Vampire Chronicles #3: The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice

Read: 26 August, 2008

In some ways, I'd say this was the worst of the three. In other ways, I think it was better than The Vampire Lestat. The story was more interesting, certainly, but the writing style was fragmented and annoying.

I think that Rice is much better at writing in the third person. That being said, the whole multiple narrators thing was infuriating. Every time I'd get really into one narrative, she'd rip me away and into a story I wasn't all that interested in. This was especially true near the end where novel kept bouncing back and forth between Lestat's experiences with Akasha and Marahet's legend of the twins. I desperately wanted to hear more about the twins and I would read those bits ravaneously. Then, I'd be thrust into Lestat's whining: "I love Akasha, she's evil, I love her, she's evil, I'm tempted by blood, I love her, she's evil, mmmm, she's so tasty!" Booooring.

This was made doubly frustrating because it was a good opportunity to explore whether or not Akasha was right. Lestat is never tempted by her plan. He is only tempted by her - even then, though, I never really got the feel that he loved her (beyond how tasty her blood was) until after she had died and he had to mourn. In fact, most of the arguments characters brought up against her plan were as irrational as the plan itself! "But but... it's so mean!" No one mentioned the simple fact that Akasha's world wouldn't work and that she herself was proof! As a female, while still human, she had ordered the torture of Mekare and Maharet. So why does she think that all other women would be all nice and friendly? As a vampire, she was commanding the mass slaughter of all men - proof in and of itself that women would be just as capable of genocide, if they had the chance, as men! But does anyone bring this up? Of course not.

Rice also seemed to experience with syntax in a really annoying way. "With leather straps they'd been bound [...] Naked to the waist they were." It breaks up the flow and is just a pain to read.

There were also inconsistencies between this book and The Vampire Lestat. For example, the final portion of Lestat describes the concert, which would have meant it was written after the book it was included in was published. If we assume this was added later, that would have meant that it had to be written right about the same time as The Queen of the Damned. Despite this, Lestat never mentions Jesse at the concert (instead, it has an anonymous biker jumping on stage). Considering how important this becomes, it should have been mentioned - if only as "and then a really nice looking red-head jumped on stage!"

And, finally, the names annoy me. Why would two women with names as Egyptian-sounding as Mekare and Maharet name their daughter something as Semitic-sounding as Miriam? Why would someone from Sumeria be named Akasha, which clearly has Indian roots? Why does Enkil's name not fit phonetically with Egyptian names? If names had been chosen a little more carefully, it would have made this whole series a great deal more readable.

I did enjoy it, though. I know I'm complaining a lot, but it was an okay read. I thought the climax was very well handled - or, at least, the resolution was worth trudging through all of the novel's flaws. I do think Jesse should have gotten a whole lot more page time, though. In fact, I would have liked to have had it all written just from her perspective and put as a "secret file from the Talamasca vault" or something like that. It would have made the multiple narratives more credible since she would have had her reason to collect data, while Lestat seems far too concerned with his own problems to have cared enough even to have bothered with the others.

Vampire Chronicles #2: The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice

Read: 14 July, 2008

Overall, I'd say that this was a good book. It wasn't fabulous, but it passed the time in an entertaining way. It didn't provide all that much food for thought. Despite the near-constant philosophical ramblings, I found that most of them contradicted with my own observations far too much to be thought-provoking (for example, one character explains that mortals will believe just about anything other than a supernatural explanation, preferring even the most ridiculous natural explanation - never mind all the talk about finding a good parking space being a "gift from god" or all the "real haunting" TV shows one sees on television). I do think that I liked it better than Interview With a Vampire, but that might just be because Interview was a bit of a disappointment after having seen and loved its movie.

The writing itself was fairly strong - not great, but better than average. There were some parts where present tense was used, despite the bulk of the novel being in the past tense. This wasn't done for any discernible purpose and it made those passages seem awkward.

I did take some issue with the narrative voice. For one thing, the start of the novel had a completely different tone to the rest. There's some half-hearted attempt to explain this, that Lestat is so old and has lived through so many linguistic eras that he switches between them from time to time. All well and good except that the voice of the first couple pages is never used again. All that explanation stuffed into the story when Rice could have just as easily re-written the first few pages to match the tone of the rest. Not to mention the fact that the voice of the first few pages was incredibly annoying, to the point that I considered not reading on.

