This is certainly a disparate set of books... They are united only by our recent trip to Whitby in the UK and Bellapais in North Cyprus.

1.
Bram Stoker, 1897, Dracula

Stoker was inspired by his visit to Whitby, and freely drew on local scenery and legends in constructing his story.

This novel could have done with a really stringent edit, as its verbosity is really annoying in places (Van Helsing, this means you...)

But it does do the creepy stuff rather well, and it is pretty exciting at the end as you wonder whether the good guys are going to succeed in staking the evil vampire through the heart before he can go to ground and leave poor Mina forever in his power.

The role of Victorian women and sexuality takes up a large part of the commentary on the book, it seems. As this example makes clear, the depictions range from the three overtly sexual vampire women who attempt to lure the imprisoned Jonathan, to the chaste and saintly Mina (who nevertheless displays qualities of the "new woman" through her acquisition of the skills of shorthand and typing, and in her intelligence, energy, and rationality).

In the middle is Lucy, who "shows characteristics of both the good Victorian woman and the impure, hyper-sexual Victorian woman. By essentially giving Lucy two personalities in the novel, Stoker is showing the ease, ability, and potential in which the ideal Victorian woman can be converted into the evil, unchaste, impure, sexual woman of Victorian society."









2.
Lawrence Durrell, 1957, Bitter lemons of Cyprus

"Like so much in Cyprus," says the New York Times, Durrell's stay "ended sadly and bitterly".

The character of the book changes along similar lines. It starts light-hearted and lyrical, fondly (if a teeny bit patronizingly) depicting the local characters of Bellapais, relating his house-building saga there, and describing the (terribly high-flying) guests who visit him. But very rapidly, Durrell and the island's population get caught up in the "troubles", the increasingly acrimonious and violent struggle over the island's future. Now, of course, Bellapais is in North Cyprus, and its inhabitants are Turkish Cypriots.

The book begins with a perceptive reflection on travel: "Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will -- whatever we think. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures -- and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection." Later, he writes about loneliness and time, "those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything".

I remember not liking the only Lawrence Durrell novel I ever read (Justine), so I was surprised by how beautifully he writes. The second paragraph goes like this:

"These thoughts belong to Venice at dawn, seen from the deck of the ship which is to carry me down through the islands to Cyprus; a Venice wobbling in a thousand fresh-water reflections, cool as a jelly... Cloud and water mixed into each other, dripping with colours, merging, overlapping liquefying, with steeples and balconies and roofs floating in space, like the fragments of some stained-glass window seen through a dozen veils of ricepaper. Fragments of history touched with the colours of wine, tar, ochre, blood, fire-opal and ripening grain. The whole at the same time being rinsed softly back at the edges into a dawn sky as softly as circumspectly blue as a pigeon's egg."

How exquisite...







3.
Christos Tsiolkas, 2010, The slap

This one is utterly different. I acquired it in the Oxfam shop in Newark because I'd run out of non-electronic reading material. I include it here because it reminded me I was wrong when I wrote of having, in Lefkosia, our first ever genuine Greek meal. Melbourne housed a substantial Greek community, and we several times tried their cuisine.

This is "a novel about the failings of middle-class life". But every representative of the middle class fails in a different way, it seems. For some, wealth is accompanied by consumerism, hedonism, sexism, and racism. For others, suburbia becomes home to alcoholism and the stupidest forms of liberalism, which show themselves in ridiculous indulgence towards their children. For still others, the clannish impulses of migrants provide solidarity, but at the expense of any generosity towards anyone on the "outside".

The narrative is developed from a single shocking incident, in which a unlovable and violent man slaps an unlovable and out-of-control child. We view the slap from the viewpoint of the many characters who witnessed it, themselves interpreting the action in terms of their own needs, fears, and loyalties.

But a few chapters in, I was thinking: "I don't like ANY of these people..." And the novel made Melbourne a much darker place than it is in my memory. I guess by the end, I'd grown to respect Aisha (honest and ultimately loyal), and Richie (struggling on so many levels, and by the end glimpsing a fragile hope). But the others? I was glad to get rid of them.

As this review puts it: "Tsiolkas's initial conceit is undeniably clever and the narrative has a compulsive quality. Yet it has serious flaws: the writing is utilitarian, the characterisations are thin and the endless sex and swearing become boring."

Absolutely...