For my latest overlong review, here's one about the best selling book in the country. I liked it overall, while thinking most of the parts could have been improved. There are no spoilers in this review, at least no more than you'll see in any short review.
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. This hugely-hyped debut novel received a ton of attention and numerous fawning advance reviews, got press for the author's record $2m book advance, and even knocked
The DaVinci Code off of the bestseller list, while being relentlessly compared to it. Are those comparisons accurate? Is it a good enough vampire story to wade through 650 pages of very formal prose? No and
yes sort of.
First, the scores:
The Historian
Plot: 5
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/6
Characters: 5
Horror: 4
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 3
Page Turner: 4
Re-readability: 4
Overall: 6.5
I actually like the whole more than the parts. There were lots of good things in the novel, and I liked the idea of the plot and the way it was told. In the end though, the novel doesn't quite work. It's not quite an exciting mystery, it's not quite an interesting character study, and it's not quite clever enough to work just as a stylistic exercise in storytelling. I didn't dislike it, but I only had a couple of "Wow, that was a great plot twist/revelation." moments while reading it, and I never felt nervous about the danger the characters were in, or joyful for their successes, or sorrow for their losses.
Kostova's writing skill is in arranging flashbacks and other plot elements, working in historical details, and describing physical details. All good traits. Unfortunately, when it comes to writing an exciting scene, or crafting fascinating characters, or fashioning believable dialogue, she's not in her strong suit.
Checking out
the scores on Amazon.com, I see that it's got a 3.5/5 average out of 400 reviews, and that quite a few (13 out of the top 20, currently) of the most-recommended reader reviews are 1 or 2 star scores. I didn't score it that poorly myself, but I can see why other people would, since there's really no excitement or climax, and you don't really care about the characters. You either enjoy it for the complete package, including the historical info, the globe-trotting setting, the intricate use of flashbacks within flashbacks, etc, or you find it a lackluster, un-exciting, failed thriller, and wonder why anyone else enjoys it.
I also wonder about the
DaVinci Code comparisons (some have called
The Historian, "The Dracula Code") since the books really have very little in common. True, they're both historical mysteries with clues to an ancient mystery found in the present day, through art and literature, but the focus is so different that they really have nothing in common. They are very similar if you've only read the quick paragraph-long blurb about each novel. If you've actually read them, not so much.
I don't have
a real high opinion of Dan Brown's writing or his most famous book (the story was better when he called it
Angels and Demons, before he thought to shoehorn in a Christ-angle for the publicity), but he can at least craft a thriller. His writing is puff, but it's entertaining puff, and it moves quickly and keeps you turning the pages. Judging her by this one book, the author of
The Historian does neither.
The DaVinci Code has a real mystery, and it's a thriller; a race against the clock to save some lives, but with vastly higher stakes than that, as the entire Vatican faces certain destruction (Or possibly not; there's really no way to keep the plots of
Angels and Demons and
The DaVinci Code straight in your memory.). In
The Historian an old college professor vanished and was maybe killed. That's pretty much it for the impetus to investigate, and there's no real time pressure at all. Furthermore, the mystery in
The DaVinci Code is an exciting race against the clock, and it's solved by the characters while we watch, with clues found in very famous works of art that still exist today. In
The Historian we see hardly any investigation, almost all of the info comes already assembled in impossibly-detailed letters from one main character to another, and the ancient books and manuscripts they're getting the info from aren't real; they were just invented by the author to advance her plot.
Here are some more specific comments about the scores.
Plot: 5The concept is brilliant, so this middling score reflects how it was actually executed. It's a very complicated story, told in multiple levels of flashback. The main character is a scholar's daughter, who goes after him after he goes missing. While she's pursuing him across Europe, she's reading letters he wrote decades ago, when he went searching for Dracula's tomb, and he is in turn sometimes reading letters written by his advisor, 20 years earlier, about his search for Dracula's tomb. So we've got a girl in 1970 hunting for her missing father, who wrote about his own search in 1950 for Dracula's Tomb, a search much aided by letters from his advisor, who did the same search in 1930. And these tales are all told at once, in overlapping style. So as the girl is on a train from Paris to some other place, we get the flashback letter from her father, written in the same area, when he was on his desperate hunt to find Dracula's tomb and try to rescue his missing father-figure.
