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For those of you who actually visit the on the forums, it should come as no surprise that KA and I have recently started (and recently, abruptly stopped) reading Anne Rice. KA posted the following on her most recent short under the thread:
"A couple weeks ago Rose went out and, for about 2 dollars, bought a bunch of random paperback novels from some broken-down old library. One of the books she bought was Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. I’d never read the book or seen the movie in whole, so I really should’ve shut my mouth, but being opinionated as I am I still felt it necessary to warn Rose that Anne Rice sucks. As per usual she didn’t heed my warning and read the book anyway; we then discussed it at length and after bitching about ten or twelve things we decided that it really wasn’t that bad. I then proceeded to go into her room and pick up the book every day for the next two weeks, reading little bits of it each time. Of course by this point Rose had already talked me into looking up 2 more Anne Rice books based on some of the characters in IwtV, which we then read and complained about."
Some clarifications:
- That "broken-down old library" is in fact the Ottawa Public Library, and is neither broken-down, nor really old. There’s a bookstore in the basement that sells books that people have donated to them to raise funds for the library (and they have a selection of sci-fi/fantasy that is about four million times cooler than anything the four story library has to offer on all two and half shelves dedicated to it). Two or three times a week they come up to the lobby and display their wares for hapless customers like myself who can’t walk buy a book sale without at least looking. Thus I wound up with Interview with the Vampire.
- KA, despite her early and vehement statements about how much Anne Rice sucks, and Interview with the Vampire sucks, spent more time reading and re-reading the book than I did, in her own, piece by piece, back to front way – because, you know, she hadn’t before. Or even seen the movie. Or really had anything to do with Anne Rice, ever. The moral of the story: KA is a lying whore.
- I didn’t talk KA into buying two more Anne Rice books. KA wanted to go out and buy The Vampire Lestat AND the IwtV movie. It was her idea, not mine. When we were there, I saw The Vampire Armand, and, Armand being my favourite character, I grabbed it. KA grabbed Lestat and the movie. I reiterate: it was KA’s idea.
- Since then I’ve also purchased Blood and Gold, which essentially should have been called The Vampire Marius.
So far I’ve read Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Armand, Blood and Gold, and the first three pages of The Vampire Lestat (in that order). But to tell the truth, after Blood and Gold I’ve kind of sworn off Anne Rice. I might still read The Vampire Lestat, but I got angry in the first three pages and put it down.
Interview with the Vampire was very good. I wouldn’t call it excellent necessarily, but it was well-written, entertaining, and had a romantic tone that I’ve always enjoyed (and I’m not talking about Valentine’s day romance here, folks. I’m talking about the actual, original definition of the word). It was very nicely executed, and the end had just the right touch of tragedy and sadness. I had assumed, at the time, that Armand had gone into the sun and died. It’s never said, but given the set-up, and Armand’s own description of what happens to Vampires who get too old, and Louis’ inconclusive description of his parting with Armand (not to mention what Louis symbolized for Armand), it made a certain, tragic sort of sense. It also made for a very good ending, and kept the story nice and tight.
So, I had mixed feelings when I realized there was a book about Armand. I loved Armand to pieces – hands down my favourite character (once upon a time he vied with Marius for the position, but then I read Blood and Gold and Marius kind of … fell off the list entirely), but I liked the idea of him killing himself at the end of IwtV. In the long run, though, the fan girl in me won over and I was happy he hadn’t died – though it does detract from IwtV a bit. Also – glory of glories – the first two thirds of the book are entirely happy! No tragedy except Armand’s (Amadeo’s at the time) angst over his rather shitty childhood, which only came up every so often anyway, and ultimately resulted in wonderfully cute scenes with Marius, and were therefore entirely forgivable (and who, besides KA, doesn’t like a little bit of angst on the side, anyway?). I was floored, but fully aware that it would eventually be shattered into a thousand pieces because, hey, Anne Rice. Lo and behold, it finally did, and while it’s not the eventual shattering that annoyed me, there were several things, from that point on, that stuck out like a sore thumb to me and really irritated the Hell out of me. Things she’d rewritten from IwtV, either poorly, so the revision is blindingly obvious, or without any care at all for what she’d previously rewritten, so that it’s confusing and nonsensical and out of character. The most annoying of which was her short retelling of the relationship and subsequent break up of Louis and Armand, in which she absolves Armand of all guilt in destroying Louis by blatantly neglecting to mention it, and in fact acting like it never happened, and adding in a fucked up little detail about Armand’s attempts to "save" Claudia before she died.
But I love Armand. I loved him even more after the book, whatever its little annoyances towards the end. But the book had ultimately left several questions unanswered. Why had Marius ostensibly abandoned Armand to his mental, physical, and spiritual torture at the hands of Santino? Why didn’t he reveal to Armand that he was still alive? Why didn’t the two of them react when they finally met again after hundreds of years? And so on and so forth. It felt like a set-up for a book about Marius, so I looked it up. Lo and behold, there it was. So I went out and bought it.
