Plunging beyond the reach of the sun
Nov. 23rd, 2005 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bironicAnne Rice's book about Jesus has hit the shelves. I report this because I adore her first three(ish) Vampire Chronicles and maintain that she should have quit there, even with the occasional good bits in the rest of the books, before the eccentricity that has culminated in Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt took over.
For years Rice, who grew up with an alcoholic mother prone to severe depressive episodes, stressed that she was unhappy with her Catholic upbringing and had been estranged from the church; when she wrote Interview with the Vampire she was also deep in grief over the death of her very young daughter (resurrected and cut down once more in the form of the vampire Claudia), whom she lost to cancer, and questioning her faith. For me one of the attractions of that book was the vampires' desperate attempt to understand their place in a world they could no longer interact with, where they felt damned without even the cold comfort of knowing there was a Being to orchestrate or witness their damnation. Some of the vampires considered themselves gods on Earth. The millennia-old vampires were unapologetic pagans. The agnosticism was appealing, as was the characters' ability to be preoccupied with other problems at the same time.
As the series progressed and the divine became more of an obsession for Rice/Lestat, the characters lost much of their original interest (always a risk of sequels, true; and there were certainly other factors that contributed to the demise of the series). Louis searching for meaning and definite proof or disproof of the existence of a higher power was one thing; Armand's weakness for religious fervour and cultism started to push it; Lestat meeting God and the Devil and travelling back in time to the Crucifixion and going mad while his cohorts lined up to immolate themselves before Veronica's Veil was a little more than I could stomach. Some of her other books that I'd read went just as far, if not further -- Servant of the Bones comes to mind, chockablock with references to Yahweh, St. Sebastian and ladders to white light (not to mention traumatising images of what it's like to be raised by a negligent alcoholic) -- but it never irked me as much as it did in the Chronicles; that's probably because, as one of my co-workers would say, that sort of thing isn't what I signed up for when I started the series. Nothing wrong with religious themes, if that's your thing, but the way it worked in the Chronicles, especially after she was well on her way to establishing her own mythology within the text, it was as if a second author joined the team halfway through and decided that there needed to be answers of a Judeo-Christian sort.
Now, citing her near-death experience & epiphany following a diabetic coma a few years ago, Anne Rice has embraced her faith and written the first of a series of books about Jesus -- a literal Jesus rather than a metaphorical or fictional one this time. About ten years too late, if you ask me; I might have enjoyed more of the Chronicles if she hadn't decided to write the equivalent of Lestat Does Dante or spend two books rambling about how the young Armand was a fanatical cave-dwelling icon- (sorry, ikon-) painter in Russia who now, instead of staring wide-eyed at kitchen gadgets and spending barely comprehensible amounts of money and seducing men like Daniel, hallucinates about the Santa Sofia. Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is apparently non-fiction and doubtless is as thoroughly researched as her novels were. At first I was going to blow it off as the late-career indulgence of an aging woman who's always been slightly off-kilter and who's lost not only a daughter but also, more recently, her poet husband. But it also seems that she's sincerely into her subject and, even better, has after 30 years ditched her purple prose in favor of a style Newsday (grain of salt) compares to Hemingway.
I guess we wait for the reviews.
For years Rice, who grew up with an alcoholic mother prone to severe depressive episodes, stressed that she was unhappy with her Catholic upbringing and had been estranged from the church; when she wrote Interview with the Vampire she was also deep in grief over the death of her very young daughter (resurrected and cut down once more in the form of the vampire Claudia), whom she lost to cancer, and questioning her faith. For me one of the attractions of that book was the vampires' desperate attempt to understand their place in a world they could no longer interact with, where they felt damned without even the cold comfort of knowing there was a Being to orchestrate or witness their damnation. Some of the vampires considered themselves gods on Earth. The millennia-old vampires were unapologetic pagans. The agnosticism was appealing, as was the characters' ability to be preoccupied with other problems at the same time.
As the series progressed and the divine became more of an obsession for Rice/Lestat, the characters lost much of their original interest (always a risk of sequels, true; and there were certainly other factors that contributed to the demise of the series). Louis searching for meaning and definite proof or disproof of the existence of a higher power was one thing; Armand's weakness for religious fervour and cultism started to push it; Lestat meeting God and the Devil and travelling back in time to the Crucifixion and going mad while his cohorts lined up to immolate themselves before Veronica's Veil was a little more than I could stomach. Some of her other books that I'd read went just as far, if not further -- Servant of the Bones comes to mind, chockablock with references to Yahweh, St. Sebastian and ladders to white light (not to mention traumatising images of what it's like to be raised by a negligent alcoholic) -- but it never irked me as much as it did in the Chronicles; that's probably because, as one of my co-workers would say, that sort of thing isn't what I signed up for when I started the series. Nothing wrong with religious themes, if that's your thing, but the way it worked in the Chronicles, especially after she was well on her way to establishing her own mythology within the text, it was as if a second author joined the team halfway through and decided that there needed to be answers of a Judeo-Christian sort.
Now, citing her near-death experience & epiphany following a diabetic coma a few years ago, Anne Rice has embraced her faith and written the first of a series of books about Jesus -- a literal Jesus rather than a metaphorical or fictional one this time. About ten years too late, if you ask me; I might have enjoyed more of the Chronicles if she hadn't decided to write the equivalent of Lestat Does Dante or spend two books rambling about how the young Armand was a fanatical cave-dwelling icon- (sorry, ikon-) painter in Russia who now, instead of staring wide-eyed at kitchen gadgets and spending barely comprehensible amounts of money and seducing men like Daniel, hallucinates about the Santa Sofia. Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is apparently non-fiction and doubtless is as thoroughly researched as her novels were. At first I was going to blow it off as the late-career indulgence of an aging woman who's always been slightly off-kilter and who's lost not only a daughter but also, more recently, her poet husband. But it also seems that she's sincerely into her subject and, even better, has after 30 years ditched her purple prose in favor of a style Newsday (grain of salt) compares to Hemingway.
I guess we wait for the reviews.
