Shadow Dancing - Joseph O'Connor

"Telling a story to someone. Reaching another person, someone you've never met. That hope... it shakes me. Someone sitting in the shadows, way in the back of the theater."

Here's the story of a guy who lived and breathed theater. Fresh out of Trinity College in Dublin where he rubbed shoulders with the infamous Oscar Wilde, he landed a desk job in the prison administration. To spice up his dull existence, he wrote theater reviews for a local paper while nursing dreams of becoming a real writer. He had two heroes, the biggest stage actors of the Victorian era: Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. Meeting Irving, who came to Dublin to perform Hamlet, flipped his world upside down. This man, Bram Stoker, became immortal as the author of the legendary Dracula. But Joseph O'Connor reveals a totally different slice of his life in this heavily fictionalized biography.

"Her: I chose to live in the real world. Him: Ah, the real world, that vile dungeon of cruelty and deprivation. You can keep it."

So in 1878, Irving hires Stoker as his secretary. That's how the young Irishman, after a rushed marriage to his fiancée Florence, lands in London only to discover the job isn't exactly what was advertised: he's expected to become the administrator of the Lyceum, the theater Irving just bought. And we plunge with young Stoker, soon nicknamed "Auntie" by everyone, into the massive machinery of a Victorian-era theater, with its army of employees from actors to set designers, not forgetting cleaning ladies and backstage crew; with its lavish sets and outrageous costumes; with its dark cellars and haunted attic. The author makes us sprint from the house to the stage, drags us from wings to dressing rooms, lets us watch rehearsals and even takes us to America when the company goes on tour. He spares us neither money troubles nor the nervous breakdowns of the Chief, the tyrannical, narcissistic, and impetuous Irving, who slips with talent and megalomania into every Shakespearean role.

"I don't normally drink. - Why not? - It makes me ordinary."

While Irving hogs center stage, Stoker hides in the attic to write. The first drowns in success, the second struggles to sell his books. Yet between these two men, the one in shadow and the one in light, seemingly opposed in every way, a friendship forms that's as solid as it is ambiguous, built on admiration, jealousy, tenderness, and resentment. The wonderful Ellen Terry brings some balance when she joins the troupe. And most importantly, around these characters and their intimate and public theater, there's London—Dickens's London, bathed in fog and covered in grime, the London where Jack the Ripper prowls, spreading terror when night falls and feeding every fantasy. Gradually, we discover Stoker's attraction to the night, to darkness and deserted streets, to the fantastic and those moments when the line between real and imaginary dissolves. And that's how a bewitching and terrifying character appears, baptized Dracula...

"And I stayed perched there, exhausted, happy, straddling the Lyceum theater so to speak, weather vanes spinning on the roofs around me, the river breeze coming in gusts to give me a sharp shove in the back, the austere and dignified beauty of towers, steeples, chimneys on the smoky horizon, and the mountainous turrets of black and russet clouds."

I loved this sprawling novel that lives up to its title and pays tribute to creation and imagination, which beautify our lives and give us access to other worlds. I loved the thrill of ambiguity, terror, and spectacle. I loved wandering through London, a city I'm crazy about and which seems so distant today. And what a beautiful tribute to this cursed writer, so endearing, whose work I regretted not knowing better, as it floats in the background and whets the reader's appetite; a humble and discreet writer, poorly matched to a woman too pragmatic for him, to whom he nevertheless owes his immortality, because in the end Bram Stoker beat his two comrades to the post of posterity, since writings remain when words fly away.