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reipanAlright, kids, it's time for me to tell you what I think of Anne Rice. Brace yourselves - it's going to be an unpleasantly twisty ride.
Before we begin, though, a quick note on another issue entirely, so as to avoid any possible (and by "any possible", I mean "one of the many possible") wanderings off on tangents later on. Let's talk about polyamory.
I admit that as a concept, polyamory (lit. "many loves", or the having of many romantic relationships, for those of you who have more of a life than me) squicks me quite a bit. Well, actually, let me rephrase - the idea of doing it makes me very uncomfortable. I can read and, to an extent, write polyamory, and, like most things, when it's well-done, it's very, very well-done. Nor do I think there's anything wrong with people who want to be poly being poly. But if someone I was dating told me they were polyamorous, I wouldn't be too happy with the idea; if they told me that in order for the relationship to continue I would have to let them see other people as well as me, then the relationship would be over. I don't write in-depth poly relationships (except for maybe once); I don't roleplay polyamorous characters. It's a matter of taste, and I Just Don't Like It. (This is, I hasten to add, confined to the idea of more than one romantic partner - sexual openness in relationships I'm all for. Well, I say "all for" - I don't think I'd like to have an open relationship, but it's an idea I'm willing to play with.)
What has this to do with Anne Rice, I hear you cry? Well, I have yet to encounter a monogamous character in any of her Vampire Chronicles; as I have this aversion to polyamory, some of you may conclude that I'm not exactly an unbiased commentator. Let me, however, say this to you: homosexuality is something I'm totally down with. I'd have some serious problems if it weren't, as anyone who knows me will tell. However, I have a hard time reading stories in which gay is the norm - which is not the same as saying "stories with many gay characters". Much of what I write could be classed, I suppose, as "gay fiction"; many of my characters are gay or bisexual. However, I realise that gay people make up a very small percentage of the population; therefore, the societies in which gay characters operate in will be primarily composed of straight people. Because most people are straight. It's not that hard to grasp. So, when presented with a society where everyone is poly, my objection is as much logical as preferential; why are all these people, from a variety of different backgrounds and cultures, polyamorous?
Now, granted, I could be reading altogether too much into this (or, as Mrs Rice puts it, "interrogating the text from the wrong perspective). Because in Anne Rice books - especially among the vampires - the boundaries between sexual attraction, romantic attraction, and platonic affection are somewhat blurred. More on that later.
Onward to the main event!
Alright. So, until a couple of years ago, I thought that Anne Rice was a good author. For those of you unfamiliar with the work of Anne Rice, she wrote Interview with a Vampire - which is a good book - and the rest of a the Vampire Chronicles, which...well, don't all live up to the same standard. I'll come right out and say that outside of her work, I don't think much of her - I've read the infamous reply she gave to her reviewers on Amazon. (For those of you unfamiliar with that particular bit of internet history, she basically said "my book is AWESOME. If you don't like it, you're reading it wrong". If you'd like to read it in its entirety, look up Blood Canticle on Amazon, 'cause I'm not digging it up for you.) But I'd read Interview with a Vampire and enjoyed it, and The Vampire Lestat, while not as good as Interview, was nevertheless absorbing. She therefore remained, in my mind, a good writer, although not someone I'd like if I met in person. I'm afraid to pick up either of those two books now; I suppose I'll have to reread them again eventually.
I'd been warned about Anne Rice's later works - apparently the difference between her books pre- and post-editor (any author who refuses to use an editor, by the way, is not someone I approve of) was marked. However, I thought I'd check out some of her other stuff. I got The Vampire Armand out of the library that summer, took it to France with me, and read it. A suspicion began to stir in me once I had done this; again, more on that later. Suffice to say that I didn't think much of it; I began to find Anne Rice very repetitive, and I was disappointed with what had been done with Armand, who I'd liked in Interview. After that, I slacked off on Anne Rice; I'd wanted to read Queen of the Damned just so that I'd know what had happened, but I didn't want to buy it, and I rarely have the time or inclination to go to libraries. The last time I went to one was to take out Eldest; I'm going at some point this week to take out some books for Sicily, and after that I'll probably go when Brisingr, or however you spell the ridiculously-titled next installment in the Eragon series (or, again, whatever the official name is) is put into libraries. The Anne Rice question sat in my brain, unattended.
