Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Title: Pale Fire

Author: Vladimir Nabokov

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Originally published in 1962

Pages: Either 27, 97, or 334

Genres: Poetry, poetic commentary, criticism, 

Format: Paperback

The famous American poet John Shade was murdered in 1959. This book contains his last poem, Pale Fire, together with a foreword, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade’s editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the ‘Great Beaver’, Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he - can he possibly be - mad, bad, even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal, he reveals perhaps more than he should about ‘the glorious friendship that brightened the last months of John Shade’s life’. 

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain 

By the false azure in the windowpane; 

I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I  

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

This is a book that appears different from every single angle. The poem, by the character John Shade, is beautiful, moving and intensely sad. It is the grief in verse of a father who lost his daughter to suicide, and can be appreciated as a stand-alone piece. If one reads the commentary and notes by the character Kinbote we begin to see Nabokov’s criticism of literary critics emerge. Kinbote hijacks the poem entirely, making it a history of his so-called home country Zembla. There’s a dark humour here, a bitter reflection held up to those who read literature with a pre-set agenda, to those who re-write the book according to their own bull-headed interpretation. 

The title of the book, Pale Fire, is taken from Timon of Athens (Act 4) 

… the moon’s an arrant thief, and her pale fire she snatches from the sun. 

With this in mind it’s almost necessary to view Kinbote as the thief, taking Shade’s poem and redirecting the light for his own purposes.  

Pale Fire is, in my opinion, a literary middle finger held up to the criticism levelled at the artist. It is entertaining, it is grotesque, it is marvellous. The two characters live beyond their written words, coming to life in the mind of the reader as two men. Shade: the artist, the grieving father, patiently humouring his nutty neighbour. Kinbote: the eccentric professor, obsessively seeking validation for his powerful delusions. 

This is a book that you can dip in and out of. If you enjoy literary puzzles, and often approach a book like Sherlock Holmes would approach a murder investigation, then this is totally your bag. If you’re looking for a poem rich in imagery and pathos, then this is also your bag. If you are up for reading a book that you can laugh along with in the face of human absurdity, then again, this is for you. 

Personally I enjoyed reading about Pale Fire as much as I enjoyed reading the book itself. This is not what I would call a holiday-pool-side-read.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Title: Dracula

Author: Bram Stoker

Publisher: Penguin Popular Classics 1994

First Published 1897

Pages: 449

Genres: Gothic Horror, Vampire Literature, Horror Fiction, Invasion Literature, 

Format: Paperback

Dracula is a unique horror masterpiece and the most famous of all vampire tales. 

Few readers will ever forget the nightmare atmosphere of Count Dracula’s sinister castle in Transylvania, the prowling of the Un-dead, the blood-curdling tension as Bram Stoker’s tale races towards a thrilling climax. 

Dracula recounts the struggle of a group of men and a woman - Dr. Seward, Dr Van Helsing, and Jonathan Harker and his wife Mina - to destroy the vampire, whose sinister earth-filled coffins are discovered by Harker in a ruined chapel adjoining Dr Seward’s asylum. Cruel and noble, evilly and fatally desirable to women, Dracula possesses a terrifying lust for power and, like Dr Jekyll or Conan Doyle’s Moriarty, is one of the immortal fictional monsters. 

This book is a romp. I’m not usually one for the hysterical gothic novels, they’re a bit too full-on for my cynical sensibilities, but Stoker managed to contain this epic in a way that others (Matthew Lewis The Monk) failed to. I bought it in a charity shop for £1, it’s a battered old paperback with 449 yellowed pages, which made it feel a bit daunting even to me. I could, however, barely put it down. It opens with this intriguing, and traditional for the era/genre, statement:

How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made clear in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of latter-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past events wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them. 

The narrative then proceeds as a series of letters and diary entries by the novel’s protagonists, supplemented with the occasional newspaper clipping. Through this format the characters remain distinct and appealing, and, considering the era in which it was written, somewhat believable. I mention the era because one can’t read this book without recognising the historic themes at play. Blood transfusions are carried out without any attention to blood groups, sexist views and brainless chivalry are rife. The only recognisably erudite Vampire is Dracula himself, who appears in the first accounts as a lonely aristocrat. The other Vampires that we see are female and they’re much more recognisable as lacking humanity:

She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there… the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity.

Which goes along with the Victorian idea that good women lacked any sexuality and were pure and virginal. Obviously this affliction doesn’t affect the Count to such a degree, so he can blend in with greater success. 

Despite these historical factors I enjoyed the tension of the plot, the constant stalling before the conclusion, and the final, inevitable, outcome. I read it mostly out of curiosity, a book like Dracula needs very little in the way of introduction as it has been immortalised by canon and the character adapted into so many new forms that we never go more than a few years without a new version of the original Vampire coming to our attention. The media having recently been through something of a Vampire Renaissance, I couldn’t help but wonder how our fascination had begun. 

How had we got from blood sucking aristocrats to sparkly floppy-haired teen American heartthrobs? It’s quite a leap after all. 

I was surprised by the lack of sexual themes, the book is not a romance, it is horror. I think that considering the recent successes of Twilight and True Blood it’s easy to assume that a Vamire themed book will involve scenes of a sexual nature, but Stoker’s work steered well clear.

If you, like me, are interested in the path of literature from The Count to Edward Cullen, then it’s definitely worth a read. If you can laugh at the ernest silliness of the plot then you’re in for an exciting ride, accepting that the conclusion is from the offset a forestalled inevitability. If you’re looking for literature that will challenge your brain and your perception of the world, then look elsewhere.