Fangs for the memories, Lord Byron! (Vampyre: The Secret History of Lord Byron - Tom Holland)

Member Name: i_am_joy

Product:	Vampyre: The Secret History of Lord Byron - Tom Holland
Date:	03/01/09 (127 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A wonderful read which is engrossing and exciting, well written

Disadvantages: ----------

I am a bit of a fan of vampire stories so when my daughter gave me a box of books I was thrilled to see The Vampyre by Tom Holland in amongst them. I was in between books so started reading it straight away and what an amazing novel it turned out to be, one of those rare books which you physically cannot put down for hours on end because the story has you so engrossed.

The Vampyre is a novel which merges fact with fantasy to create an alternate existence for one of England's greatest poets, Lord Byron. While travelling through Greece, Byron and his friend Hobhouse come across an enigmatic nobleman who obviously rules with an iron will and has a strange effect on the young Lord Byron. Usually afraid of Vakhel Pasha, Byron develops a gentle love and respect for the man which is eventually betrayed when the Pasha turns Byron into a 'Vardoulacha' in an act of revenge for the Englishman helping one of his favoured slaves to escape.

What follows is the tale of how the now immortal Lord Byron copes with his new found power, how his relationships develop and how he goes through an eternity without his beloved Haidee, the slave he rescued years before who was drowned by the Pasha for her rebellion.

The story begins as a descendant of Byron tracks him down, she approaches the family solicitor to gain access to his private vault on the premise of searching out old diaries. Rebecca Carville has the shock of her life, and perhaps her death, when she finds not a bundle of dusty papers but an ancient corpse and Lord Byron sitting in the gloom just waiting to recount his strange life. It's Byron himself who tells the tale to a listening Rebecca, I love this in a novel because it gives the reader plenty of opportunity to hear not only the words but the thoughts of the leading character.

Rebecca, although the first character we come across in the book, is not involved much in the story and it's quickly apparent that the author has used her presence merely so that Byron has someone to recount his tale to. This is not a bad thing however, Rebecca has not simply been slotted into the book to fill the gaps but has a genuine reason to be seeking out Lord Byron and really fits into the pace of the story. Pages and chapters will go by without any reference to Rebecca, but as soon as Byron pauses to ask her opinion on something or she starts to argue with his rationale then she is suddenly back into the forefront of the readers mind.

Lord Byron is a strange character. I shouldn't like him because he is arrogant and juvenile, he is cruel and doesn't care for anyones feelings, he is plainly a nasty character although he does try to be suave and gentlemanly at times during his narrative. But I do like him, it's hard not to as he has feelings of love and at times during the novel is in deep despair over the love he lost so long ago.

Byron, of course, is a vampire who learns to enjoy his killing sprees but in the narrative the blood thirsty aspect of the story is kept to a minimum and while the tale is still exciting there are very few descriptions of death to offend and I found these were written to give a depth to his character rather than to shock the reader. The novel really concentrates on the learning curve that Byron finds himself on, his reactions to various situations, his love life through the decades and eventually to the point where he embraces his new life after staging his own mortal death in Messolonghi.

I know a little about Byron and after reading The Vampyre I quickly checked on a few websites and was surprised at how faithfully Tom Holland has kept to the facts about the mans life. Actually I was rather surprised at how much I enjoyed this book because from what I know about Lord Byron he seems an uninteresting character from history despite his gaudy and boisterous behaviour, I also think his poetry is generally self obsessed drivel so I didn't think this story was going to be as interesting or as exciting as it was!

What the author has done is taken the history of Lord Byron as we know it today and interlaced all the facts with the clever story about vampirism. The children in The Vampyre are actual children that various women bore for him, his marriage was real and so was the love affair with deranged Lady Caroline Lamb, he really did spend many years travelling in his 20's and the true Lord Byron did indeed die of a fever in Messolonghi. But even though Tom Holland has kept well to the historical facts, this book at no point reads like an appalling Dan Brown novel which has been taken directly from Wikipedia.

There are lots of twists and turns to keep you interested in the book, in fact the plot is so dense that I sometimes felt myself having to really concentrate to keep it all straight in my head. This is a good thing however and doesn't make the reading feel like hard work, more it pulls you into the story and eventually when you have connected a face to each name you find yourself willing them on - even the bad guys like an appalling renaissance style vampire called Lovelace who at first teaches Byron the vampire ways and then becomes a long term companion who's cruelty and vanity only serves to egg on Byron to ever more depraved acts.

I thought this novel flowed extremely well, partly because it is spoken by the leading character but ultimately because the author has proved himself to be a natural storyteller whose descriptive abilities made me almost believe I was riding with Byron or watching him drain peasants of their blood from nearby. He described scenes rather than people, which helps the book seem believable despite the rather fantastical subject matter because why would a dandy such as Lord Byron want Rebecca to know what 'the fat Greek' was wearing or the fragrance worn by the man he killed? No, a traveller such as Byron would want the reader to know about the hills of Greece or the waterways of Venice or even the green areas of his native London.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Vampyre and now intend to seek out more work by the same author, you can buy a paperback copy of this enthralling and exciting novel from Amazon for £5.99 and I urge you to do so as I fail to see why everyone should not like this book.

Summary: An excellent novel for anyone who likes vampire books.