To tell the truth, Blood and Gold is really, rather boring. I suffered through the first large portion of the book, just waiting for Armand to appear. It took for fucking ever. And then finally, there it was! The part I’d been waiting for. And what does she (Anne Rice) do? Rewrites the Vampire Armand and changes it in ways that appear small and subtle, but in fact bastardize everything that mattered. To sum up: Marius pisses off Santino, who kidnaps Marius’ kids and Armand to get back him. Santino burns the boys horribly, and tortures Armand until he (thinking that Marius is dead and that he has nothing to go back to or live for anyway) finally breaks and joins Santino and his cult of Satan worshipping freaks. Meanwhile, Marius turns Bianca into a vampire because hey, she’s hot (every last reason given in that scene is bullshit), and promptly proceeds (like, the next day)to forget about Armand because Armand was really only a symbol of his love of mortals, and he was past that stage in his life now, and, hey, Bianca’s hot. Later he goes to France to spy on Armand and see how he’s doing, finds him at the head of one of Santino’s covens, and promptly blames Armand’s whole, fucked up life since Santino took him, on Armand, absolving himself of all responsibility because if Armand wanted to be free of it, he could free himself. At no point does he let Armand know he is, in fact, alive. Why would he do that? After all, Armand’s not his responsibility. He obviously let this happen to him, what with the being tortured for Marius’ mistake when he was seventeen years old, and thinking the only person he loved was dead, and being mind-fucking-fucked to the point where he didn’t know what the Hell was going on. Oh yes. It was totally his free and willing choice. And obviously his fall is entirely his fault. So let’s just let him continue to dwell in his own mistakes – which of course, having everything to do with Marius, have nothing to do with Marius.
Now, this would be fine if I thought that Marius was the type of person to do that. But the problem is, this is a complete turn around from his character as presented in Armand’s book, and in Lestat’s book as well (according to KA). He’s set up as the wise, old, fatherly figure, who protects everyone and cares about everyone’s well being. And in Blood and Gold he’s presented as a cowardly, selfish, short-sighted man who uses the people he claims to love and is quick to discard them when he no longer requires their company. He’s a shrivelled up husk of the vampire he’s supposed to be and I can’t stand it. This book completely rewrites his character and personality, and not in a favourable way. I get angry every time I think about his lack of a reason for abandoning Armand like he did – his lack of reasons for just about everything he did in the book, when you get right down to it.
And the worst part is, that in light of these grievous problems with the book and the characters and everything else, it makes it nigh impossible to forgive Anne Rice the other irritancies in her books and style that are normally entirely overlookable. The repetitive nature of her stories and characters: self-destructiveness, wanton, passionate loving of everything that crosses your path and an equally wanton and passionate destruction/leaving of that thing, the fact that any character with even the remotest piece of likeability will be promptly turned into a vampire, usually for no god damned reason, her own blatant disregard of her own canon. This last one is the worst, I think. The constant rewriting of previous scenes and characters grates on the nerves. Just when you think you’ve got a character figured out, she rewrites them – and usually in such a way as to kill half the character. It’s like she started writing the vampires in IwtV, and abruptly realized that, hey, I think I actually want them all to be Lawful Good super heroes now. Excuse me, while I rewrite my own canon to make it so.
The books are like a great, big, complicated Mary Sue, where every character is some aspect of all of Anne Rice’s wishes and dreams come true, and she changes them as often as she pleases to suit that. How would you write a fan fiction based on her work? Is Lestat an attractive asshole with a mean streak a mile wide, including with the few people he’s capable of loving (read: Louis), or does he have a heart of gold and really only drinks the blood of the "Evil Doer" despite whatever else he’s done in previous books (oh yes, Claudia was so evil at six years old)? Is Marius an old-school Paladin, or a shrinking, selfish little man? Did Armand and Louis break up because Armand did some very bad things without fully understanding the effect it would have on Louis and ultimately destroying the one thing he hoped to love, or because hey, they just kind of got bored of each other? Then again, she’s taken what you might call an against Fan Fiction based on her work, so I suppose it’s kind of a moot point.
But it does highlight the types of inconsistencies that crop up more and more as I read her work. She has ten books in her vampire series, and I’ve admittedly only read three of them, but three, I think, is one too many. I wish I’d never read Blood and Gold. I did enjoy The Vampire Armand, and I still love IwtV as a stand-alone work. But I think I’d rather just abandon her work entirely and preserve what love of her characters and stories I have left, then continue to have it whittled down any further than it already has.
On a note that’s related only in that it pertains to Anne Rice: Did you know she’s from 7-year-old now? Under her pseudonym? Interesting.
♥ Rose
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