Interview with the Vampire
No. 1 in The Vampire Chronicles series
by Anne Rice
|
Ballantine (New York): 12 April 1976. Paperback: 325 pages. ISBN-10: 0-345-47687-5 ISBN-13: 978-0345476876 Suggested retail price: $6.99 (US) Tags: Fantasy; France; New Orleans; Paris; plantations; theaters; vampires Tactical strength: [6/10] |
As the title suggests, Anne Rice's first book in the Vampire Chronicles starts out with the frame of a reporter (known only as "the boy") recording the history of a particular vampire, Louis. Generally I don't like the interview frame, especially when every paragraph starts with a quotation mark, but Rice has such vivid descriptions of the characters emotion and the scenery around them, that the quotation marks interfered only trivially with my reading of the book. Rice also writes in relatively long paragraphs for a fiction writer, and I have a hard time picturing someone talking at such length and with such detail. Supposedly Louis tells the entire story in one night, so he must have talked incredibly fast to get an entire novel's worth of text out in just one night.
Louis lived on a plantation outside New Orleans in the late 1700s. A vampire, Lestat, decided to change Louis to a vampire because Lestat wanted to live the rich life of a plantation owner that Louis enjoyed. Louis agrees to the transformation, but he always seems to have some repugnance to killing people for his meals. This disappoints Lestat, who freely and sometimes carelessly kills just about anyone. Because of Lestat's uninhibited killing, and the observation that Louis and Lestat only appear at night, the slaves on the plantation revolt. The plantation house catches fire, and the two vampires barely escape with their lives and settle in a hotel suite in New Orleans.
Louis continues to have human morals interfere with his ability to live comfortably as a vampire, and Louis decides that he will leave Lestat. Lestat suspects that Louis has plans to leave, so he brings a five-year-old girl, Claudia, to the hotel and makes her a vampire. Louis morals won't let him just leave the little girl to Lestat, so Louis remains in New Orleans. Eventually, Claudia comes to dislike Lestat and also wants to get free from him, but she has developed a more vampiric sense of how to go about getting free. She plots to kill Lestat, carries out the plan with Louis's help, and Louis and Claudia travel to Europe.
Claudia has never met another vampire besides Louis and Lestat, and she wants to find other vampires. She has read all she can, and has Louis take her into eastern Europe. They find vampires very much unlike themselves. These vampires have no reasoning abilities and hunt and behave like animals. Disappointed at not finding other "human" vampires, Louis and Claudia move to Paris. After some time in Paris, Louis encounters an entire theater troupe of vampires that put on a pantomime show involving the sacrifice of a human victim. Louis meets Armand, the leader of the troupe, and falls in love. At least, you would call it love in a romance novel, but Rice's vampires don't seem to use their residual sexual organs. They have orgasmic pleasure while drinking blood, but Louis explains that he merely wanted Armand as his intellectual companion. Even though sexual intercourse doesn't occur between Louis and Armand, the Rice's description of the attraction between the two uses the same descriptive vocabulary you would find in a romance. I don't know if you can call unconsumated love between to male vampires homosexual, but regardless, Louis does love Armand and he does want to leave Claudia for Armand.
Louis and Claudia learn from the other members of the troupe that vampires have only one law: that you don't kill another vampire -- a crime punishable by death. Learning this law makes Louis a bit nervous, but the law doesn't seem to phase Claudia. Claudia realizes that Louis has fallen for Armand and makes arrangements for her to live without Louis, and this plan seems about to work when one night Lestat appears at the vampires' theater.
Rice writes with a descriptive style that one might call flowery, but her prose never seems to have any superfluous words or details. Her descriptions combine the emotions of the characters and intertwine them with her descriptions of the various settings. Whether on a dark rainy street or in a plush hotel room, Rice makes the details of the setting a vivid part of the state of the characters' emotions. Emotions play an enormous role in Rice's plot. Louis always seems on the edge of an emotional crisis. Rice also talks about love between the vapires a great deal. Since the vampires don't have sex, it seems she wants to explore the type of relationships that can generate deep and enduring love without needing the binding experience of sex. Since the book ends somewhat tragically with all of the characters living alone, Rice shows that all these relationships devoid of sexual contact cannot endure -- that love requires certain human elements forever unavailable to vampires.
While Interview with the Vampire has expertly crafted depictions of scene and emotion, this volume doesn't have some of the polish and flare you find in some of the later volumes in the series. Nevertheless, Interview with the Vampire tells an engaging story that introduces us to Rice's intriguing world inhabited my supernatural creatures.
Related Item from Amazon.com
  Boxed Set |
