Sounds kind of dirty, but I admit a guilty pleasure is well worth it this time of year. My most recent find was a debut novel from Elizabeth Kostova which contains elements from many of my favorite genres - thriller, suspense, mystery, historical fiction, and vampire lore. It is no surprise that this intelligent story was a very entertaining read. Though I feel that the story concept and development deserve five stars, I feel that there are a few important flaws in this book which put it into the four star category.
First the good: I really enjoyed the historical facts surrounding the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Europe that Kostova weaved into her tale. I also loved the way she used letters to reveal the more thrilling aspects of the story bit by bit. This kept me in that "I'll just read ten more pages" mode on many a late night.
Now for the problems: The first 300 pages of this book were very compelling and hard to put down. Somewhere between page 300 and 450it began to feel like Kostova had an old graduate school dissertaion on the migration patterns of monks in the 15th century lying around so she decided to work it into the story. Wow did that slow the pace... I don't have a problem with the storyline taking the characters on a search for the history of these monks, its just that Kostova occasionally strayed across the line between entertaining fiction and dry academic research...until after about 600 pages of this nonsense, we finally pry apart the gravestones (duly pausing to note how the dust of the centuries has settled just so on the fading inscriptions of the musty crypt) and learn the terrible truth of Dracula's horrible plans to create undead denizens who will Duh-Duh-DUUUUHHNNN!--CATALOG HIS LIBRARY! (As Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up.) As it turns out, the Prince of the Undead is a bit of a bookworm. Who knew?
Whenever she has written her characters into a corner the author adds another mysterious book into the pile, not once, not twice, but several times. Everyone in this novel is a bookworm, for the same reason that everyone acts, thinks, and talks the same: because everyone in this novel is essentially one character, the author herself. Romanian peasant, Turkish professor, expat teenager--read a line of dialogue at random, and you'd never be able to guess who is who. When you pick up the book, it is often a bit confusing to figure out where you are, not because there are so many narrators, but because there are so few voices. One imagines the author perhaps putting on now a pair of Groucho glasses, now a fez, now tying a kerchief around her hair, as she evokes one character or another, but the writing never changes. Neither do the characters themselves--the protagonists are all secular, rational people, who, when they find themselves in a vampire story, simply shrug and reach for a crucifix and a silver bullet. What they are experiencing in picking up that crucifix--and what it might mean to their beliefs of the world and how it works...are subjects that are never touched upon. Heaven knows, an author with a certain curiosity about character and psychology, to say nothing about metaphysics, might have spun a wonderful novel out of this material, we do get a three page diatribe about the nature of evil. But psychology and character didn't seem to be as important as the lists of cities to visit that define the plodding bulk of this book.
Even Dracula's little hobby of distributing those dragon books to young historians to rouse their curiosity, then trying to kill them if they actually start to do research on them, might have become a window into a vain and endlessly bored mind, giving himself a little thrill to while away the centuries. Here, it's just another illogical plot contrivance, vanishing into the swarming multitudes of its fellows.
Perhaps the biggest gaffe is the ease with which Drakulya is disposed, we set up a super villain, and a ray of light kills him, (seriously WTF), surely in thousands of years he would have been able to dodge a silver bullet or two. And um I hate to say it but the silver bullet was for werewolves.
All of that said, my opinion as an avid reader of such stories is that this is an excellent book, well worth reading. I am sure that it will have wide appeal.
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