers from "false advertising!"), since my shelving decisions telegraph that fact. Part of the relatively low esteem it gets on Goodreads (it has an average rating of 3.07 --and a lot of Goodreaders confuse its scale with Amazon's, where three stars would only mean the book is "okay") may be due to those dashed genre expectations. But that's far from the only cause for low esteem. This is simply nowhere near as accomplished, compelling, and entertaining a read as Dracula is.

Like Dracula, this is structured as an "epistolary" novel; that is, it's made up of letters, journal entries, memoranda, newspaper reports, and legal or other official documents supposedly written by various characters. In contemporary fiction, this is no longer as popular a novel structure as it once was; but even so, it can work well, and did in the author's earlier novel. (The supposed way that all this material was cobbled together as a book is "explained" late in the novella.) Our main setting is the Land of the Blue Mountains, a fictional small country (adult male pop., about 100,000) on the Adriatic coast of the Balkan Pennisula. We begin with a short report, dated in January 1907, in the (fictional) Journal of Occultism, from one of their seasoned correspondents, who with two officers of an Italian ship, running close to the Blue Mountains coast on a moonlit night, briefly saw a mysterious woman clad in a shroud drifting in a coffin-shaped vessel in a coastal bay.

Then, however, we move back to a long section set in England, beginning in about 1892, where we're introduced in detail to the well-to-do Melton family, and particularly to their not so well-to-do distaff cousin, Rupert Saint Leger (b. ca. 1878). He was the son of Patience Melton (d. 1891), who was a couple of decades younger than her two surviving brothers, by her only marriage, to a decorated army officer who died while Rupert was very young. This account is mainly filtered through the jaundiced eyes of Ernest Roger Halbard Melton, grandson of the older of the two brothers, who detests Rupert. (But since he unconsciously reveals himself to be a money-obsessed, mean-spirited snob, we're inclined to think in the opposite way to his!) Rupert ran away to sea at fifteen. We meet him again only in late 1906, when he's summoned back to England for the reading of the will of Patience's other brother Roger, who's just died, and whose fortune was known to be substantial. (As we eventually learn, it was over a million pounds; and he was a behind-the-scenes world political power player, as a lender to several European and Asian governments.) Not many details of Rupert's intervening years are given. But we do learn that he's been an adventurer and soldier of fortune in many exotic parts of the world (with paranormal experiences and encounters with ancient occultism under his belt as well), and has grown into a handsome, seven-foot-tall young man of considerable athletic and military prowess, and sterling character.

Long story short, Uncle Roger, who was quite fond of Patience, interested himself in her son. He never actually met Rupert (they did correspond briefly, since Roger was a trustee of Patience's will); but he kept up with the young man's adventures, and has left him the lion's share of his fortune, provided that Rupert agrees to reside for a year in Castle Vissarion in the Land of the Blue Mountains, the former seat of the country's Voivode. Roger's purchase of this great estate has some mystery elements, and is tied into secretly funding the small country's purchase of arms to resist encroachments by the Ottoman Sultan. (This book was written in the time of the real-life intrigues leading up to the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, and of course World War I --which started in the Balkans-- soon after that, a backdrop that provides a degree of realism.) Rupert agrees. Soon after he moves in, he gets a visit from a beautiful but pale, strange young woman, clad only in a wet shroud and seeking warmth, who has to be invited through the French windows of his bedroom, and who hastens away at cock-crow. (Hmmm.... :-) )

Although the premise here has the possibilities for a quality tale, they're largely unrealized. The author tries to write in a variety of modes; the first half is a Gothic romance of sorts, the second fourth tries to be action-adventure, and the last fourth could be described as political fiction, though not of a very plausible kind. There are also traces of sci-fi, with a submersible naval craft of unexplained lethal combat abilities, bullet-proof garments, and airplanes with silent "radium engines" and a design that doesn't seem to resemble real-life Edwardian aircraft. But none of these are developed in enough detail to really satisfy readers seeking that sort of thing. That the book is plot-driven rather than character-driven isn't a flaw as such; but the characters are largely one-dimensional and shallow. Rupert often comes across as a "Gary Stu" figure (that is, the male equivalent of a "Mary Sue," a character so super-humanly competent and multi-talented as to be unbelievable). Even by pre-modern standards, the insta-love factor is so unrealistic that it undermines the credibility of the romance. Stoker's pacing here is poor (the lead-up is much too long, there are a lot of draggy parts, and the storyline way overstays its welcome), and his prose is often overwrought or overly descriptive. (And that criticism is coming from a reader who likes Poe's and Lovecraft's prose!) Although he's writing in the Romantic tradition, the emotional impact of the situations described tends to be squandered. Hidden identity, a common trope in older fiction (especially in this school) appears here, but again it's not used as effectively as it could have been. Reproducing the dry and tedious formal content of legal and government documents often comes across as... well, dry and tedious. :-) The Turks here are treated as cartoon villains, while the Blue Mountaineers (who are supposed to be clannish, xenophobic and suspicious) take to Rupert with improbable ease. And don't even get me started on the unlikely character of the political and other developments near the end! (I will say that, for the record, the Eastern Orthodox church would never agree to let one of its communicants marry a non-Orthodox person.)

On the (scanty) plus side, this tale has its moments of interest or amusement in places. Ernest's character could be a writing textbook example of how to handle the self-revelation of a totally unlikable and worthless character, who has zero clue that he's unlikable and worthless (think, Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters). :-) Overall, it succeeds as well as it does because of the title character. Though she's not sharply-developed, and though like Britomartis in The Faerie Queen, she delivers an eye-rollingly anti-feminist statement in one place, her character and actions (also like Britomartis) tend to subvert male chauvinist stereotypes. She's gutsy, strong-willed, competent and capable of great self-sacrifice for others. And while I didn't shelve this as an action-heroine read (it's more like one that, as a Goodreads friend of mine would say, "may contain traces of action heroine" :-) ), she does effect a rescue that takes nerve and some athletic ability. (Interestingly, Stoker tells us that Blue Mountaineer women are trained to arms the same as the men are, and can acquit themselves just as well in combat!) So I did give this an "okay" two stars rather than actually disliking it. But I wouldn't encourage any reader to rush out and grab it as a must-read! (Despite the only 196-page length of this edition, I'd also warn readers that these are big pages, because it's a tall book --about a foot high-- and due to that factor and the often turgid prose, it's not really a very quick read.) ...more

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