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
I am as grateful for your enjoyment as I am undeserving of the comparison. :)
ReplyDeleteJeff,
ReplyDeleteI recognize that it was a rather high-flown comparison, but using language and image like that recalls no one more recent. The poems are archaic in the very best sense of that term--not outmoded, but classic--going back to the best in the tradition of English poetry.
In short, I like them a lot and they take a fine ear and sensibility to compose. I'm a sucker for anything that smacks of a more formal approach.
shalom,
Steven