However, all things in their proper time and place; I was at Nat's this week, and the topic of Anne Rice came up. She, like me, expressed the sentiment of having gone off her slightly. I remembered that she had Queen of the Damned, remembered also that I was short of reading material, and asked to borrow it, a request to which she readily assented. She also gave me Merrick, which I've only just started, and which will henceforth be referred to as Maverick, because that's how I keep misreading the title. I wish I knew why. I can't seem to stop.
Queen of the Damned was a huge, huge disappointment. I'm not sure what I was expecting, to be honest, but...well. As soon as I opened the front cover and saw that it was dedicated to the memory of her editors, I knew I wasn't going to like what I read.
For starters - Lestat. Anne Rice's vampires embody much of what I dislike about vampiric portrayal - they're beautiful, have magical wonderful powers, and are generally Evil and Sexy. I won't restate why all these things annoy me; read the entry on vampires if you've forgotten or never knew. But Lestat...oh, he annoys me. It's sad, because he had so much potential; I liked him in Interview; Louis/Lestat is a pairing I'm very fond of. But he slowly grew, over time, into a complete Gary-Stu. He's beautiful. He's angsty. He's totally indestructible - seriously - even immortal beings nominally more powerful than he are always saying that he'll never, ever be killed. He's arrogant, okay, I can live with characters who are arrogant, as long as it's an actual flaw. It's not. From the beginning of Queen of the Damned:
"And by the way, when other characters describe me as beautiful or irresistible, etc., don't think I put those words into their heads. I didn't! It's what was told to me after, or what I drew out of their minds with infallible telepathic power; I wouldn't lie about that or anything else. I can't help being a gorgeous fiend."
Spoiler alert: There is not a single character who does not describe him as beautiful or irresistible, etc. And they all do so in much the same terms; the recurring one is the description of him as a "brat prince". The trouble is that all vampires are, in this book, and so it ceases to be a defining quality; it ceases to make him interesting. So he's beautiful. Which vampire isn't? Rice clumsily tries to excuse this later in the book:
"Was nobody ugly ever given immortality? Or did the dark magic simply make beauty out of whatever was thrown into the blaze? But Gabrielle had been a lovely thing in life surely, with all her son's courage and none of his impetuosity, and Louis, ah, well, Louis of course had been picked for the fine bones of his face, for the depth of his green eyes..."
And so on. The fact is that either vampires are, against what Anne Rice herself would have us believe, entirely superficial creatures, and therefore only select pretty humans to make into vampires, or Anne Rice just wants all her main characters pretty. I know which I'm betting on.
Another issue I took with Queen of the Damned in particular was that Anne Rice comes across, for the most part, as incredibly sexist. A dialogue between Akasha and Lestat (villain and hero, for our purposes) had me wondering who was worse - the woman claiming that women are all perfectly loving beings who did nothing for personal gain and that only by destroying men can we live in peace, or the man claiming that women are attracted to the side of men that likes to smack them silly; that "their souls crave it".
