Like a fiery envelope

Given that I (reputedly) have about four books on the go at once, I really ought to love exercises of turning books into blogs. There’s a new one out of Stoker’s Dracula. The gimmick is simple: post novels in diary form as diaries, with the posts synchronised to appear on the date they’re supposed to in the novel. You can try your own too.

It’s a charming game, and I applaud it for pushing some classic works (such as Pepys’ Diary out in a fresh format. However, the novel-as-diary format just doesn’t work well for me. It may be that Pepys’ Diary, which is appearing with helpful annotations, is better suited to daily installments. A novel surely is not; Alexander McCall Smith’s recent attempt at a daily novel for The Scotsman is typically elegant, but rather unsatisfactory in novel form, and I suspect was unsatisfactory for parallel reasons in its original newspaper version.

Dracula is surely not meant to be read in daily paragraphs. The momentum of the story will not take it. The intensity of the thing, let alone the reader’s retention of storylines, will be stretched beyond reason.

Perhaps I am being unfair. I can only comprehend reading the thing in batches in the monthly archive: I haven’t reset my world to accommodate reading daily dispatches from these sites, although perhaps I should give it a sincere effort.

Surely, though, Dracula, with its mix of journal items and letters from different hands, would be better served by being emailed: subscribe to the email-novel and you will receive a chronologically arranged stream of emails from the various narrators over the course of the novel. I’d far prefer to spot a little envelope in the corner of my screen alerting me to an urgent missive from Mr Harker. If you’re going to do it, do it properly.

I say that, and I know that Andy in particular will now be thinking of the logical extension. Reset the novel as a series of letters, postcards, phone calls, emails, parcels containing journals, anything and everything necessary.

Imagine a copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses that arrived as a keepsake box full of letters.

It would be the devilish offspring of Dennis Wheatley, Nabokov, Nick Bantock and BS Johnson. It would be tremendously expensive, tremulously arcane and terribly good fun.

Only one question remains: which novel to do first?