Last year I wrote a review of a brilliant debut novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. This year, I have another debut novel that, while not quite as brilliant as the former, is still a remarkable book. The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, is a modern Dracula story, complete with all the elements one would expect of a post-Hammer era book. What makes the book remarkable is its fastidious detail for historical fact.
In fact, in some ways the novel is less a novel than it is an extensive history lecture on the late Medieval history of the Balkans and, particularly of Vlad Ţepeş. Nearly every non-vampiric detail given in the novel is historical fact, and the gruesome details of Dracula’s life are recounted throughout the book.
That said, it is, in fact, a novel—and quite a decent one at that. It traces the search for Dracula through three generations of characters, interweaving story lines from the 1930’s, 1950’s and 1970’s into a well-braided storytelling that moves from Amsterdam, the French Pyrenees, Istanbul, Romania, Bulgaria, and Oxford. It is best to give nothing away about the details of the plot, but a few things stand out.
Firstly, Ms Kostova, in an obvious homage to Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, uses letters to convey a good portion of the story. This epistolary style used to be quite common in novels, but has been rarely used for well over a century. It is particularly effective, however, in horror novels. Something about the extra layer of removal between the author and the reader lends tension. After all, this character had time to write the letter, so the question becomes, “How is he getting out of this one?”
Secondly, the aforementioned attention to historical fact is not merely interesting, but compelling. Some of the details about Dracula’s life I assumed were contrivances on the part of Ms Kostova (in particular a story about his first wife), but on looking him up in various resources I found that everything right up to the edge of the supernatural was exactingly accurate. This alone, for me, makes the novel worth reading.
Thirdly, and I think most importantly, is the way that the novel builds its story up carefully. Yes, the book is long, but it is long in order to instill a sense of foreboding and anticipation in the reader. While the storyline is in Bulgaria, for example, we are waiting, just as the characters, for something to happen. The tension of this part of the book, in particular, was very well managed.
All that said, there are some problems, chiefly among them is that the unnamed (sort of, we know she is named for her mother, so some form of Helen or Elena) heroine of the story is hardly a character at all, and the Oxford student (what was his name anyway?) seems to be slipped in for no particular reason. Perhaps he is intended to be a stand-in for the bumbling Jonathan Harker of Stoker’s book? But that doesn’t seem right as he’s not bumbling, just forgettable. The main characters (Helen/Elena and Paul) are the main focus of the story, and the most interesting, and yet the novel spends a lot of time away from them, and I don’t think all that time is well-served.
So, if you want a brilliant historical fiction with supernatural elements, go read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. If you feel like a pretty decent novel with a lot of history and featuring vampires, well you could do so much worse.