The relationships, then. It saddens me greatly that Anne Rice has forbidden fanfiction based on her works, because frankly I think fan-authors would be able to do much better with her characters than she, in some cases. Because they're all polyamorous, basically anything can be canon - Lestat loves and is loved by most of the other characters; Marius, Armand, Gabrielle (who starts out, incidentally, as his mother), Louis, and so on. Although some of her characters have favourites - Marius has a preference for Armand, Armand favours Daniel, Louis and Gabrielle are particular favourites of Lestat - basically, if you put two of her characters in the same room they'll fall in love eventually. And again, it happens to such an extent that the love they all supposedly feel for one another becomes meaningless. Lestat falls in love with Akasha? So what? He's in love with half of the other characters too, mostly because of their startling good looks; there's very little record of any of these people spending much time together before the Love kicks in, with the possible exception of Louis and Lestat (which is why they're my OTP; but even their relationship doesn't get much attention after Interview. It's more "they looked at one another and found one another beautiful, and there was love between them. Scene change!"). And although it's made very specific at the end of Queen of the Damned that Akasha and Lestat "were lovers, you know, as surely as a mortal man and woman ever were", I can find very little in their relationship that distinguishes it from what Lestat has with Louis or Gabrielle, except the flying and burning people to death.
The descriptions of vampiric feeding, also, are a source of dissatisfaction to me. Basically a lot of what Rice writes reads like thinly-disguised pornography; the blood-drinking is positively orgasmic for both vampire and victim, and if the victim is to be turned then they drink the vampire's blood and the whole cycle starts again. All you have to do is change the names of the body parts being used, and you've got a fairly standard sex scene, including, most of the time, declarations of eternal love and possession afterwards.
And it's a shame, because her plots could have been so interesting, if she'd just gone for a little variation. As it is, they're overwhelmed by all of this other stuff about Love and Lust and Drinking Blood; you can't go for more than about a page without bumping into it in some shape or form, and it's unbearable. Just as I was getting really interested in Jesse and her life (and by the way, Maharet The Guardian Vampire Who Is Actually A Firstborn? Predictable), she becomes a vampire, and she's never quite the same.
In short: It's a shame about Anne Rice. She could have been great, really great. I'll get back to you on her witches once I've finished Maverick, which apparently has more witches in it. Lord help us all.
Obligatory life update, Plus Advertising: Went to a party at the Japanese Embassy yesterday to celebrate the launch of a competition. If you live in the UK and draw manga, you might be interested in entering Manga-Jiman 150; comment me for more details.
Reipan out!
Before we begin, though, a quick note on another issue entirely, so as to avoid any possible (and by "any possible", I mean "one of the many possible") wanderings off on tangents later on. Let's talk about polyamory.
I admit that as a concept, polyamory (lit. "many loves", or the having of many romantic relationships, for those of you who have more of a life than me) squicks me quite a bit. Well, actually, let me rephrase - the idea of doing it makes me very uncomfortable. I can read and, to an extent, write polyamory, and, like most things, when it's well-done, it's very, very well-done. Nor do I think there's anything wrong with people who want to be poly being poly. But if someone I was dating told me they were polyamorous, I wouldn't be too happy with the idea; if they told me that in order for the relationship to continue I would have to let them see other people as well as me, then the relationship would be over. I don't write in-depth poly relationships (except for maybe once); I don't roleplay polyamorous characters. It's a matter of taste, and I Just Don't Like It. (This is, I hasten to add, confined to the idea of more than one romantic partner - sexual openness in relationships I'm all for. Well, I say "all for" - I don't think I'd like to have an open relationship, but it's an idea I'm willing to play with.)
What has this to do with Anne Rice, I hear you cry? Well, I have yet to encounter a monogamous character in any of her Vampire Chronicles; as I have this aversion to polyamory, some of you may conclude that I'm not exactly an unbiased commentator. Let me, however, say this to you: homosexuality is something I'm totally down with. I'd have some serious problems if it weren't, as anyone who knows me will tell. However, I have a hard time reading stories in which gay is the norm - which is not the same as saying "stories with many gay characters". Much of what I write could be classed, I suppose, as "gay fiction"; many of my characters are gay or bisexual. However, I realise that gay people make up a very small percentage of the population; therefore, the societies in which gay characters operate in will be primarily composed of straight people. Because most people are straight. It's not that hard to grasp. So, when presented with a society where everyone is poly, my objection is as much logical as preferential; why are all these people, from a variety of different backgrounds and cultures, polyamorous?
