One more time, a work featuring the grotesque figure of the vampire emerges from the shackles of the Middle Ages to top the list of recent fiction best sellers. Already being translated into thirty-five languages and having been purchased for two million dollars from its first time novelist even before its publication, The Historian (2005) by Elisabeth Kostova entraps its readers in a series of breath-taking events promising to unravel deeply hidden ancient secrets and crucial truths. This paper looks at these so-called deeply held secrets showing that through the genre of the fantastic, rather than escape and evade reality, the writer has negotiated contemporary cultural anxieties and conflicts. These are referred to in the title of this article, the age old battle between West and East and how the West perceives this clash in the form of an exonerating battle between Good and Evil, or in this case between Monks and ‘Infidels’.
Najla Jarkas