The Historian

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. You'll probably be hearing a lot about this one over the next month of so. It was just published a few weeks ago and is being widely touted as this year's "DaVinci Code". For those of you who didn't read Brown's book last year, it was what I'd call a historical thriller. It concerns a modern day search for the descendant's of Jesus and Mary Magadelene. It winds through all kinds of interesting, if speculative, information about Jesus's supposed heirs and the secret societies that were set up to protect them. It was a great, fast-paced page-turner.

I suspect a lot of author's are going to try to repeat Brown's success. Kostova is one of them. She, commercially, tries to combine the historical thriller genre with a plunge in to the world of the 15th century warlord, Vlad Tepes or Vlad the Impaler. More commonly, this villain and the legend he inspired is known as Dracula. Yup, its a bloodsucking novel. I'm not particularly into the Dracula legends. I've never made it all the way through an Anne Rice novel or even Bram Stoker's book. I haven't seen all of the famous Bela Lugosi movie or even watched a full episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Maybe, if you're into this kind of thing, you'll enjoy this book more than I did.

However, I'm not even sure thats likely. This is Kostova's first novel and it definitely shows. The long (600 pages+) book would have benefitted from a strong editor who was willing to force trimming of at least 100 pages or so. First of all, the book is reasonably confusing - it blends together four different stories that, eventually all become one. However, the author jumps without warning from one to the other, forcing you to frequently stop and figure out what she's talking about.

Other stylistic issues are just as distracting. I guess since she's taking over a well known legend she didn't have much lattitude, but I got real tired of reading about the "undead". There is one character, a librarian, who follows the hero all over the world and, every time Kostova refers to him, its always the "evil librarian". She also seems to have a hard time sustaining the story and repeatedly resorts to having characters read the letters of others in to the record. In other words, the writing really isn't all that great.

Finally, she has a problem that seems to be common among first time writers, especially ones that write long involved novels with multiple story lines. After about 600 pages, Kostova seemed to realize that things were just going on to long. The primary plot line was wrapped up reasonably well, but now she had all these loose ends hanging there. If she ignored them, at least 3 of the 4 interacting storylines would have been useless. So she hurriedly starts throwing out resolutions. For example, there's one character who appeared briefly and tangentially earlier in the book. This character, for no apparent reason, shows up in the ultimate confrontation scene and dies saving the day. In the last 30 pages of frantic wrapups, Kostova gives us less than 2 paragraphs to explain why this guy showed up at all. Frustrating.

As is common with this kind of book written to be commercially popular, the epilogue seems to leave open the possibility of more to come. Kostova, apparently, wanted to make sure that if she did turn out to be the next Anne Rice, she could extend this story for more riches. Unfortunately, I'll pass on the next one.