Now, granted, I could be reading altogether too much into this (or, as Mrs Rice puts it, "interrogating the text from the wrong perspective). Because in Anne Rice books - especially among the vampires - the boundaries between sexual attraction, romantic attraction, and platonic affection are somewhat blurred. More on that later.
Onward to the main event!
Alright. So, until a couple of years ago, I thought that Anne Rice was a good author. For those of you unfamiliar with the work of Anne Rice, she wrote Interview with a Vampire - which is a good book - and the rest of a the Vampire Chronicles, which...well, don't all live up to the same standard. I'll come right out and say that outside of her work, I don't think much of her - I've read the infamous reply she gave to her reviewers on Amazon. (For those of you unfamiliar with that particular bit of internet history, she basically said "my book is AWESOME. If you don't like it, you're reading it wrong". If you'd like to read it in its entirety, look up Blood Canticle on Amazon, 'cause I'm not digging it up for you.) But I'd read Interview with a Vampire and enjoyed it, and The Vampire Lestat, while not as good as Interview, was nevertheless absorbing. She therefore remained, in my mind, a good writer, although not someone I'd like if I met in person. I'm afraid to pick up either of those two books now; I suppose I'll have to reread them again eventually.
I'd been warned about Anne Rice's later works - apparently the difference between her books pre- and post-editor (any author who refuses to use an editor, by the way, is not someone I approve of) was marked. However, I thought I'd check out some of her other stuff. I got The Vampire Armand out of the library that summer, took it to France with me, and read it. A suspicion began to stir in me once I had done this; again, more on that later. Suffice to say that I didn't think much of it; I began to find Anne Rice very repetitive, and I was disappointed with what had been done with Armand, who I'd liked in Interview. After that, I slacked off on Anne Rice; I'd wanted to read Queen of the Damned just so that I'd know what had happened, but I didn't want to buy it, and I rarely have the time or inclination to go to libraries. The last time I went to one was to take out Eldest; I'm going at some point this week to take out some books for Sicily, and after that I'll probably go when Brisingr, or however you spell the ridiculously-titled next installment in the Eragon series (or, again, whatever the official name is) is put into libraries. The Anne Rice question sat in my brain, unattended.
However, all things in their proper time and place; I was at Nat's this week, and the topic of Anne Rice came up. She, like me, expressed the sentiment of having gone off her slightly. I remembered that she had Queen of the Damned, remembered also that I was short of reading material, and asked to borrow it, a request to which she readily assented. She also gave me Merrick, which I've only just started, and which will henceforth be referred to as Maverick, because that's how I keep misreading the title. I wish I knew why. I can't seem to stop.
Queen of the Damned was a huge, huge disappointment. I'm not sure what I was expecting, to be honest, but...well. As soon as I opened the front cover and saw that it was dedicated to the memory of her editors, I knew I wasn't going to like what I read.
For starters - Lestat. Anne Rice's vampires embody much of what I dislike about vampiric portrayal - they're beautiful, have magical wonderful powers, and are generally Evil and Sexy. I won't restate why all these things annoy me; read the entry on vampires if you've forgotten or never knew. But Lestat...oh, he annoys me. It's sad, because he had so much potential; I liked him in Interview; Louis/Lestat is a pairing I'm very fond of. But he slowly grew, over time, into a complete Gary-Stu. He's beautiful. He's angsty. He's totally indestructible - seriously - even immortal beings nominally more powerful than he are always saying that he'll never, ever be killed. He's arrogant, okay, I can live with characters who are arrogant, as long as it's an actual flaw. It's not. From the beginning of Queen of the Damned:
"And by the way, when other characters describe me as beautiful or irresistible, etc., don't think I put those words into their heads. I didn't! It's what was told to me after, or what I drew out of their minds with infallible telepathic power; I wouldn't lie about that or anything else. I can't help being a gorgeous fiend."
