Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice. As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan. I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet. After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview . So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not. Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot. These new books were spare, polished, poetic. The
Sometimes I think that McEwan thinks all women discovered the idea of sex suddenly about 1940. His themes of women's sexual awareness ARE better suited for Edwardian times.
ReplyDeleteDear Connie,
ReplyDeleteI blush to admit that I haven't read enough McEwan to even be able to agree. My introduction was _On Chesil Beach_ and I've been disinclined to pursue any others I've picked up to their conclusion. I'm sure they are fine works, but I just haven't discovered the access point yet.
shalom,
Steven