Reader, Unbury Him With A Word

“‘ Reader, Unbury Him With A Word’”

11/01/2005

Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. 656 p.

You’ve spent a lot of time in the library lately. You know the intricate detail of its public walls better than you know your own. One evening, as you leave for the day, a librarian you’re familiar with runs after you to return the legal pad and book you left behind. The uncanny thing is that you could have sworn you put that tablet in your satchel before rising from the table, and the small worn book is not yours.

You browse the tome outside the front door of the library. It’s ancient, a lovely old piece bound in real leather with old but perfect paper inside, completely blank, except for one single heart-stopping illustration in the middle, at the median point that many books automatically fold open to so often it is practically a platonic point of content. It bears the woodcut of a dragon curled in on itself. It covers the entire page, and the bottom bears the only caption in the entire volume, DRACULYA.

Your scholarly hackles rising? Interest piqued? There is something you should be aware of: every scholar who finds one of these lovely old tomes is somewhat afraid, because all of them could not control their passion for books and so have lost the life of one close to them, all because they began to follow the trail of that dragon.

Still curious? Kostova will lay it all out for you in this story of one history grad student who found such a book—and how that legacy still even haunts his daughter, a brilliant scholar in her own right. Finding such a text and a pack of old letters, she asks her father to tell her the story of how he came by them, and what happened after. His tale, initially spoken and later supplemented by letters (bringing to mind Stoker’s epistle on the same malignant figure), carries the reader across western and eastern Europe.

It seems the distribution of these odd old books is not limited to England. They also turn up in Istanbul and Bulgaria. On the trail to finding the elusive Wallachian prince, the main characters weave in and out of exotic European locations, and through numerous libraries and archives, from the better known largesse of Oxford University to small one-room archives in Istanbul, and finally to those ancient repositories of books and knowledge, the oldest monasteries in Europe. And pursuit of the Son of the Dragon is not easy. Vampires do indeed people this tale, mainly in the form of librarians, for this incarnation of Dracula has a taste for rare books. Yet for every setback or vampiric attack in this quest, there are a corresponding number of helpful locals and clues to egg on the characters’ scholarly endeavors.

Kostova’s tale is enthralling and entertaining. She holds the reader’s interest in a grip as obsessive as that which holds her characters in thrall. I am inclined to think that her work is best appreciated by bibliophiles, scholars and librarians like myself. However, the bestseller status of this work proves me wrong. For the best-seller-oriented public, her work is just one more book in a syndrome for which the catalyst was Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003). Other works in a similar vein include best-sellers such as Brown’s Angels and Demons (2000), Ian Caldwell’s The Rule of Four (2004), the less famous In the Hand of Dante by Nick Tosches (2002) and The Geographer’s Library (2005), by Jon Fasman. However, Kostova’s work is the first in this line-up to cross into the horror genre on a technicality, by virtue of its vampire characters.

For vampire fans, it’s an anomaly, a work of vampire fiction not penned by Anne Rice that has achieved best-seller status. And so, like Kostova’s scholars, we vampire fans must investigate. We last saw vampires in mainstream thriller fiction in James Patterson’s Violets Are Blue (2001), or rather, what were supposed to be vampires. Patterson’s book is best left to his own fans. As a tale involving vampires, it fails miserably. The possibility of vampirism is a byline as far the plot is concerned, and so for vampire fans it lacks bite and cannot satisfy.

