A tragic story of faith, love, intrigue and conflict during the era of Charlemagne (800 AD). I started reading this series, who main character is a vampire, in the 80's. What has drawn me back to them, is that they are meticulously researched for each historical era and geographical place. It's not so much about being a vampire, as being in a long time line and the march of history and place, seen through one particular pair of eyes. If you like historical novels, you'll probably love any of the St. Germain chronicles by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. ( )

Night Blooming is the 15th published book (of 23 as of this writing) and chronologically the 6th book in the long-running (over three decades and counting...) Saint-Germain series proper (the chronology on the author's website includes offshoots of the series: books featuring former lovers of the Count Saint-Germain, Atta Olivia Clemens and Madelaine de Montalia), featuring the millennia-old vampire known by variations of his name through the years and many different locales that he resides in: Rakoczy, the Count Saint-Germain, the intellectual vampire who, after several hundred years as a more typical revenant, has come to embrace love and treasure life, despite a maddening, numbing series of events that would sway most saints to the blackest misanthropy.

Night Blooming is set during the those years of Charlemagne's rule (here mostly styled Karl-lo-Magne) that proved to have the most impact on European history: 796-801 A.D. Saint-Germain finds himself summoned to Charlemagne's court by Charlemagne's favorite scholarly churchman, Alcuin of York, to debrief him and his fellow scholars on the lands that he has seen (particularly what is now China, then ruled by "the Great Khan") and the mathematics that he knows ("which rival the Arabs for subtlety and potency"; p. 3); Saint-Germain finds his geographical knowledge derided and disbelieved because it doesn't conform with the scholars' benighted notions of what the world looks like and not much attention is given to his mad math skills before he is drawn into Charlemagne's orbit after inadvertently helping the Frankish king on a hunt. After Charlemagne pays him various double-edged honors -- including granting him a literate mistress named Odile whom the always lecherous Charlemagne soon reclaims for his own enjoyment -- Saint-Germain is obliged to take under protection a woman named Gynethe Mehaut (that's a first name, BTW: "Gynethe Mehaut is like Marie-Louise, not like Mary Smith"; p. xi) who doubly alarms most of her contemporaries due to her albinism and her stigmata: as Yarbro explains in her foreword and exhaustively, even tiresomely, demonstrates in the novel itself, the Catholic Church's first reaction to stigmatics in the 8th and 9th centuries was one of suspicion, if not outright fear; the fact that a woman would have the temerity to manifest the sacred wounds of the World's Saviour was an affront and a challenge more profound than the countryfolk's continuing worship of their old gods to most of the clergy.

Saint-Germain is ordered by Charlemagne to escort Gynethe Mehaut to Rome to be examined by a court convened by Charlemagne's patron-cum-vassal, Pope Leo III, whom Charlemagne sheltered at his imperial residence at Paderborn after Leo survived an attempted mutilation in April 799. Along the way, Saint-Germain and Gynethe Mehaut come to know one another a little better, and one of Saint-Germain's former lovers-turned-vampire, Atta Olivia Clemens (first introduced in Blood Games; 1979), makes a welcome guest appearance, instead of being confined solely to a series of letters that she exchanges with Saint-Germain, as is more typical.

Like many of Yarbro's Saint-Germain books, Night Blooming is jam-packed with an impressive amount of historical detail that focuses as much on the mundane lives of ordinary people as it does on the lives and loves of the great and powerful. Also, as is true with many of her Saint-Germain books, one can't make out why Saint-Germain is so determined to do right, or at least, do no harm: most of the people here (as in most of the other Saint-Germain books that I've read) are so uniformly unlikeable, even when they're not out-and-out dangerous, that one may find one's self longing for a hard rain, a cleansing fire -- a good old fashioned ass-whuppin', fram damn it, if not a good long bout of whack-'em-and-stack-'em. In Yarbro's universe, the only truly good people are either vampires or dead, and even fans of vampires (as Your Reviewer is not) are apt to be disappointed by the low-key manner in which Yarbro presents the supernatural happenings. Readers looking for more in the way of romance are apt to come away unfulfilled as well, especially after reading several Saint-Germain books: not only is the Count's wooing of various and sundry ladies rote and pat, but Yarbro's love scenes are borderline -- and sometimes well over the border-- risible. (Male vampires are impotent; in any case, Yarbo's vampires are physically unable to love each other, as vampires can only take nourishment -- physical or spiritual -- from the living, which is why Saint-Germain and Olivia can't simply hide out at a secluded estate for a few centuries and say sod-all to the world of men.)

Night Blooming takes much too long to get its main plot moving -- the mass market paperback edition is 646 pages long, excluding the ten-paged author's note (and the nine-paged excerpt from Midnight Harvest; the excerpt presented here is set in Franco's Spain in the 1930s) -- and by the time it does, one may well have lost interest in precisely how badly things will end for Gynethe Mehaut and Saint-Germain. Yarbro's portraits of Charlemagne and the barely-there Leo aren't up to her usual standards of representation of historical figures in her novels; particularly disappointing is the way that she comes down on the side of Charlemagne calling the shots once he's able to succor Leo from his (literally) Byzantine enemies: Yarbro makes it pretty clear that it was Charlemagne's idea to be crowned emperor (he was the first Holy Roman Emperor, although supposedly he wasn't called that in his lifetime), whereas modern thought (as represented in two short 2006 studies, Derek Wilson's Charlemagne and Jeff Sypecks' Becoming Charlemagne: Europe, Baghdad, and the Empires of A.D. 800) suggests that even The Great Karl was nonplussed at how his coronation played out on Christmas Day in 800 A.D. One also wonders at Yarbro depicting all of Leo's enemies as being supporters of the Greek Orthodox Church, or at least of the only extant polity directly descended from the Roman Empire; one suspects that a good many of Leo's foes were more incensed at his common origins than desirous of seeing the Greek rites usurp the Roman. OTOH, if digging a little deeper into the background of the attack on Leo would've added another hundred or so pages to this book, then I'm all for the condensation and simplification.

That said -- and for all of Yarbro's relative lack of fleshed-out characters (historical points are more apt to come tripping out of minor characters' mouths than anything resembling real dialogue) -- Night Blooming is worth a look from any history buff curious about the novel's setting. It may have taken me a little over four months to read, but it's still doubtless less painful than a graduate degree in medieval history would be. ( )