Thursday, January 22, 2015

Anno Dracula 1918: The Bloody Red Baron by Kim Newman



            So, after reading the original Anno Dracula, I have decided to continue on to the sequel: The Bloody Red Baron.
            These books will doubtless only appeal to certain readers, but I quite like them because it allows me to combine my interest in early modern history with my interest in pulp fiction.

            Set in the same universe as Anno Dracula (the universe in which Dracula defeated Van Helsing instead of vice-versa), this book takes place 30 years after Anno Dracula, during World War I.  Dracula is on the side of the Germans now, and there are vampires fighting on both sides of the war.

            Most of the same comments that I made about the first Anno Dracula also hold true here as well.  The fun of the book is a universe in which real historical characters are intermixed liberally with characters from many other stories.  So this novel features characters like Winston Churchill, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, General Jack Pershing, Mata Hari and Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron) interacting with H.G. Wells’s  Dr. Moreau, Jules Verne’s Robur the Conqueror, Paul Baumer from All Quiet on the Western Front, Mycroft Holmes and his more famous brother Sherlock Holmes.
[There are also brief references to The Greyfriars (which I’m familiar with because of George Orwell’s critiques of The Greyfriars stories ) and to Harry Flashman, who is mentioned as a public school graduate of disrepute.]

Although at first glance it may seem quite bizarre to re-tell the story of World War I with vampires, it does actually fit once you start reading it.  Since World War I was already one of the most horrific wars (from the soldier’s point of view), the subject matter is already quite macabre to begin with.  And into the slaughter fields, where Europe killed off an entire generation of its youth, why not add in vampires to increase the horror of it?  (Although actually, although my local bookstore had this book shelved in their horror section, it’s actually much more fantasy/adventure than horror.)

The writing style is, once again, highly readable.  So if you’re interested in this kind of book, it’s recommended.

Other Notes
* As luck would have it, a co-worker of mine is reading a history of World War I right now, so we chatted about the subject.  “I just finished a book on World War I myself,” I told him.  “Well, World War I with vampires mixed in.  The premise is that it takes place in a world where Dracula was never defeated, and Dracula goes over to fight with the Germans.”
            “That’s just the sort of thing Dracula would do,” my friend immediately said.

Annotations
            The 2012 re-print edition (the edition I read) contains annotations at the back, where author Kim Newman explains the origin of a selective some of his characters and references.
            Personally, I would have preferred a more complete set of notes.  But as Kim Newman writes: “I’m not going to tag every borrowed, misappropriated or historical character, setting or bit of business. … I want some mysteries to remain.” (p. 551).  I find this frustrating, but I suppose this is his prerogative as the author.
            Similarly, Kim Newman writes, “Obviously, this is a fantasy novel—but much of the most unbelievable material in it is true; I have refrained from too many ‘yes this really happened’ and ‘my god, they actually said that’ notes.” (p. 551)  What a shame!  I really love those “yes this really happened” and “my god they actually said that” notes.  And I’m a bit puzzled by Kim Newman’s reluctance to include them here. 

            I am, however, sympathetic to the fact that Kim Newman is writing these annotations at a distance of almost 20 years from his original book.  This book was originally published in 1995, and as Kim Newman admits: “It has been a sobering experience to re-read the book and realise how much of my research I’ve completely forgotten.  In some cases, others will have more luck tracking down what or who I meant than I have. (I can completely identify.  I have the same experience re-reading my old under-graduate papers, which are also at about a distance of 20 years remove now.)

            The Bloody Red Baron is even more packed with borrowed names and characters than its predecessor.  Just about every page has some new name on it.  And just about every name in the book is a reference to real history or some other fictional work.
            But fortunately this is where Wikipedia really comes into its own, because the Wikipedia page for this book (W) contains a (complete?) list of the borrowed characters, historical and fictional, that populate The Bloody Baron.  And so it was from Wikipedia that I learned that the English fighter pilot Albert Ball (W) was actually a real person, and that the character “Red” Albright came from the Captain Midnight (W) radio show, or that the character Kent Allard came from The Shadow series (W).

            But that being said, there are still plenty of interesting notes in Kim Newman’s annotations.  For example, it was in Kim Newman’s annotations that I learned about Biggles (W), a character in The Bloody Red Baron that comes from a series of novels by W.E. Johns.  Kim Newman claims that at one time Biggles was hugely popular in British culture, and furthermore suggests, “It is possible that their [the Biggles novels] pre-eminent position in British culture was shot down by devastating parodies of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. (‘I don’t understand your banter’), which Michael Palin at least must have come to regret.” (p. 559)
            So then, of course, I had to look up on Youtube the Monty Python parodies of Biggles.  For example, “Biggles Dictates a Letter”


And the “I can’t understand your banter” skit (which doesn’t explicitly mention Biggles by name, but Kim Newman seems sure is indirectly parodying the Biggles books.)


And the Spanish Inquisition sketch, featuring “Cardinal Biggles”.


            (I have actually seen all of these sketches before, but enjoy them much more now that I know what they’re parodying.)

            And that is the whole joy of a book like this.  It’s constantly opening up new areas of interest for the reader.

Link of the Day 

5 comments:

dpreimer said...

I read a couple of Biggles books when I was 11 or so (the library had 'em. Also heaps of Enid Blyton adventures. The benefit of living in a former colony). They would have been WWII era, or slightly post. A year or two later I read one of the Python's (Graham Chapman, I'm thinking) Biggles parodies, in which the roles of Ginger and Algy are rather, um, expanded. All those Airplane "cockpit" jokes seemed rather tame, after that.

Joel Swagman said...

Ah, right, so these books are out there somewhere in North America then. I've never heard of them, but then there's tons of stuff I've never heard of. (I wonder if the Canadian--Commonwealth connection does make a difference? It could well be that I just never bothered to make it to that section of my library, but there probably is something to the former colony connection theory.)

The thought occurs to me that you might get more out of these Anno Dracula books than I do, being more widely read, you'd probably pick up on more of these allusions than I do.
Not that I can, in good conscience, recommend these books too highly. They're essentially just pleasurable junk food.

Interesting to think that a series of books was at one time popular enough to be parodied by Monty Python. That must have been in a more literate age.

dpreimer said...

I suspect the Commonwealth connection is pretty huge. We took most of our cultural cues from the Brits. My mother surprised me when she showed me a childhood scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings of Queen Elizabeth II. I'd thought our tribe was pointedly removed from the concerns of Empire, but the nationally mandated curriculum for schools certainly made that difficult to dodge (in fact, there was a significant chapter of Mennonites who left Canada for Mexico and South America when the national curriculum was introduced). And of course Canada entered the Great War and later WWII earlier than the US because they were defending King and country.

Anyway, in the '70s the children's section in the library was dominated by British material. One of the deeper pleasures that came with following my father in his academic pursuits was spending time in US libraries, which seemed the very flower of diversity by comparison.

dpreimer said...

I might take a peek at the Newman books, BTW. Hard to say. With my half-century mark nearly upon me, I'm increasingly fussy about what I will or won't pick up.

Joel Swagman said...

>>>I'm increasingly fussy about what I will or won't pick up.

Fair enough. As I say, it's essentially just junk food reading--I can't recommend it too highly.