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.
