The
fans of Anne Rice's earlier work seem to be a mixed bag as to how they
react to her religious fiction and her spiritual
memoir, Called Out of Darkness.
Anne Rice herself has had to defend her work quite a bit but I think she
expected it,
if I understand the back notes to
Out of Egypt correctly. So this page of the site is dedicated to
exploring the topic
of Rice's current work.
Please try and remember that as
the webmistress, I reserve the right to state my own opinion on the
matter. Since
this is a site for fans, it is okay
to state your opinion as well. All I ask is that you do so respectfully
and courteously...like
a Southerner.
I think, if one reads all of Anne Rice's work since Interview With
the Vampire, one will find that a
common theme in her books is spiritual journeys and souls tormented by
questions of
God and eternity. Even if the
characters never appeal to God directly, they are still tormented by the
same questions.
Lestat,
as he moves us through his existence, is increasingly tormented
by the question of salvation and
even sainthood. He takes us through his first sexual experience in 200
years with
Gretchen in The Tale of the Body Thief, then anguishes over his love for Rowan Mayfair (but cannot actually have sex
with her) in Blood Canticle.
Rowan
Mayfair, though she never puts her questions in the context of
God, explores the same questions
more philosophically. Like Lestat, she is concerned with morals - right
and wrong, natural
versus unnatural. Even Mona, the
"wanderslut," acts upon her moral conviction when she first learns of
her pregnancy
by announcing the baby will be
delivered and raised by Mona ("this is a Catholic family...we don't do
away with babies" ~Taltos).
Later, she carries her grudge
against Rowan for the reason that she feels Rowan is directly
responsible for taking a newborn
- Mona's newborn - away from its
mother.
Then
there was Louis, who searched from the very beginning. In life, he had
no answer for the loss of someone he
loved (in the book, his brother; in the movie, his wife and child) so
he wanted to end
his life. When his life became a
sort of living death, "undead," he had no choice but to search for
meaning to
his existence. Again, same
questions, different framework.
Michael
Curry, though he had separated from the Church (as had Rice at the time
she
wrote the Mayfair trilogy), still
exhibited a desire to see, if not necessarily worship, at the altar of
his childhood.
Though his tour through St. Mary's
is nostalgic more than anything else, he is still thrilled at the
prospect of a traditional,
beautiful white-dress wedding.
Granted,
not all of Rice's characters are tormented souls, but the most famous
of
them certainly are. If Pandora and
Vittorio were searching souls, I must have missed it, but they certainly
had their
anguish and their sense of what was
good and right to them according to the time and culture their lives
took place in.
Can we say Azriel was not searching
for some kind of meaning, or the man who talked with him, hearing the
story of how Azriel
became the Servant of the Bones?
Was not Triana Becker in a similar torment (the most autobiographical
fiction character
Rice ever wrote about; I thought Violin
was one of her best and most underrated novels)? Though her torment,
on the surface, seemed to be about
her compromised talent for playing the violin and her own confidence,
what we see under
the surface is extreme guilt and
pain for the people she has lost.
Authors
write about what they know, what interests them and what concerns
them.
When I sit down to write (not on
this site), I write from those three elements. You could also say that
writers also
pursue what obsesses them. In that
way, writing can be cathartic, but also can give us greater
understanding as we see
the things our minds have created
spelled out before us. Getting it down on paper (or word processor)
allows us breathing
room; it allows us to explore
different aspects of the story and it grows from there, becomes richer
and the things we weren't
aware of about ourselves and the
world we live in become apparent.
It
was apparent to me that Rice's most enduring characters endured because
she put
more into them than others. The
specific "thing" she put into them was an ongoing spiritual torment that
could not be
resolved; there was no neat
beginning, middle and happy ending. Indeed, characters struggled to
establish a beginning
in order to find a path through the
middle they were muddling through to get to that elusive happy ending.
So
it is with religious fiction. How is Toby O'Dare any different? Like
Lestat, he started out wanting to be
a priest, appreciate the arts, but became a killer because death
visited him too early.
Instead of a walking dead body, we
have a walking dead soul. The parallels are in fact astonishing.
I
don't think it was Rice's intention to reshape anything from the past
to make
it fit into her current context. It
just happens that this is the major theme behind her life's work, and
her life itself.
This is what is the most apparent in
her work because this is one of the most critical things to her as a
person. I
think fans appreciate that more than
they will admit. It's easy to be scared off by the label "religious
fiction" but
this is hardly the first time in
history that religious fiction has been written or published in any
guise.
Rice's earlier work is often referred to as "gothic fiction." I think it would
be very interesting to look at what is "gothic" and what is "religious."
If you look at the backside of the jacket to Angel Time,
you see that what
looks like clouds are in fact angels
- millions upon billions upon trillions of angels, angels beyond count
is what the picture
implies. Some could be Roman,
some Egyptian, some Chinese, some English, some South American, some
Indian...or
they could all just be.
They could speak English, or Spanish, or French, or Africaans...or they
could
have a language all their own that
no living person could ever learn. They could be black, brown, white,
pink,
blue, yellow...or they could be of
indeterminate color. I'll bet they know a lot about Christian, Muslim,
Jewish,
Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Wicca,
Shinto, atheism...
Can
they fly, or do they use teleporters? The angels in the picture seem
to
all have wings but are those our own
metaphor for how we perceive their ability to be mobile in the
atmosphere?
To us, the only things that fly in
the air have wings. Naturally, we are going to assign these heavenly
creatures an
anatomy that requires wings
for flight. Does that mean they could be part raptor without the
talons?
There are so many questions and so many different answers that it's easy for it all
to make your head dizzy.
It's okay to ask questions...that is why religious and gothic fiction both are so
enduring.