But if you are enamored of the undead, you'll appreciate that Kostova's novel joins the line-up of fictions that have further explored Bram Stoker's Dracula mythos, some of which have earned great respect among like-minded children of the night. The earliest reworking of Stoker’s tale was Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape, the first book in what would become a long-running series about the king of vampires. The anthology Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1992) includes stories investigating the denizen of the night by such auspicious names as Bentley Little, Richard Laymon and P.N. Elrod. C. Dean Anderson’s I Am Dracula (1993) takes up the tale while Dracula is still mortal. Elaine Bergstrom in Mina (1994, as Marie Kiraly) and Blood to Blood takes on Mina’s frame of reference after Dracula was slaughtered in Stoker’s novel (or was he?). Jeanne Kalogridis secured her fame in the realm of vampire fiction with her trilogy Diaries of the Family Dracul (Covenant With The Vampire, Children of The Vampire, Lord of The Vampires). Her saga begins almost a generation before Stoker’s work and weaves its tale through the period inhabited by Stoker’s own characters. Laen Estleman lets Dracula share center stage with London’s most famous mind, Sherlock Holmes, in Sherlock Holmes Vs. Dracula (2000). In Dracula as part of the Darker Passions series, Nancy Kilpatrick (as Amarantha Knight, 2001) tries to recapture the shocking sexuality of Stoker’s work by rewriting it as a story so explicitly sexual and erotic this reviewer is still surprised that the mall bookstore was willing to put it on its shelves. Authors in the anthology Dracula in London (2001), featuring new stories by Saberhagen, Elrod, Kilpatrick, Bergstrom, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, ponder the other activities of the prince of darkness during his stay in London during Stoker’s novel (no, he doesn’t run into Saint-Germaine; I haven’t had time to read it yet, but I checked for that–drat!). P.N. Elrod takes a stab at Van Helsing in Quincy Morris, Vampire (2001). Allen C. Kupfer speculates about the young metaphysician in The Journal of Professor Abraham Van Helsing (2004), and Tim Lucas explores Renfield in The Book of Renfield: The Gospel According to Dracula (2005). All of these works assume the reader has read and attained an understanding of Stoker’s novel. They often give us a very different perspective on Stoker’s character’s actions as we learn, in-depth, interpretations and intentions vastly different from what we have assumed—and as a result Dracula’s actions often appear justified.

Kostova takes a different tack from these works. She also assumes the reader has some familiarity with Stoker’s novel, but her work is appropriate even for those who merely have heard of the book and know a few basics which one could largely pick up from the odd late night movie. To compliment her own work, she has written the forward accompanying the September 2005 publication of Stoker’s Dracula, rightly assuming that readers who have not read Stoker but enjoyed her own book will be curious to delve further into this character. As a reader who imbibes in regular libations of vampire fiction, I found myself comparing her figure of Dracula with that of Stoker’s. Stoker’s Dracula was practically in the limelight when contrasted with the near-invisible presence of Kosova’s Vlad. Kosova weaves together the true history behind the prince of Walachia with Stoker’s Dracula in order to create a new and intriguing incarnation. The Vlad Dracula of history adds a sinister and frightening edge to her vampire. He gains an aura of omnipotence and villainy we have not seen since the brash and sexy Lestat and the orgasmically angelic and merciful Saint-Germain entered the genre. This creation is so different from our fare for the past few decades that it’s refreshing and may inspire the next epidemic of vampire fans, or simply capture those who like their vampires hairy and no-nonsense.

Kosova’s Dracula is a seasoned soldier who will brook no weakness. Indeed, he weeds it out systematically through his extended existence in order to fulfill his purpose. As much as I enjoyed reading Kostova’s work, it is this purpose that still puzzles me and keeps me, for now, undecided about Vlad. His games of cat and mouse with the world’s greatest humanities scholars makes me wonder: is he losing his edge and resorting to lesser adventures or is he devilishly clever, as he foresees a grand future for himself that our mortal minds can’t contemplate within our cramped lifespans? Perhaps Vlad is the Renaissance man of old Walachia, an accomplished ruler/soldier with a fine appreciation and understanding of the written word and the power and strength it can give him. It is Van Helsing’s advanced learning that vanquishes Stoker’s creation. Should we be surprised that Kosova’s Vlad seeks to overcome this with his predations on historians?

Kosova holds her own in the pantheon of afore-mentioned authors by giving her Dracula a weapon that may be more powerful than any fang, claw or mesmerizing stare, a power that few if any of us vampire fans had considered viable because we are so mortal and so weak. She gives him books: rare, enthralling, infamous books to feed his voracious mind and his lust for violence. And she appoints him millennia to sort out the world’s scholarly minds to find the best and strongest of them to care for his diabolical library. At the end of her book, Kosova shows us a vision of Vlad Draculya: He meticulously instructs the monks who will care for his mortal remains. He stands with his hands folded behind him, like one who has all the time in the world. Over the centuries, both Dracula and an unflagging, intelligent passion for books will be the scholar’s undoing.