The Historian

Elizabeth Kostova

There have been a spate of articles recently bemoaning the publishing industry's lack of a Great American Novel this year. I don't know what the writers are thinking, as The Historian pretty much fits the definition. This is a novel that won awards before it was even completed. Kostova's advance was a sum staggering even in this day and age. It firmly qualifies for doorstop status, weighing in at a hefty 656 pages, and Kostova's author photo is definitely of the "let's play up the author's sexiness" angle that's becoming more common these days. Really, what more could they ask for?

But when all's said and done, what's going to be remembered in the next decade, perhaps the next century, is none of these things; people will wonder about the content of the book. Is it a good read? I'll answer that with something of a qualified yes.

It seems somewhat ironic to me that The Da Vinci Code turned years of good marketing practice on its head. Usually, something gets big (e.g., goth/industrial in the wake of Nine Inch Nails' smash success), all the majors jump on it, and what we end up with is a morass of material that shares surface characteristics, but isn't nearly as accomplished. (E.g., everything Nine Inch Nails released after 1996, plus a slew of Trent wannabes with no more writing skills than, say, Jessica Simpson.) Then Dan Brown got big, the majors did their thing, and what did we end up with? A whole lot of books that, for the most part, are far better than The DaVinci Code could ever possibly be. The Historian qualifies, for the most part, but there are a few structural flaws you should probably be aware of.

The story itself is quite nicely done; in three time periods, interlinked by the main characters, Kostova traces three generations of historians searching for the truth behind the Dracula myth. Ah, I hear fans of seventies fiction saying, a generational saga! And you're right. Unfortunately, you're not completely right; this is Kane and Abel with added supernatural suspense. Which, of course, can be done well, which is why Barbara Michaels has legions of fans around the globe. And for the most part, it's done well here; Kostova's writing style is engaging enough that, if you don't look closely, you may not see the structural defects at all. Inveterate readers of suspense thrillers, though, will start noticing disturbing patterns about halfway through the book, and by the last hundred pages, you know exactly what you're going to get-- the elves open the door, discover the huge piles of treasure, and we cut away to a deodorant commercial. It's the oldest suspense-building trick in the book, and it stopped working well about the time deodorant commercials were invented. (And if you think you see a stock B-movie ending coming, congratulations, you just caught the gold ring.)

Still, despite all that, Kostova writes with a solid sense of pace, and her writing is quite simply fun to read; she's obviously far more erudite than Dan Brown (though perhaps a step below someone like Palliser or Pears), and the writing is simply better than one would expect from what is, stripped to its bones, yet another vampire novel. It's a clever, and bold, attempt to do what very few authors have done: take a simple horror story and elevate it to the realm of literature. With a few changes, it would have succeeded marvelously. But Kostova gets an A for effort.