With its intense attention to detail, breadth of erudition, and themes of conspiracy, paranoia, and the lone intellect questing for answers, V. has been compared to the novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad. It can also be seen a mutation of the spy novel genre as practiced by, for example, Eric Ambler, the exotic mystery story such as Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu tales, or the romantic adventure tale in the manner of Willkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) or H. Rider Haggard's She (1887).