The Limits of Experience

KING JOHN

by W.L. Warren

King John, by W.L. Warren

W.L. Warren begins King John with an explanation of how and why John ended up with the dastardly reputation we all know from Robin Hood stories and other popular fiction. John, Warren says, suffered from a confluence of factors that have rendered a slanted and warped portrait of him. Historiographical methods of the past concentrated almost entirely on contemporary chronicles, practically ignoring administrative records and other, more objective sources. John especially suffers under this kind of examination, since the chroniclers who wrote about his reign were all either poorly informed, outrageously prejudiced, or both.

John is mocked with the name “Softsword” for having lost his hold on the French domains his father, Henry II, and his brother, Richard I, worked so hard to keep. Warren points out, however, that such far-flung territories could never have been maintained, and, even had Richard lived, the French outcome would probably have been the same. Far from being a military do-nothing, John is the founder of the Royal Navy. Warren marvels that a nation that came to treasure its naval superiority as England did could so completely vilify the founder of its navy.

But this book is no whitewash, either. John was duplicitous and grasping and didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t beholden to him. He surrounded himself with baseborn hangers-on, excluding and alienating the barons of his realm. He took money for dispensing justice and then still ruled against the side that paid him. He was cunning and conniving, and was known to issue decrees that said one thing while secretly issuing instructions that ran exactly counter to what he wrote.

Yet this same king instituted something that, to historians, is even more important than the Royal Navy: the systematic keeping of government and court records. Before John ascended the throne in 1199, English government recordkeeping is spotty and haphazard – a frustratingly obscure and incomplete source for the study of history. But from 1199 on, these same records emerge as a rich and authoritative resource. Hmm, almost as if John knew the chroniclers weren’t going to treat him fairly…

Another myth that gets busted in this book is the one about King John’s being forced to sign the Magna Carta. While Warren concedes that John had backed himself into a corner by running roughshod over his barons, he explains that the Magna Carta was simply a compromise brokered between him and his opponents. Nobody was holding a gun to his head – and wouldn’t have been even had guns been invented. And John had the last laugh when, days later, he made England a fief of the Pope, who reciprocated by declaring the Magna Carta null and void.

When I started reading this book, I had a fairly negative attitude about King John. By the time I finished, I still didn’t like him much, but I had a new appreciation for him as a brilliant, complex, and probably tortured soul who tried to do great things and occasionally succeeded.

THE HISTORIAN
by Elizabeth Kostova

The marketing campaign accompanying the release of this book seemed determined to class it with The Da Vinci Code. While that’s an understandable economic decision, it’s a shame from a literary standpoint. Now, I didn’t read The Code, so I have no business telling you it’s bad. I didn’t read The Code because the amateurish writing style put me off before I got to the end of page one. But I can tell you I devoured every elegant word of the 656-page Historian.

It’s the early 1970s, and our unnamed 16-year-old American heroine lives a lonely yet still rather enviable existence with her father and a housekeeper in Amsterdam. They vacation in history-laden European destinations most of us have only seen in pictures. She reads the dusty old volumes in her father’s library. One day, she uncovers a beautiful leather-bound volume with all its pages blank except for one sinister woodcut of a dragon in the center. Along with the book are letters and research by the scholar who was her father’s graduate advisor. When she asks her father what these items are, she gets a tale – gradually revealed at great personal cost to him – that sends both of them on a quest for the world’s oldest living – or rather, undead – person: Vlad Dracula.

The reader is shuttled backward and forward through time between the 1950s and the 1970s. We meet the heroine’s parents at the time when they’re drawn together by a common goal: saving someone who’s important to them both, someone they’re convinced has been abducted by Dracula. This search takes them to Turkey, to Hungary, and then on to Romania and back to Turkey again.

Meanwhile, back in the present-day 1970s, the heroine gradually unravels her family’s sad and shocking past, which is inextricably linked with Dracula himself. She soon realizes she has no choice but embark on a journey of her own – one that will bring her either profound joy or profound sadness. But the one thing that’s never in doubt is that it’s the adventure of her life.

The hunt for Dracula takes the characters to places that are unorthodox by vampire novel standards yet perhaps more appropriate: churches, libraries, universities and monasteries. There’s only one relatively brief but thoroughly memorable nighttime visit to a castle ruin. But if you’re thinking there can’t be much suspense or many thrills in watching graduate students poke around in old books, letters and manuscripts, think again. The Historian is that great rarity among literary novels: a page-turner. Not only is it more beautifully written than anything to come out of New York in a long while, but it’s also full of edge-of-the-seat thrills, some of them deceptively subtle, and it’s an emotional roller coaster ride. There’s very little bloodletting, but Ms. Kostova wrings every drop of impact from those infrequent spillages. These characters aren’t hunting Dracula simply because they hate him or they want to prove how smart and brave they are. They’re hunting him because they can’t do anything else. There is no better motivation, nor one that’s easier for a reader to identify with.

In my opinion, The Historian was the best novel of 2005, and I believe – pardon the pun – that history will treat it well.

The Historian