As pseudonyms go, Temple Drake isn’t exactly a low-key choice. Adopted by the highly regarded Rupert Thomson for what is billed as “a modern twist on the vampire myth”, its stagy flamboyance might lead us – think late period Anne Rice – to expect the worst. This expectation, though, is the first of many that NVK overturns.
In 1579, a young girl flees the remote Karelian farmstead where her family have been slaughtered by marauding Russians. Shunned and solitary, she resolves to “pass unnoticed through this this world”. She takes to biting her forearm, comforted by the taste of her own blood, but these acts of self-harm nourish a radical self-sufficiency and provoke a transformation.
When we see her again, it is through the eyes of one Zhang Guo Xing, a wealthy, disaffected financier in the Shanghai of 2012. Now styling herself Naemi Vieno Kuusela (the titular NVK), she is enigmatic and uncannily beautiful, with hair “like a fall of light”. She appears, in other words, to be a familiar creature of male fantasy, but here the projection of such desires is part of the point and, for Naemi, hardly a new experience. Besides, she has desires of her own.
The two become lovers, on her strictly limited terms. Between interludes of rhapsodic sex, Zhang must await her pleasure. While he moons around beneath the city’s gleaming towers, Naemi retreats to her spartan eyrie above the city. There she contemplates the unfortunate persistence of human desire before curling up – in an overt nod to canonical lore – on a pile of earth shipped from her native Karelia.
For Naemi, those persistent human desires contend with centuries’ worth of wariness. If she finds Zhang modestly intriguing, it is largely because he seems less than usually needy. In her presence, though, his self-sufficiency begins to rupture. He is warned against her by friends – warnings laced with dark allusions to Chinese mythology – but only grows more obsessive, even enlisting an underworld contact to investigate her. He begins, as men often do, to want too much from her.
All of this is just as glitteringly baroque as it sounds, but made palatable by the finely calibrated style for which Thomson is known. And for all its mythological opulence, the tale’s central ambiguity – the question of who is preying on whom – seems urgently modern. Like all vampires, Naemi has been feared and ostracised for centuries, yet she feeds only on herself. Cowering in bathroom cubicles with a cannula, she seeks to “break the circle in her body, the loop of her own blood”. What choice does she have, after all, but to reenact this formative damage? As lonely and changeless as she is, it is the world of men, insistent and voracious, that has never really changed.
• Paraic O’Donnell’s The House on Vesper Sands is published by W&N. NVK is published by Titan (RRP £8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
