What Book to Read?

The Historian was published in 2005, with a good deal of hype. Its publisher had paid an unusually high advance for a first novel, probably in the hope that its mixture of thrills and history would replicate the success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.  It’s a much better book than Brown’s, but I don’t think it deserved all the excitement, any more than The Da Vinci Code did.

In a note to the reader at the beginning of the story, the unnamed narrator, an historian, explains that she is writing about ‘the most troubling episodes of her life’, when she searched out her father’s past. She presents this search as documented history, based on interviews, letters and papers to which she has access to supplement personal recollection. She admits that she has also had recourse to ‘the imagination’, but only when ‘informed speculation can set these documents into their proper context’. But the epigraph to part one of the novel gives the show away (if you weren’t already suspicious). It is a quote from Bram Stoker, claiming that his story, too, is ‘history’ based on contemporary sources. And what are both these stories about? Vampires. In particular, Dracula.

Kostova suggests that Vlad III, ruler of Wallachia (now part of Romania) for three periods during the 1440s to 1470s, was the source of the Dracula legend. Vlad, often known as ‘the Impaler’ because of his cruel practice of impaling his enemies on stakes, was actually named Vlad Dracula – that is, son of Vlad Dracul. Dracul means dragon and his father was so called because he was a member of the Order of the Dragon, formed to protect Christianity in Europe from the advances of the Ottoman Empire. There have been myths about vampires in folklore since time immemorial, but it seems that Bram Stoker was the first to link the name Dracula to vampires. There is however no suggestion in Dracula (1897) that the evil count is in fact an un-dead Vlad III. This premise has been left for Kostova to explore.  

It is an interesting idea, if you can suspend disbelief long enough to accept that there may be vampires in our midst. And this certainly isn’t Twilight territory. There are some thoughtful reflections on the nature of history and the role of the historian. One character sees the topic of vampires as a ‘subtext of the ordinary narrative of history’ – a manifestation of the unconscious which history so often ignores. ‘It is a fact’, he says, ‘that we historians are interested in what is partly a reflection of ourselves, perhaps a part of ourselves we would rather not examine except through the medium of scholarship.’ It is open to interpretation who the historian of the title actually is. Indeed himself Dracula says: ‘I became an historian in order to preserve my own history forever.’ The temptation he offers to historians is that ‘history will be reality to you.’ What can be learnt about the past, and what remains hidden, is a major theme of the novel.

Kostova writes well; her descriptions of the various locations visited are terrific. My problem with the book is its structure. The original female narrator introduces first person accounts told to her by her father, and letters he has written to her. There are also first person letters written by another character. There is quite a bit of jumping around between these which can get very confusing, the more so because none of the first person narrators has a particularly distinctive voice. The father’s Peace and Democracy Foundation – perhaps a modern version of older orders mentioned in the story – and his diplomatic travels in Eastern Europe in the 1950s don’t strike me as particularly authentic, given the iciness of the Cold War at the time. The story is a bit silly too, but what can you expect from vampires?

For all that, I find much of the history the book covers fascinating. The Europe I studied when young didn’t include the Balkans at all; I missed out entirely on the interplay between Ottoman and Byzantine civilisations, and the effect of the Ottomans on Eastern Europe. Any novel that helps make up for this is most welcome.

You can read more about Elizabeth Kostova here, about Vlad III here, and about Dracula here.