As fate works out, I first tried to use this thing as a way to ramble about books with Jasper Kent’s The Twelve, and here I am after a two year hiatus trying to get back in the saddle with some thoughts about the rest of what turned out to be the Danilov Quintet.
After I bought and read Thirteen Years Later, I let Kent drift. A few years back I hoovered up the other three books and put them into my Kindle queue, but it took a lot of lockdown to get me to the point where I decided to see how it all worked out for those crazy Danilovs. Push, I said to myself, and it’s a block of three books off the queue.
When I was grumping about Thirteen Years Later ten years ago, I grumped about the focus on Iuda being a mistake. I didn’t know how committed Kent was to that mistake. Never mind the Danilovs; Iuda’s the connective tissue through all five books. He’s in all of them, and he’s the puppet master of an awful lot of the action. Sure, the big bad is your actual canonical Dracula, but the engine for the books is Iuda trying to play Dracula off against everyone else out of some weird mixture of morbid curiosity and the impulse to be awful just for the sake of being awful.
So, how does it all go? Well, I was right that the fourth book would have the Russo-Turkish War in it, but not in any terribly important way. I was right that the last book would be the Revolution, but how easy was that to guess given the obsession with the Romanovs? In reality the action is anchored between Moscow and St Petersburg in all three books; there are outings to fun travel spots like Sebastopol and Yekaterinburg, but Kent keeps the things which matter in the cities which have always mattered the most to Russians and Russian-ologists. For the rest, the background is the general awfulness of the struggle between Tsarist Russia’s tiny middle class and the forces of Romanov autocracy. Which was a long grim slog from the efforts of the Decembrists to the Bolsheviks, and it’s hard to fight the idea that if the Romanovs had listened to the Decembrists, the two hundred years since then would have been a lot easier on everyone.
Of course, while all of that’s going on, the Danilovs are fighting vampires, and if I were a smarter man I’d have some kind of idea of how that mirrors a fight for the soul of Russia. Anyhow, there’s a lot of vampires, and they don’t have a plan. Because most of them are stupid, and the one at the top is that particular kind of stupid that you get when no-one has the nerve to say no to you, and the one really smart one just seems to enjoy meanness for its own sake, which is no kind of plan for anything.
How much fun is any of this? Not very much. While the bad guys are bad, the Danilovs are not necesarily great company. They’re mopey and self-absorbed, which is a very realistic thing for Russians under a curse to be, but not something that’s necessarily fun to read about.
So there’s not a lot of fun to be had. Most of it comes from the cleverness of Kent’s thinking. His notion on why vampires don’t show up in mirrors is a very clever one. Vampires look so awful that everyone, themselves included, just edits the reality out when they’re looking at them. But when they edit out what they see in the mirror, they can’t write over that missing reflection with anything else, so it all disappears. It’s clever, and he makes a very good plot point out of what happens when someone clever - Iuda, who else? - figures out how to make a mirror which vampires can see their reflections in.
The other bit of cleverness is in the fifth book. Which opens with the fun news that Dracula is dead, solving all the problems the other four books are obsessed with. With Dracula dead, he can’t threaten the Romanovs any more, and the Danilovs can relax their vigilance at last. I liked it that Dracula got killed, because Kent is true to the meta-canon. The events of the fourth book sent him off to London looking for a McGuffin, and he ran afoul of Van Helsing just as he did in the Stoker book and got schwacked. I like a bit of respect for the established verities. But what on earth is going to keep the Danilovs suitably miserable, other than the Ootober Revolution?
A nutty plot to resurrect Dracula, what else? Which is when the whole thing really does start to feel more like the adventures of Iuda than anything to do with the Danilovs, since the nutbag in chief of the resurrection plot is Iuda’s first girlfriend, and when the resurrection does not quite go according to plan, it’s Iuda who gets brought back, not Dracula. I had been really thinking Iuda was good and dead at the end of the fourth book and I was quite fine with that.
Credit where credit is due; Kent pulls that off. Iuda winds up sharing a body with the last surviving Danilov, and they alternate not just control of the body, but control of the narrative. Kent gives us two very different narrative voices, and a set of clever challenges for the two squabbling occupants of one body. It keeps the suspense going very well through the book and right up to an incredibly downbeat ending. Yes, sure the day is saved and the vampire plague put to bed at terrible cost, but Kent makes sure in the epilogue to remind the reader that nothing good is going to happen in Russia any time soon.
So, a bit of a slog, and it took me a long time to get there. On balance it was sort of worth the effort, but it’s not something I’m coming back to.
Unlike this on-again off-again rambling. I’m not a John Wick levels of thinking I’m back, but it’s time to get back on the horse.
