The fable of Dracula has been peddled through a variety of guises since the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897.While certain novels succumb to mass appeal by way of a gory thriller, Elizabeth Kostova‘s endeavour, The Historian, holds the myth central to the story, while weaving a skillful web of plots through letters and articles that enable the narrative to take place simultaneously in the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s, and by the end of the book, 2008.
For critics of Kostova’s work, this is a significant flaw as the reader is jerked from one account to the next, a process that can lead to a loss of the plot thread.
Contrastingly, it is this ability to fuse the melange of events that provides the strongest attraction of The Historian, as the swift jaunts can equally be perceived as shrewd cliff-hangers, which render the somewhat lengthy – 704 pages – tome addictive in the extreme.
Conducted in the first-person narrative, the novel opens in the home of the sixteen-year-old protagonist, whose name is artfully elusive through the novel, although some readers venture it is Familia, after her grandmother.
Residing in Amsterdam with her diplomat father, Paul, her boredom leads her to her father’s inner sanctum of the house, the library.
There, she discovers a peculiar, ancient book that is blank, save for the centre pages that hold a woodcut print of a curling dragon.
Beguiled, she sets out to discover the significance of the book and her father begins to recount the tragic tale both in person, and through letters left as a legacy.
Along the way, father and daughter attend a variety of diplomatic missions around Eastern Europe, France, and Italy, enabling Kostova to flex her admirable skills as a travel writer.
It is her eye for the subtle details of the towns and villages visited, and her ability to avoid languishing on the milieu that allows the reader to gain a sense of the environment, to smell the scents of the town and observe the microcosms around the characters, which gilds the gripping novel.
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