A Date With Dracula

Gleefully I rub my hands together, because the novel already feels like what The Da Vinci Code ought to have been but wasn’t: an intelligent romp through personal and collective history, literature and legend, led on through a maze of obscure codes and secret symbols, hidden texts and medieval traditions; and, of course, the imagination. A novel that brings together the mystique of Vlad the Impaler, Dracula, and Evil. Best of all, a sumptuous quest-novel with an intelligent woman as protagonist and narrator. And her narration is cool, thoughtful, intelligent. Much is promised, then, and the novel mostly lives up to the promise. It is an academic quest, far more in the tradition of A S Byatt’s Possession than in the farcical potboiler style of Dan Brown.

Like any literary adventure novel, The Historian is not an easy read. It is a handsome and heavy volume, weighing in at close to 650 pages. It is filled with letters, conversations, embedded narratives, italicised accounts. It begins with an old book that has a dragon — a dragon! — printed in the middle. It has scholarship of the best kind: the kind that approaches research as an intellectual adventure. It draws you into the pages and you read on guiltily through the night, shivering a little as the monsoon winds wail outside your windows. Especially when you read a declaration such as Dracula’s: “History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so.” But it is a fascinating and enjoyable experience, and one is thinking about the questions it asks long after one has shut the book — and waiting to get back to it again, when one has the time, the energy and the long weekend to spare for the task.