SubscribeThis book was a challenging read. It took a whole lot longer to finish reading than I ever expected it would. Parts of this book were so good that I was willing to overlook the parts that were boring, or confusing. I would not recommend attempting to read this book while on your break at work, while talking to coworkers, (which is what I did, in part). It requires way more concentration than that.
I knew from the moment I picked up The Historian that it was basically a vampire story. From there, the plot gets complicated. The main character is a woman, who I think is named Helen,(but Im not really sure), after her mother, who is dead. She starts out with a note to the readers, basically telling us she never intended to tell her story, but decided to now. The next page jumps back in time to when “Helen” was sixteen. She finds a note addressed to her father many years ago, the begins with “My dear and unfortunate successor…”.
She of course, asks her father, Paul, about this letter. He tells her, reluctantly, in bits and pieces about its significance. So now, we are reading a story told by Paul to “Helen”, through the eyes of the 16 year old “Helen”. At the same time, Paul and “Helen” are traveling around the world, because Paul is some sort of diplomat, and he is working. So, right away, the story is jumping around from “Helen’s” past, (and her memory of her father telling these stories), to Paul’s past, (and his memory of what happened), and, in between, the…. present time…. of Helen and Paul traveling, and what they see, and eat, and where they visit, (which, we know from the first few pages of the story, is also in the past).
Confused yet? I was. I found myself having to flip back pages, and read some parts over again, trying to figure out who said what to who, and whose memory it all came from. I ended up needing to do this, again and again, for most of the book. Much of the book is presented in the form of letters that one character wrote to another, or pages from the historical documents and books the characters are studying. Some of it, at first, was interesting. It reminded me of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where much of the story was also in letters and diary entries. So I continued reading.
Paul tells about events from his college days, where he was working with an advisor named Rossi, who he was good friends with. One day, Paul finds this strange old book that has a dragon printed in the center of it, and blank pages. He brings it to Rossi, who freaks out, and shows Paul an identical book. This is the part where The Historian starts to mention Dracula. Rossi was, at one point, studying him. In this book, Dracula is tied to the legends and history of Vlad Tepes, also known as “Vlad the Impaler”, which is an interesting take.
Then, bad things start to happen. (Some of this may be a bit of a spoiler, so be warned before you read on.) Rossi’s disappears, and Paul takes up his notes and letters, trying to find him. He is joined by a woman named Helen, who claims to be Rossi’s daughter. She is from Romania, and has never met her father. The two are also in search of Dracula’s tomb, hoping to find Rossi there, and save him.
Sometime before Paul finished telling his story to “Helen”, he disappears. Well, he leaves a note behind, saying he was looking for “Helen’s” mother, who was said to be dead. Without permission, “Helen” tries to follow her father, taking with her a new friend named Barley. On the way, she reads a packet of letter’s and notes her father has left behind. So, again, we have layers of story going on. We have the “Helen” of the past, reading about Paul’s past, as if it were the present, and traveling by train, once again, in the “present”. To add to the confusion, these letters go into much more detail about the historical books that Helen and Paul find. There is an entire chapter that consists entirely of research about certain monks who traveled from one monastery to another, possibly with a relic. This, for me, was the most boring part of the book. I couldn’t understand, until after I had read the whole chapter, how that related to the main story. Also, there are a whole lot more characters added. By the end, the reader does get to meet Dracula, more than once, and finds the answers to all the mysteries that all the characters set out in search of finding answers to. It just takes a while to get there.
Now that I am finished reading, I’m not really sure what I think about this book. It’s long. Parts are really scary and action packed, but they are in between much longer parts of history and letters. It was confusing much of the time, as I struggled to keep track of which character was “speaking”, and which one wrote the letter being read, and where the reader of the letter was at in the world while reading it. This book has more layers than an onion! On the other hand, it was pieced together like a quilt. All the parts, no matter how disjointed they seemed at first, fit together beautifully by the end.
I think this book will appeal mostly to readers who enjoy a good mystery, and especially to readers who find research itself fascinating. (So much of this book described old libraries, and the books found within them). If you are looking for an action packed vampire story, this is not the book for you.
Oh, and it just came out in paperback recently. I would advise that you carry around the paperback while you are reading, instead of hauling around the much heavier hard cover, like I did!
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