“And you did get into the coffin?”
“I had no choice. I begged Lestat to let me stay in the closet, but he laughed, astonished.”
Confession time folks. It’s my birthday in ….ooh, six hours. So my wife and I treated ourselves to a nice bottle of Verdelho mid-way through my reading of this book. I am slightly tipsy.
That being said, I think I’m in the perfect position to review this book. It is, after all, a bit dull.
Sorry this review seems to have started early. Let me take a moment to explain the plot.
Louis is the son of a wealthy French family, with a Louisiana plantation near New Orleans to his name. He feels bowed down by guilt after spurning his younger brother’s religious visions, compelling the family to sell their property in America and return to France to fight the revolutionary scourge of anti-monarchist atheists. When his brother dies mysteriously, Louis refuses to reveal to his mother and sister that madness was the cause of his death. He confesses this to a priest, who blithely dismisses his brother’s religious ecstacy as the result of possession by the devil.
This leaves Louis primed for seduction by the vampire Lestat. Callous, profligate and in need of property, the vampire chooses him in order to gain access to his wealth and status. While Lestat has the appearance of a man of style, he has no head for money. Louis, in effect, once transformed into a vampire becomes manager of his sire’s financial affairs, investing the monies stolen from his victims astutely to provide for them. Immortality has its own challenges, such as a ready access to capital.
Eventually he begins to tire of Lestat’s vain and selfish behaviour, and seeks to go his own way. The two vampires become rivals, with the latter deciding to transform a five-year old girl into a proxy daughter for their undead family.
“I want a child tonight. I am like a mother…I want a child!”
Claudia becomes a companion to Louis, encouraging him to investigate the origins of vampires. They travel to Europe, discovering only haggard revenants, with the secret of a vampire retaining any semblance of a conscious self seemingly an accident of Lestat’s invention. Until, that is, they come to Paris and find the famous Théâtre des Vampires.
I am sorry to say I did not enjoy the experience of reading this book at all. It is incredibly frustrating. At times Rice‘s plot fascinates – Louis’ ruminations on damnation inform an interesting perspective on religious faith; his relationship with Lestat is reminiscent of Bram Stoker’s tortured association with Henry Irving – only for these passages to give way to interminable ramblings on the pain and suffering of life as a vampire. It is not even internally consistent. Rice establishes that the undead are perfect beings, preserved in time having expelled any human functions upon the moment of conversion. Then there is a passage when Louis is described “defying the sweat which had broken from every pore”.
Of course I have not mentioned the ‘interview’, of the title. Louis, it turns out, has approached a young man, referred to throughout as a ‘boy’, to record his testimony as to his existence as a vampire. With the religious subtext of the book, this interview comes to resemble a secular confession. One of the highpoints of the novel is Louis’ confrontation with a priest. Disillusioned after years of living in fear of damnation, he finds himself standing in a church, gazing at the marbled statues of saints and heavenly powers. Suddenly he realizes the pomp and decadence of the Catholic Church and takes out his frustration on the priest present. It’s a rare moment of passion in amongst the mumbled misery and depression of this novel, a sign of how powerful Rice’s themes could be if applied properly.
As for Lestat, the hero of a number of Rice novels, he appears to be nothing more than a vain, vulgar and impudent child. I have no desire to read another book describing his adventures.
A sad disappointment overall, frustrating and for the most part, quite boring.
8 comments
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January 9, 2011 at 7:34 am
colin smith
Firstly, a very happy birthday from the Splendid Wife and myself. I read her your first two paragraphs here and she declared “quite right too”, approving, as she would, of a suitable way to slide pleasantly downwards towards a birthday.
Secondly, you’ve nailed the book. It seems to me to function as a backdrop for readers to imagine themselves in such a pseudo-romantic world, a kind of pre-internet immersive reality, with a great big reader-sized hole where you might expect a dynamic plot and a similarly dynamic, or at least fascinating, character to exist.
January 9, 2011 at 12:15 pm
Emmet
Cheers Colin! Yes it has already been pointed out to me that “The Vampire Lestat”, supposedly ups the ante in terms of character development, but to my mind if the Vampire Chronicles had not yet been written and I had just closed this book for the first time, I would have declared this fictional universe a narrative dead end.
The Interviewer is enthralled, as I suppose the reader is supposed to be, by Louis’ tale. Yet when all is said and done the vampire existence seems to be bound up in endless tedium and spiteful resentment. Lestat is a void of charisma and poor Louis is lost in proscrastination.
I found myself appreciating for the first time what a difficult task director Neil Jordan had in front of him when he adapted the book to the screen. I wish they had included the confessional scene with the priest in the film though.
January 10, 2011 at 3:49 pm
Patrick Rennie
Happy Belated Birthday!
This was my vampire series when I was a teenager. I perfer my vampires barely disguised metaphors for more deviant sexual activities than abstinence – although I do have to give Twilight credit for being the first to do that.
Lestat is a much more entertaining dirtbag when he’s the protagonist. The next couple of books have a bit more action in them, which helps.
January 10, 2011 at 9:01 pm
Emmet
Cheers Patrick. It has to be said, the book doesn’t shie away from sexuality. My problem was I couldn’t understand why anyone would tolerate Lestat for more than an hour.
He seems extremely dull. You are right though, I did not even mention sex in my review really. It’s not even something I notice really anymore. It took Stephenie Meyer removing sex from vampire lit to make me realize I missed it!
January 10, 2011 at 9:07 pm
Emmet
Oh it’s just occured to me though, I wouldn’t credit Meyer with introducing abstinence. After all Stoker’s Dracula is itself a metaphor for the author’s sexual disgust. Complete female submission is more Meyer’s bag.
January 12, 2011 at 6:08 pm
Stacy
Of all the Rice books I did read, Interview was not one of them. While I think she has a way with words, I found myself stopping at one point as the stories weren’t fun to read anymore. On a side note, I rather liked the movie.
Her prose can be a bit too melodramatic, and often the payoff was not worth it.
I agree Lestat is someone who is completely intolerable. He’s not any better in any of the other books.
I saw an interview with a critic of hers who said she does not allow editors to adjust her writing in the slightest. WOW.
January 13, 2011 at 10:33 am
Emmet
Hey Stacy. I remember seeing the film when I was a teenager and feeling bored stiff, wondering what the fuss was all about. I unfairly concluded that Jordan had butchered the book.
It turns out I was very wrong. I think he improved some of it quite a lot. Would have been interesting to see the ‘Louis & Claudia, feral vampire slayers’, sequence, or the aforementioned church sequence that I enjoyed, but overall he did a decent job.
As to Rice’s editorial oversight, well I can easily imagine that. She is something of an institution. I’m sure she could write a novel about the Teletubbies and it would be a best-seller.
“Oh Tinky-Winky, life on the hill is such an endless cycle of furry ennui”.
January 15, 2011 at 3:43 pm
Stacy
The movie did play up Louis’ emo status. I won’t even go into how wrong “Queen of the Damned” is in spite of being tempted to review it on SDCS.
I am curious as to how Rice’s books on Christ are, since they don’t contain vampires and several of her usual motifs (I think). Come to think of it, I’m rather afraid to read them.