The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

October seemed like a good time to re-read The Historian, my favorite vampire book.  Unlike many others, Kostova keeps Dracula true to his origins -- evil and genuinely scary -- while tying him explicitly to Vlad the Impaler.  There's a great deal of historical research here, resulting in a fascinating display of both Medieval and Cold-War-era Eastern Europe. (I really want to visit  Budapest now.  And Istanbul.)  When The Historian came out it was compared, naturally enough, to The DaVinci Code, but Kostova's novel is quite a bit better, and as far as I can tell not filled with egregious historical and theological mistakes.

A second read did cause me to notice some flaws.  The novel is told in a collection of letters, diaries, and reminiscences,  set mainly in 1930, 1950, and 1972, and told from the viewpoint of the several historians who encountered Dracula directly or indirectly, but Kostova did not distinguish the voices well enough.  Moreover, while Dracula's over-arching plan was clear -- immortality not just through blood, but history -- some of his specific actions were mystifying in light of his goals.  But ultimately these are minor flaws.  Watching the characters piece together Dracula's life was fascinating, and wondering if they would escape his taint was thrilling.

Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves

I absolutely loved Kostova's first novel, The Historian, a modern take on vampires (specifically Dracula) that tells a great mystery while retaining the horror and symbolism of the vampire myth (no dreamboat vamps here), so I was eager to get her second book, The Swan Thieves. It's funny that I read it after re-reading Possession, because they share many similarities. Both involve Victorian artists who are caught between their passion and social constraints, and modern day pairs who feel compelled to solve the mystery of their 19th century counterparts. Both address the tension women face between being creators and being muses (or mothers). And both are told through personal narratives, journals, letters, and so on (a structure Kostova also used in her first book).

Unfortunately, I did not enjoy this book as much as The Historian. Some of it, to be fair, is because I simply don't find the subject matter that carries the story -- painting -- as engaging as the Dracula myth, despite the effective way Kostova described the sensations of painting. But the real problem was that I could not get myself to care about the characters she created. The story centers around a painter, Robert, who tries to vandalize a work of art in a museum, and refuses to say why. He is the stereotypical tortured artist, self-centered and almost completely blind to the suffering and sacrifices of people around him, and yet everyone who meets him falls under his spell. Because this is a book we cannot see his art, which is supposed to be brilliant and moving, and because he refuses to tell his story we never get a chance to really understand him. As a result, I felt little interest in Robert, and I could not understand why the other characters were so drawn to him (surely someone, somewhere, would get as impatient with him as I would?). Robert does suffer from a mental disorder, but Kostova keeps that diagnosis a secret from us, and never makes clear how much of his personality is attributable to that, how much to his natural temperament, and how much to the fact that everyone lets him get away with bad behavior.

Moreover, the book relies heavily on the reminisces of the psychiatrist trying to help Robert, Robert's ex-wife, and Robert's ex-girlfriend. These passages are overwritten, almost precious, and far too perfect to be believable as memories. The result was a certain sameness despite the fact they they were supposed to be very different characters. (This occasionally happened in The Historian, too, but I enjoyed the story too much to care.) Add to that the fact that throughout the book I was two steps ahead of the protagonists in figuring out the central mystery, and you have a disappointing book. A sophomore slump, I guess. I'll be interested to see what Kostova writes next.

Pretend it's still Halloween . . .

So perhaps you have heard of vampires? And how there is a book or two out there about them? Even though I've always liked vampires (from a mythological standpoint), I've avoided almost entirely the current crop of books and movies about them, because I really don't like how creators have taken scary monsters that represent true evil and turned them into sooper-speshul, hawt, emo whiners (or invincible, kewl, I-wish-I-could-be-one-that'll-show-my-meanie-classmates superior beings -- White Wolf, I'm looking at you).

I guess we could blame Anne Rice, but Interview with a Vampire and The Vampire Lestat were actually quite good, albeit completely different in tone from each other. Unfortunately, Rice got too caught up in the mythology and turned it into a incomprehensible mess, while also focusing too much on the sexiness and decadence of being a vampire and not the tragic or disturbing consequences. When you have the vampire matriarch explain over and over why her tribe's ritual cannibalization was really ok and not at all icky, and how it was totally not her fault she became a vampire, it was evil patriarchal men (the bastards), well, in my opinion you've totally lost sight of what it means to be a vampire.

But that's what a lot of these series do. They take the sensual appeal that Bela Lugosi brought to Dracula, and transform vampire stories into melodramatic romances. Of course, that means having vampire heroes who just hate having to leech off innocent humans, and so they drink animal blood or steal from blood banks or only victimize criminals, all the while whining about how tortured they are. Or writers get caught up in the special strengths of vampires, and end up making them ridiculously powerful and superior to humans, practically Mary Sues and Marty Stus. That's one of the main reasons I could never get past the first couple of chapters of an Anita Blake story, not even as a melodramatic teenager. And if Wikipedia is to be believed, Anita Blake has garnered a laughable amount of specialness and super powers by now.

Which isn't to say all pop culture vampires are bad. I've heard the Sookie Stackhouse series is lots of fun, and I can't say enough good things about Kostova's Historian -- it was fascinating and scary, and a great update of and homage to the original Dracula. And of course I was a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That show did a fabulous job portraying monsters and monster-fighting as a dead-on metaphor for adolescence. And Angel was was pretty good character, even if he was arguably the proto-emo vampire boyfriend. My favorite part, however, was when Spike went out and got himself a soul (uh . . . spoiler!). I was fascinated by the fact that Angel, the first "good" vampire, had his soul thrust upon him as a punishment, whereas Spike, who had been trying to be good for a while, acquired a soul to make himself a being worthy of love. I wanted an exploration of what it means to be good, and what role free will has, but unfortunately it was not that kind of show.

There are a lot of fascinating ideas that could be explored with vampires, and the nature of good and evil, agency and free will is just the beginning. Watching Coppola's version of Dracula over the weekend, particularly with Renfield wailing on about how "the blood is the life," I was struck with how vampirism could be seen as a total perversion of the Mass. Although maybe it's for the best that no popular writers (that I know of) have really latched on to this -- in the hands of Dan Brown, we'd probably end up with a book about how Jesus' followers were the first vampires and sucked His blood, and ever since the Church has been behind a murderous vampire conspiracy. That's why I find most current vampire books disappointing: they don't explore the issues I find interesting.

So as a reaction to the over-saturation of contemporary vampire books, and because it was the week before Halloween, I decided to read the original -- Bram Stoker's Dracula. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I was a little afraid it might be too gothic (I don't like gothic, at all, at least not the overwrought style of Ann Radcliffe) but it wasn't, and I liked Stoker's technique of telling the narrative through diaries, journals, and newspaper articles. I also liked that Stoker gave the vampires a mesmerizing appeal without allowing the characters (or us) to completely lose sight of what they really were. It is a product of its time, and so the theology was a bit suspect, the characters tended to use ten words when two would suffice, and the constant statements about how Mina was so much stronger and smarter than the typical flighty, faint-hearted woman caused a lot of eye-rolling. Over all, though, I liked it quite a bit.