Got all of that?
The plot also relies on a ridiculous number of implausible coincidences, and has quite a few holes in the behavior of the main characters, the absurd ways they only meet people who can aid them on their quests, and especially in the physical reality of Dracula and vampires in general. What the vampires can and can not do didn't seem to be thought out very well at all, and while I played along during the book and kept hoping it would all be explained or make sense in the end -- it never was.
Concept: 8Great idea, mediocre execution. I'm also deducting potential points for the conclusion, which was incredibly weak. Kostova also thought out the middle very well, but apparently couldn’t think how to end the novel, since it ended with a confusing muddle of a whimper.
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/6She's not a bad writer, but would probably be better doing non-fiction. Her descriptions of cities in Europe and retelling of ancient fictional-history were great. She just can't write action or suspense or characters or dialogue.
Characters: 5This one was a high score halfway through, until I realized that every single character spoke and wrote with the same voice, and pretty much thought with the same mind. It reminded me of Lovecraft a bit, in that everyone is polite, scholarly, erudite, shy, modest, etc. Even when characters do something because they're supposed to be madly in love, it seems calculated, almost as if some "how to write characters who are madly in love" guide was being referenced, with heavy highlighting in the "how often characters should do something impulsive and rash" section.
Horror: 2This was a real failing of the novel; there was supposed to be fear and terror, and we know for a fact that Dracula or some other vampires are out there, stalking and disappearing characters, but we never worry about it happening to any of the principles, and they never seem to worry about it themselves. So they blithely walk down into dark, dank crypts, face the prospect of killing vampires with no more than a silver dagger, and sleep in lightless French farmhouses without seeming to harbor a worry in their heads. This one had the ingredients to be a thriller, and a horror novel, but shied away from both possibilities.
Humor: NANot a laugh to be found; at least not that I remember.
Fun Factor: 3Nope. Not a joyless read, but there aren't any big payoff money scenes. Even at the conclusion.
Page Turner: 4Nope. I often went a day or two between reads, and took a couple of weeks to get through the whole thing. I did read the last 150 pages or so in a go, but that was simply because I was sick of the book lying around unfinished and I wanted to get on to something else.
Re-readability: 4I can't see why you'd want to. It's not even one of those books where you learn some amazing revelations at the end, and then suddenly realize why character X was acting the way he did the whole time.
Overall: 6.5This is really a very generous score, given largely on the concept, the potential, and the skill with which Kostova organized all of the flashbacks and made them work together, more or less. If this story had been told in as many pages, without the intricate structure and interesting pseudo-historical info, my score would be closer to a 4.
It's easy to generalize and think that the author is just like the girl in the story. Raised in an international style, knowledgeable about the world, but only from books and reading, not from actual living in it, and a product of an earlier, more stately an formal age. I knew nothing about her when I read the book, but after going through
a few online interviews, I see that my preconceptions was pretty much right on the money.
I don't know how the woman reached 40 in this day and age without being more reflective of the modern world and popular culture, but she should get out more, or if she does she needs to let her getting out reflect more into her writing. Every character in
The Historian is like an upper-crust white Englishman from an old Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot mystery, and while they're not stupid or completely oblivious, there's just a sameness to the characters and the writing that began to bore me. There's a difference between writing characters who accurately reflect the time in which they lived (most of the book is set in the 50s and then in the 70s, in the two long flashback narratives) and writing a bunch of bland people who all act the same.
Overall, you'll enjoy this if you love reading and history and especially works written in classic literary style (I.E. long and slow).
