Book reviews

It sounds like an intriguing premise: what if the historical Count Dracula (called Vlad TepeÅŸ, also known as Vlad the Impaler) really had been a vampire? What if Bram Stoker’s seminal novel, Dracula, inadvertently or deliberately somehow held the real truth, rather than using the historical figure of Vlad TepeÅŸ as the basis for the novel’s vampire?

First-time writer Elizabeth Kostova purportedly spent ten years in the writing of The Historian, and it’s clear she spent a great deal of that time reading about Wallachia, Istanbul, etc., probably doing a lot of reading of secondary texts dealing with the history and geography of those regions. There’s some careful and interesting writing in the novel which reads almost like a travelogue. Yet there are some inexplicable historical blunders which serious research would have made avoidable – such as the mistaken mention of Old Church Slavonic dialects in written manuscripts, the incorrect assignment of dates concerning Communist influence in Hungary, and so on.

These historical errors are only minor niggling points, of course, and they are not the major reason why this novel failed to move me. It’s a hefty work, which would be no problem if the plot and writing were worthy of the number of pages… but the plot is untenable, the characters all seem to speak with the same voice (being in a sense clones of each other, varying not at all in opinions, choice of words or mindset), and the denouement itself has all the impact of a pillow fight when one was expecting cannons.

The novel begins with the (unnamed) narrator, writing in the year 2008, looking back at events that began for her in 1972. As a teenage schoolgirl, she discovers a mysterious red book without any text (only the woodcut of a dragon in the centre of the book) and some old letters, and questions her father about these. While he takes her on a journey, he begins to tell her what they mean – but he does so with a great deal of meandering and wandering off the point. Clearly Kostova intends to draw out the story so as to make it more intriguing, but all that is achieved is a sense of bewildered irritation, because the story itself is not substantial enough to profit by this treatment, nor do the circumstances of the relating warrant it. The narrator’s father, Paul, supposedly tells his daughter of his doings in the 1950s in order to protect her from what menaced him at that time. If that is the case, why does he not just tell her? Why turn it into a Lonely Planet guidebook with far more padding than substance?

Kostova’s story is deliberately modelled upon the classic novel Dracula. But what worked in that novel – the use of epistolary and diary sections – does not work as effectively in The Historian, because in The Historian these devices are not used because the plot needs and demands them… They are used because Kostova decided to use them in imitation of Bram Stoker’s novel. And because the style is thus imposed upon her own novel, the reader cannot help regarding it as a pretentious and inapt literary device.

The novel fails to chill, and its atmosphere is never spine-tingling; on the other hand, the historical elements which Kostova ties together are quite interesting in and of themselves. It’s the plot of the novel that just does not work – there is far too much reliance upon coincidence. Every one whom the narrator meets is somehow related to the story (and everyone whom Paul met, including the girl Helen who is an important part of his story – and everyone whom Professor Rossi met…). Rossi (who discovered his own blank red book with the dragon woodcut in the 1930s) started investigating the book and what it might mean. He receives a fright, becomes convinced that Dracula is real and that he himself has been warned off researching the book, and forgets (after drinking a potion called Amnesia) much of what has occurred, including a romance with a peasant girl. Ah. Connection. Helen is Rossi’s illegitimate daughter by that same peasant girl.

Paul also found a blank copy of the book with the woodcut. He also decides it must be related to Dracula, tells Rossi about the book, discovers that Rossi too had found a copy, and is given letters written by Rossi which relate his journey years ago in relation to the book. (Why letters? Why would he not write it out in a complete telling rather than write it – again filled with unrelated digressions – in letter form? The idea of letters is here completely misused, for letters in novels are intended to be part of a dialogue, whereas here they are merely long expository monologues.) Rossi disappears… Paul suspects vampiric involvement… Paul and Helen meet up, and begin their own journey to discover what is behind all of this.

The meaning behind it all is, in my opinion, utterly insufficient. Spoiler Apparently Dracula, during his lifetime, desired to become immortal, and found some way of continuing his existence after death. However, he created many copies of this mysterious red book in order to tempt scholars into searching for him. When they did search for him, he sent various vampire servants to scare off the scholars – killing their pets or family, leaping upon the scholars and turning them into vampires, that sort of thing. But wait! He did want scholars – historians – to search for him. Why? Because Dracula is a bookworm, of course, and needs his enormous library catalogued. (One hesitates to ask, but why did Dracula not find a librarian rather than a scholar? A scholar is not a cataloguer…) The internal illogic of this is ludicrous.

If all of this boggles the imagination, the final face-off when Dracula is finally encountered doesn’t benefit from any sense of suspense, for Dracula has never been more tiresome, bland and easily conquered than in this novel. Spoiler In the end, he is defeated when Helen takes advantage of his distraction to shoot him with a silver bullet. That’s the end of Dracula.

This review no doubt reflects my annoyance at the hyperbole that gave this book a sense of literary importance it does not merit. The standard of writing is reasonably good, but not high enough to overcome the story’s deficiencies. Not recommended.