Finished this book today… I’d toyed with buying it last year after it was in zarabee’s list of highly recommended books and won things… but then when I rang her, she said if I didn’t like that period or Victoriana, I probably wouldn’t like it.
The funny thing is, while I loathe Jane Austen and Flaubert and that lot with a passion, I’m quite fond of Charlotte Bronte and Mary Shelley. And Bram Stoker, for that matter. What’s more, I enjoyed Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula stuff and hawk_eye definitely infected me with a love of alternate history stuff – it wasn’t hard, as I was a history buff to start with.
So, although I didn’t end up buying it, when Jaime from Perth expressed disgust with it and left it behind, and Matt, whose opinion I value a great deal, said he’d loved it, I was happy to check it out. It does start dreadfully slowly, but after consultation with subtle_eye, who said I could probably get away with skimming for the first 200-or-so pages, it got better. Certainly better than Anno Dracula, definitely. In part, I think it’s more literary. In part, because it draws on a wider range of influences (the entire canon and concept of ‘English magic’ and ‘Faerie magic’) rather than the simpler premise that vampires from a particular novel lived and married into the royal English line.
I managed to spot and read all the key scenes early on (the raising of someone from the dead and how this occurs, the first encounter of Stephen the butler with the thistledown-haired gentleman) and then read solidly from about page 300 on (it’s 782 pages long). The end (last 250 pages?) is fabulous. She still needed an editor with a stronger will, I think, as there are still a couple of diversions that drove me a bit batty, and the spelling of ‘chuse’ and ‘surprized’ and a couple of other words but NOT ‘alarum’ or other more obvious ones that took longer to standardise annoyed me.
Anyway: highly, highly recommended.