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In Review: The Swan Thieves
Elizabeth Kostova
Review by Macy Walsh
Elizabeth Kostova made a splash in modern literature with The Historian, her best-selling debut novel about the legend of Dracula. The Swan Thieves, her much-anticipated second novel, wanders into Dan Brown thriller territory, but lacks the body count found in The Da Vinci Code. Instead, she offers an understated, beautifully written tale of art, love and obsession that’s filled with the same meticulous research and attention to detail that made The Historian so gripping.
Kostova is an old school novelist, offering a hefty volume that spans time and space, from 19th century France to contemporary America. Artists are transfixed by visions and obsess over muses. Psychiatrists puzzle over mysteries of the heart. Forbidden passions build amid barely suppressed desire. There are numerous blind alleys and red herrings along the way, but the plot finally comes together in a manner that Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot would himself admire.
The novel follows Andrew Marlow, a psychiatrist at a private hospital outside Washington, DC. His new patient, Robert Oliver, is a well known artist who has been committed after attempting to slash a painting in the National Gallery of Art. Robert utters a few cryptic words, then retreats into silence. While hospitalized, he continues his artwork, obsessively drawing the same woman over and over. A clue to his obsession may lie in the letters found among his things. Dating from 1878, the letters detail a correspondence between art student and bureaucrat’s wife Beatrice Vignot and the Impressionist painter Oliver Vignot, her husband’s uncle. Through these letters, Beatrice becomes the second narrator as Marlow attempts to uncover her significance to his patient. “I did it for her,” Robert says, but who is the mysterious “her”? Why did Robert slash that particular painting, a work by a contemporary of Vignot’s known as Leda and the Swan?
As the tale progresses, we also meet Robert’s ex-wife, Kate Oliver, along with Mary Bertison, the woman with whom Robert lived after his divorce. Marlow tracks these mysterious women down and both tell him about Robert’s past and their parts in it, thus becoming the third and fourth narrators. This could have easily become an unwieldy plot device, and it’s to Kostova’s credit that she handles all the disparate voices well, keeping the plot moving at a brisk pace and deftly weaving the narrative threads together so they’re relatively easy to follow. Marlow’s quest takes him from New York to Acapulco to Paris as he seeks to learn more about Beatrice and Robert’s obsession with her, an obsession that destroyed his marriage and his teaching career.
The story is cinematic in scope, though I must admit I was disappointed in the development of the two principal characters. Marlow is more psychiatrist than living person and a self-satisfied prig to boot. Here are his words about an ex-girlfriend whom he hires to translate Oliver’s letters: “We’ve remained good friends, especially since I didn’t feel strongly enough about her to regret her terminating our relationship.” Likewise, Oliver is depicted as a renowned artist whose paintings are sought after by museums, but famous contemporary artists don’t speak of their work in the way Robert does. His paintings, as Kostova describes them, would be far too outdated to appeal to contemporary art curators; he’s a 19th century artist in 21st century clothes.
Still, none of these flaws detract from the story. As Marlow assembles the pieces of his puzzle, he uncovers a secret more than a century old, one that promises to rewrite art history, and the resolution does not disappoint. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot’s comments on a Wilkie Collins book, it has no merit beyond melodrama, but it has every possible merit that melodrama can have.