Spoiler alert: There is not a single character who does not describe him as beautiful or irresistible, etc. And they all do so in much the same terms; the recurring one is the description of him as a "brat prince". The trouble is that all vampires are, in this book, and so it ceases to be a defining quality; it ceases to make him interesting. So he's beautiful. Which vampire isn't? Rice clumsily tries to excuse this later in the book:
"Was nobody ugly ever given immortality? Or did the dark magic simply make beauty out of whatever was thrown into the blaze? But Gabrielle had been a lovely thing in life surely, with all her son's courage and none of his impetuosity, and Louis, ah, well, Louis of course had been picked for the fine bones of his face, for the depth of his green eyes..."
And so on. The fact is that either vampires are, against what Anne Rice herself would have us believe, entirely superficial creatures, and therefore only select pretty humans to make into vampires, or Anne Rice just wants all her main characters pretty. I know which I'm betting on.
Another issue I took with Queen of the Damned in particular was that Anne Rice comes across, for the most part, as incredibly sexist. A dialogue between Akasha and Lestat (villain and hero, for our purposes) had me wondering who was worse - the woman claiming that women are all perfectly loving beings who did nothing for personal gain and that only by destroying men can we live in peace, or the man claiming that women are attracted to the side of men that likes to smack them silly; that "their souls crave it".
The relationships, then. It saddens me greatly that Anne Rice has forbidden fanfiction based on her works, because frankly I think fan-authors would be able to do much better with her characters than she, in some cases. Because they're all polyamorous, basically anything can be canon - Lestat loves and is loved by most of the other characters; Marius, Armand, Gabrielle (who starts out, incidentally, as his mother), Louis, and so on. Although some of her characters have favourites - Marius has a preference for Armand, Armand favours Daniel, Louis and Gabrielle are particular favourites of Lestat - basically, if you put two of her characters in the same room they'll fall in love eventually. And again, it happens to such an extent that the love they all supposedly feel for one another becomes meaningless. Lestat falls in love with Akasha? So what? He's in love with half of the other characters too, mostly because of their startling good looks; there's very little record of any of these people spending much time together before the Love kicks in, with the possible exception of Louis and Lestat (which is why they're my OTP; but even their relationship doesn't get much attention after Interview. It's more "they looked at one another and found one another beautiful, and there was love between them. Scene change!"). And although it's made very specific at the end of Queen of the Damned that Akasha and Lestat "were lovers, you know, as surely as a mortal man and woman ever were", I can find very little in their relationship that distinguishes it from what Lestat has with Louis or Gabrielle, except the flying and burning people to death.
The descriptions of vampiric feeding, also, are a source of dissatisfaction to me. Basically a lot of what Rice writes reads like thinly-disguised pornography; the blood-drinking is positively orgasmic for both vampire and victim, and if the victim is to be turned then they drink the vampire's blood and the whole cycle starts again. All you have to do is change the names of the body parts being used, and you've got a fairly standard sex scene, including, most of the time, declarations of eternal love and possession afterwards.
And it's a shame, because her plots could have been so interesting, if she'd just gone for a little variation. As it is, they're overwhelmed by all of this other stuff about Love and Lust and Drinking Blood; you can't go for more than about a page without bumping into it in some shape or form, and it's unbearable. Just as I was getting really interested in Jesse and her life (and by the way, Maharet The Guardian Vampire Who Is Actually A Firstborn? Predictable), she becomes a vampire, and she's never quite the same.
In short: It's a shame about Anne Rice. She could have been great, really great. I'll get back to you on her witches once I've finished Maverick, which apparently has more witches in it. Lord help us all.
Obligatory life update, Plus Advertising: Went to a party at the Japanese Embassy yesterday to celebrate the launch of a competition. If you live in the UK and draw manga, you might be interested in entering Manga-Jiman 150; comment me for more details.
Reipan out!
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Date: 2008-06-15 07:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-16 04:05 pm (UTC)~pondering~
Date: 2010-06-08 07:39 am (UTC)