There has been a lot of reviews and commentary about for this book, much of it complimentary. So I looked forward to reading ‘The Historian’ hoping it would be a well written, involving literary adventure. Considering the author was paid around US$2 million for it, you would hope so.

Well, what a disappointment!

I don’t know where to start with what is wrong with this book – do I mention that the writing is ‘clunky’? Do I go into how the book is based on letters supposedly written in a hurry that end up reading a melodramatic word-by-word recreations of events twenty years past? Do I mention how in the second half the book got so bogged down in boring extraneous information I ended up skipping and skimming through much of it like a pebble across a lake?

I think there are probably three main problems with this book. The first is the author has forgotten the main rule, equally applicable to films and books, when writing about ‘fantastic’ subjects – if you expect the reader to believe the unbelievable (in this case that vampires do exist) everything else about your story should be believable. And here we come to ‘the letters’ – most of this novel is presented as letters written by a father to his daughter. Nothing wrong with that. However, these letters are meant to be written in a hurry as the father is concerned he will not have the time to tell his daughter all he wants her to know. Yet, what is meant to be a letter is full of flourishes such as “She inhaled without flourish, smoking dexterously…The Friday plane to Budapest from Istanbul was far from full, and when we had settled in among the black-suited Turkish businessmen, the gray-jacketed Magyar bureaucrats talking in clumps, the old women in blue coats and head shawls – were they going to cleaning jobs in Budapest, or had their daughters married Hungarian diplomats? – I had only a short flight in which to regret the train tip we might have taken...” etc. etc. etc. After a few pages of this, the reader is left wondering why the author bothered with the letter conceit and just didn’t tell it as a narrative. There was no way I could believe these were letters rather than a novel.

The second problem is the density of this book – while I can understand an author unwilling to leave out any of the information gathered over ten years of research, where is the editor in all this? By the last quarter of the book it gets so tied down in blather about details that are not all that interesting you wonder why you are bothering at all.

Lastly, there is the plain and simple fact this is not a well written book. As I stated above, much of the writing is clunky. Many of the descriptions of the locations are workman-like rather than evocative – I have been to places mentioned in this book, including Istanbul, and rather than recreate the city I loved I thought it was really boring. And the plot itself relies on too many clichés – unbelievable co-incidences, extraordinary good luck, even amnesia for one of the main characters for goodness sake. By the time you eventually get to the ending and the reason for the dastardly Dracula’s actions are revealed, you are too bored to even laugh at the ridiculous reason.

After all this, a review in a nutshell – the writing is clunky; the plot is meandering and ridiculous. The book is too long, and could have been much better with half the words. In short, don’t bother – life is too short to slog through this book! Get your hands on some Anne Rice or even Bram Stoker if you want to read a good book involving vampires.

RELEASE NOTES:

Added to 'Published since 2000' bookbag

Taken from the bookbag.....tho after reading megami's review i'm wondering if it's worth it. i will try a bit and see

I liked it more than megami, tho I do agree an editor should have been employed. Some the letters did get a bit long and meandering and in the end Dracula didn''t seem all that threatening to me.

RELEASE NOTES:

Selected off the Virtual Book Box.

Thank you!