I missed out on Elizabeth Kostova’s bestselling debut The Historian but I heard so many readers praise it that I was looking forward to The Swan Thieves. The opening promises high entertainment: into the care of Andrew Marlowe, an institutional psychiatrist and hobby painter, is thrust uncommunicative Robert Oliver, a successful painter caught trying to slash a canvas at the National Gallery of Art. Marlowe is expertly drawn by the author and makes for a sympathetic protagonist who embarks on a journey of discovery into Oliver’s life, into his art and his women. I also admired Kostova’s sumptuously evocative descriptive writing, in particular on art. So . . . with a healthy narrative, lead character and vivid milieu in place, I settled in for an absorbing read.
Regrettably, The Swan Thieves becomes unmoored as a result of word bloat. Perhaps a different editor could have cut it down to the three-hundred-page novel it is at heart, but by the middle of the 564 pages, I grew dangerously restive. The central conundrum – why the painter seemingly went crazy – is intriguing, but Kostova stretches it out in the equivalent of a shaggy dog story, and several plot elements lack credibility. Rather than being a surprise, the ending is telegraphed eons earlier. And the other characters besides Marlowe lack special distinction.
With so much to offer, The Swan Thieves would have made a fine mystery or a lyrical literary novel; as a baggy mixture of both, it ends up as interesting but flawed. 2½ stars.