Elizabeth Kostova’s follow-up to mega selling debut The Historian comes at a time when bookshelves are groaning under the weight of conspiracy thrillers. Dan Brown and Steig Larsson have opened the thriller genre up to a younger audience, and instituted new clichés – now, the non-professional detectives must be artistic and academic, the conspirators are shady cultural entities, not governments or rogue agents. Meanwhile, train station posters advertise ‘emotional thrillers’, focussing on the angst of the victim.
Kostova’s debut was a sensation, and although her writing has been attacked as wooden, she can still consider herself a cut above the ‘the important man picked up the red cup’ prose stylings produced by Brown. Unlike Larsson, she is able to create a male protagonist without the ludicrous wish-fulfilment sexual magnetism of Kalle Blomkvist. Her new novel, The Swan Thieves takes multiple narrative viewpoints, and features a nineteenth century sub-plot. Yet it never grips in the same way as the Millenium Trilogy did.
Part of the problem is the lack of an engaging protagonist. The novel focuses on the emotional destruction of the artist Robert Oliver. Oliver is a brooding, silent presence throughout the novel, repeatedly sketching an idealised female form, based on a woman he encountered once. His psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe, also an artist, embarks on a quest to understand his patient, tracking down the women in his life, and investigating a series of letters sent by a female Impressionist painter in the nineteenth century.
We see a variety of narrative viewpoints, including Marlowe, Oliver’s first wife, and another art teacher with whom he had a relationship. These are interspersed with translations of 19th century correspondence between an ageing Impressionist and his niece. Unfortunately, Kostova only really convinces and engages when writing from a female viewpoint. The first twelve chapters are entirely narrated by Marlowe, with his banal references to soup, his amateur view of art, and his unfortunate lapses into Langdon-esque exposition: ‘What had happened in France in 1879? Hadn’t there been the Paris Commune? Exactly when had Baron Haussman designed all those great boulevards?’
There is promising material in The Swan Thieves – Kostova sets us up for the forensic analysis of a life in progress, and establishes a brooding, Pinter-esque central figure. The opening section, an artist attacking a painting with a knife, promises drama. But the pacing is poor, and the novel is at least 200 pages too long. Meanwhile, her attempts to create a literary mystery along the lines of Possession are foiled by her inferior skills of mimicry.
Ultimately, The Swan Thieves is a disappointment, an opportunity missed. Kostova may have been trying to do the right thing, exploring the psyche of the artist, the taciturn man capable of wildly demonstrative work, but the novel is misjudged. Simply put, too many chapters fly past with no activity, no revelations or new insights. Oliver’s presumed psychosis never feels real, and Marlowe is little more than a cipher. The women, Mary and Kate, are more interesting, as we are allowed to see more of their lives, through monologues, but even they are not memorable. As a novella, this may have been fine, but Kostova is unable to sustain the narrative over 600+ pages.
Suggested Further Reading
If you like the literary mystery element of this story, then AS Byatt's Possession and Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child offer far superior versions. If you like the idea of novels which begin with paintings being destroyed in art galleries, I heartily recommend Christopher Fowler's The Seventy Seven Clocks, which starts in the same way and is far more fun, with 80 year old detectives, and a series of increasingly unlikely murders including Bengal tigers, snakes, ice cream vans and the Savoy Hotel.
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