"The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova

This is a weighty tome of 700 pages. The narrator is an elderly woman, recalling events when she was a teenage girl. She discovers a strange book and her father, a diplomat, takes her to different cities and slowly tells her the story of how he found his mysterious book and how his dissertation supervisor had discovered his mysterious book. It's all to do with Dracula still being undead.

This is a silly novel with a B-movie plot and sometimes B-movie prose: "Helen held the cross right over his nose, and he began to sob again. 'My master', he whimpered." (C 21). It involves ancient orders of Turks fighting against Dracula since the 1450s, handing on their knowledge to their eldest sons. Dracula's own 'Order of the Dragon' seeks to recruit mostly historians and librarians by biting them. The whole thing is laughable.

It is made worse by the pace. At some stage Kostova must have encountered William Empson's advice in Seven Types of Ambiguity: “A dramatic situation is always heightened by breaking off the dialogue to look out of the window, especially if some kind of Pathetic Fallacy is to be observed outside." (p 19) A brilliant example of this is deployed by Harlan Coben in Gone for Good when a revelation is just about to be made in a diner and the waitress comes and takes the order, slowly. But these tension-heighteners are meant to last a few paragraphs at most. Kostova spins out her thin story by ensuring that every nugget of information is surrounded by irrelevance. Her characters travel across Europe and everywhere they go they eat and drink and take in the historical sights. Perhaps these activities add verisimilitude (much needed in a horror story, especially one as unconvincing as this) but the net result was that the book became a travelogue, more about sight seeing and restaurant reviews than Dracula.

The narrative therefore creeps (and not in a creepy way). This could have been written in half the words or fewer (though the paucity of the story-telling might then have been exposed.

Is it just me? Other reviewers loved it. The Sunday Telegraph is quoted as saying "Told with a compelling intensity" which was the direct opposite of my experience. The Observer states that "Kostova is a whiz at storytelling and narrative pace"; not for me. In Aspects of the Novel, EM Forster states that “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” (p 165). I felt that I wasted my time.

There are great moments:

• "skilled with a feather duster and clumsy with teenagers" (C 1)
• "My father's library had probably once been a sitting room, but he sat down only to read, and he considered a large library more important than a large living room." (C 1)
• "My father hated planes, which he said took the travel out of traveling." (C 1)
• "His English was ferocious and sure, strong, loud." (C 5)
• "His feet in their pathetically worn socks twitched and were still." (C 53)

I feel guilty about putting this book into a charity shop. It needs to be buried with a stake through its heart. June 2020; 700 long pages.

Another, somewhat better, book from the New York Times Bestsellers list is Friction by Sandra Brown