50 Book Challenge: book 18
Interview With The Vampire – Anne Rice
This is an exceptionally difficult book. Which is not to say that it’s not a good one, nor highly readable. If it wasn’t either of these things then it would be only too easy to dismiss as low-brow pulp or near-pornography or any of the many other things it’s been called over the years. But I personally couldn’t do that. For one thing, it’s got a dense, fluid and sensual prose style that keeps the reader involved despite a conspicuous lack of those handy literary devices such as paragraph breaks and chapters. And for another there is, as far as I can see, a really serious philosophical point at its core. Plot spoilers may follow from this point on.
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It has been said by the author that the book was, in part, a response to the death of her daughter at an early age from leukaemia. And the death of a loved one is what precipitates the major protagonist and narrator’s descent into vampirism. It appears to me that, in this book, the rationale of death is explored by looking at its corollary – eternal life. And we see how appalling it would really be to achieve immortality; to lose our humanity and be condemned to consciousness without end until Domesday comes. For, what do these vampires do with their seemingly precious gift? At first they struggle to hang on to their humanity, seeking consolation and distraction among people and beautiful things; they become discontented and plot and fight among themselves and eventually, against a background where they must kill every day to live and, only at that moment attain anything close to a shadowing of their lost mortal existence, become so hardened and unfeeling that their immortality no longer means anything to them. They have no hope of redemption and eventually cease to care to the extent that they fade away and die through sheer lack of will to continue living. By exploring the cruel, sensual and amoral world of the vampires, it appears the author is celebrating mortality and humanity (and possibly faith – but let’s not go there since I already found it unpalatable enough without having to take any possible religious overtones into account as well).
On the other hand, these strong points are set out among such a plethora of disturbing imagery and narrative that I had to work really hard to make my way through the 360-odd pages in my edition. It’s quite plain that vampires have no use for sex in the sense that we recognise it when they have the superior pleasures of the kill to keep them satisfied. But it’s all wrapped up in layers of eroticism, occasional outright sexual behaviour plus barely-implied sado-masochism. Again, this wouldn’t necessarily be a problem in itself. But it is made profoundly uncomfortable by the fact that one of the major characters is a child of, I would guess, around six or seven. This character is turned into a vampire before she has the chance to grow up and is eventually, with the sensibility of both a grown woman and an amoral predator, trapped helplessly and eternally in a child’s body – perhaps somehow harking back to the author’s own experience of a daughter dying ‘before her time’. Mix all these factors together, add in the contrasting brutality and banality of the narrative and you’ll see why you’ll need a pretty strong stomach to get through it. Not that it’s not worthwhile. There’s a present-day narrative that serves as a framework to the bigger story which spans some three hundred years, which I admired for its ability to get to the point and not tie the reader down with needless distracting backstory. I think this can be rewarding reading but to say it will not be everyone’s cup of tea is to barely scratch the surface of the problem.
I’m glad to have read it and I’d say it’s a powerful, original work of great imaginations and an accomplished style that successfully attempts to convey the worlds of New Orleans and Paris through the keen, awakened senses of the vampire narrator. But I feel I can put it back on the shelf having accomplished what I set out to do and I don’t feel any need to read further in the series. Especially given the fact that controversy seems to grow and grow the further down the line you get. And, as I already said in another journal post about this book, it has been kind of funny to discover these characters that I appear to have spent my teens impersonating, as well as dressing up as while playing Vampire: The Masquerade. Thinking about it, this may have been one of the most disturbing aspects of the whole thing…