Angel Time--Anne Rice
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 sp...
Steven,
ReplyDeleteI suspect that too many writers don't understand that it isn't the plot that makes an Austen novel. It's the intelligence and wit in the author, which appears in the narrative, that makes her works so great and that demands rereading.
Dear Fred,
ReplyDeleteAnd a sense of a place, a time, and a way of being. A modern comedy of manners would necessarily NOT imitate Austen because modern deportment is quite different and modern expectations different. And while it is a time-honored tradition to "lift" plots, Austen's are particularly intractable because the plots are driven by the characters and the expectations they have of one another--expectations that could not possibly make it into the modern world in anything that we would recognize as Austen.
You make several good points here.
shalom,
Steven