As we have already established on this blog, I have always been a voracious reader. When I was a kid and my family went on holiday, half the weight in the suitcases would be books - some people sunbathe at the beach, some people swim, I would use that downtime to smash through a book a day. In fact, often my favourite part of a holiday, or at the very least preparing for one, would be the trip to the bookshop to pick out all my holiday reads. Since I took up rock climbing though, my holidays look a lot different. After spending a whole day at the crag or up a cliff, I barely have the energy to read a handful of pages in bed before I'm dead to the world, so even for a week it's really not worth taking more than a single book. On my recent trip to Leonidio, Greece (absolutely amazing by the way), that single, solitary book was this, The Historian.
Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," and reveal a mass of secrets about her father's past and her mother's death, linked to one of history's ultimate evils. Decades earlier, her parents embarked on a mission to find her father's kidnapped PhD advisor, chasing his trail across Europe and continuing the dangerous research that resulted in his disappearance - the final resting place of Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler, the original Dracula. Is the myth of Dracula rooted in reality? Does the Impaler live on, his influence and his evil will stretching down through the centuries? What will happen to those researchers who discover the truth?
Now, I don't know if it was just the context that I read it in - a perpetual state of exhaustion - but this book dragged. I found it fascinating, but I was not hyped to pick it up. It's told in a russian doll style series of first person narratives - nestled inside each other from the actual narrator, throwback scenes, letters, letters inside letters, retellings of other people's stories, and postcards. This makes for quite a tedious read, especially when all of the voices are pretty indistinguishable from each other, and it was easy to lose track of which character was driving the narrative at any particular time. Although telling a story through things like letters etc. is an interesting take, it does kind of lose some of its plausibility when the letters are all incredibly detailed and convoluted. Can you imagine yourself ever writing a letter, years after the fact, in which you recall every single detail of the events, however inconsequential? I can't even remember what I had for dinner yesterday, nevermind 18 years ago. So little actually happens in the narrator's (the young girl) own timeline that honestly it could have been removed altogether without much damage to the story.
We spend the majority of the book jet-setting all over Europe, hunting down Dracula, Vlad Tepes, ruler of Wallachia, and lord of the undead. There are chapters upon chapters investigating his exact movements, which monks carted his decapitated body where, this monastery, that monastery, this fight against the Ottomans, that invasion of the Turks and so on. Weirdly, what no one is particularly interested in investigating, is how and why Dracula became undead in the first place. Was he the first vampire? How did he find out about it? There's an ultra brief mention of a French monastery with a mysterious abbot in the last like, 10 pages, but it answers no questions at all, and is incredibly disappointing. In fact the whole ending is pretty disappointing. Considering how slow moving the rest of the book is, the ending falls right into the "lets wrap everything up in the last 30 pages" trap, and doesn't at all deliver on the preceding 600 odd pages. [Highlight to see spoliers] When Dracula finally does show his face, he's not even that scary - he doesn't have plans for world domination, he doesn't seem to want to feast on us mere mortals and plague society, he's just a massive nerd who wants someone to catalogue his library for him. Sorry, why were we ever scared of him? All the poor guy wants is some decent, reliable research assistants. Sure, maybe he has to suck their blood a bit to gain control over them and make sure they're going to stick around, but decent staff are so difficult to find these days.
The upside of the slow moving pace is that we do get to enjoy the surroundings. This is clearly a meticulously researched book, and I have certainly learnt a lot about the Ottoman Empire and the Medieval Balkans. It may as well be a travel guide in some places - the multitude of destinations are described with care and clear love, as are the dishes. There are so many sumptuous meals in this book, don't read it when you're hungry or you'll get damp stains all over the pages from your mouth watering. The downside of is that the pace is often so slow moving because some of the research has actually been included in the book - if I wanted to read a journal paper (even a fictionalised one) I'd do it for work, not in a book I'm supposed to be reading for fun, thanks.
I was aware of this book before I picked it up - I vaguely remembered all the hype that surrounded it, but honestly, I don't think it lives up to that. I mildly enjoyed it, but in a very forgettable way. I actually struggled to write this review because there was so much of it I just couldn't remember - though again that could have been the state of perpetual exhaustion I read it in. If you're after a tense, gothic vampire story dark-academia vibes, you'll have more fun with the OG Bram Stoker. Dracula's Van Helsing might be a pompous windbag spouting overlong monologues, but he's still got better pacing that The Historian.
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