My other major issue with the narrative voice is that it is very similar to the one used in Interview With a Vampire. There was no distinct personality showing through as I have seen in so many other novels. The Vampire Lestat was a novel best written in first person, and that was a good choice, but in terms of skill, Rice ought to have stuck to third person instead. This became even clearer during Armand and Marius' narratives. If I put the book down and picked it up again later, I could easily forget who was telling that part of the story. It's forgiveable in this case because of the plot - that Lestat is re-telling the stories he'd been told in the past. So it's conceivable that he is re-telling them in his own way. But this doesn't excuse the likeness of Louis's and Lestat's stories.

There was also a bit of sexism present, as in Interview With a Vampire. Female characters are given very little page time. In this book, there is the added discussion about how female vampires are unpredictable or mad. That being said, however, the narrators of Interview With a Vampire and The Vampire Lestat are both male and it is a character who makes the statement about female vampires. I am willing to accept that the sexism of these novels is from the characters and not the novel itself, especially since Claudia and Gabrielle both seem to be strong and independent (in mind, though Claudia, of course, is completely dependent in other ways) woman with clear and consistent goals. In many ways, I've found those two (with the possible addition of Eleni) to be more interesting than Louis, Lestat, Armand, or Marius. It's a shame they don't get their own stories (or maybe they do? If anyone reading this review knows of a Rice book where any of these three gets their own story, I'd love to know which one).

And my final complaint is with the names. I've never heard a French name like "Lestat." Just saying it, it doesn't sound French at all, even if the final T is pronounced (which would be a no-no in modern French). I don't know where Rice got it from, but I personally think it was a very poor choice. It killed my suspension of disbelief every time it came up because I would try to say it in French, as I do with Louis's name, and it just wouldn't work.

I loved the inconsistencies between Interview With a Vampire and the Vampire Lestat. I also liked that the explanations in the Vampire Lestat for questions that had been left unanswered fit well into a separate narrative of their own. This was something that had bothered be in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The subsequent novels attempted to explain away a lot of what had happened in the first, and this killed the jokes and made the subsequent novels feel like they were mostly there as additional material rather than stand-alone books. This was something Rice successfully avoided.

P.S.: What's the deal with Typhon? Why is the name Set never mentioned? If anyone knows, I'd love to hear it!

Vampire Chronicles #1: Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice

Read: 26 June, 2008

Overall, I did enjoy the book. I just found it disappointing in several ways. My first complaint is that the timeline was rather fuzzy. We are told at the beginning that the story starts in the 1790s. He then says that two hundred years pass before going to Paris, which really doesn't make all that much sense. I know that part of the whole point is that Louis survives by being so self-absorbed that he doesn't really notice the time flying by, but it would have been nice to have some indication of how much time has been passing. I would have liked a better sense of the change in eras rather than the "and everything was the same because my life sucks, boohoo" that we ended up getting.

The book was definitely a page-turner, but I felt vaguely disappointed whenever I did turn the page - especially in the first fifty or so pages. I think it's mostly because I enjoyed the movie so much and people have been telling me for years about how wonderful the book is. So I came to it with such high expectations that it couldn't possibly have lived up to them.

Louis's whining got on my nerves a bit. Most of the time, it was overshadowed by my interest in the plot so I didn't notice it. But there were passages that just went on and on about how terrible it is to be a vampire and how damned he is and how he doesn't know if God exists and so forth and it made me just want to smack him and tell him to get over it. I think that Lestat says it best at the end of the movie where he tells the interiewer that Louis always did whine a lot.

Speaking of the interviewer, I was very disappointed by that part of the book. Having an interviewer was a great opportunity for a dialogue between the reader (using the boy as a surrogate) and Louis - an opportunity that Rice misses. Instead, the boy is just an annoying disruption in the first portion of the story, completely non-existent for the second portion, and only came back at the very end for the punchline. It's as if the entire set up of an interview was just so that the boy could deliver the "final lesson" to the reader or something. Don't get me wrong, the punchline was good and I'm glad it was there, but it shouldn't have been the only reason for the boy's presence. There was wasted opportunity there and I can't help but feel let down.

Other than that, though, I did enjoy it. I liked the abusive boyfriend kind of angle to it. Claudia was a great character. All in all, I'd say that it's a great page-turner for a lazy afternoon, but not much more than that.