Romance dilutes pertinent story
Freedom is an elusive but vital human need pulsing through the narrative, writes Paula Green.
Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel,
The Historian ,wasa New York Times best seller but attracted biting criticism along with adulation. Her third novel, The Shadow
Land, might very well achieve the same results. It is part historical fiction, part gripping thriller, part romance.
Alexandra Boyd’s beloved but wayward brother went missing on a family hike in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Alexandra feels she is to blame. This introductory sequence, set in the 1990s, irritated me in view of the girl/boy gender divide. He was the bad boy and she was the good girl, intent on smoothing the way for him. By adolescence he was hiving off with his misbehaving friends and she was mending the cigarette holes in his jeans.
Alexandra heads to Bulgaria to teach English – her brother’s favourite country on the map – but is skewered off course with a bag mix-up on the hotel steps. She discovers a satchel with its container of human ashes in the taxi and decides she needs to return the precious cargo. Easier said than done.
My favourite character, the taxi driver – always more to Bobby than meets the eye – is prepared to drop everything and assist on helter-skelter road trips with danger at every turn.
With the urn’s contents linked to an oppressive Communist regime, a time when large numbers of people were incarcerated in Bulgarian labour camps, often without trial, history is a key player in the narrative. Kostova sheds light on an individual story as a way of exposing the wider historical context, but for me the wider context was less accessible.
Stoyan Lazarov is a violinist who speaks out of turn and then suffers; his violin becomes the mouthpiece for truths he cannot utter in public. In the labour camp, he preserves his mind by playing his favourite pieces of music, day by day, note by note, in his head, and inventing a son. I found this unbearably moving as I mused upon the novel’s key issues.
Stoyan’s story feels acutely pertinent in our current climate of ignorant hierarchies, smashed freedoms and political deceit and greed. Freedom is the elusive but vital human need pulsing through the narrative: freedom to think and speak, to live and eat, to pray and create.
This powerful notion forms the hot spots of the book that kept me reading. The pungent detail renders the physical settings so alive.
I was less glued to the book when it came to the romantic love threads; the contemporary characters felt like pawns forced to participate because the author thought the novel needed a romance. The stronger and more complex love that connected characters associated with Stoyan worked far better.
Kostova has delivered a novel that makes you think and feel, at a time when global critics, bloggers and writers muse about what matters in this fragile world. However, the impact is diluted by superficial relationships and a shallow depiction of the politics beyond the individual. I felt like Bulgaria was adrift in space.