Anne Rice
Random House
Otago Daily Times, December 18th 2010
Best known for her Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice has been writing gothic, erotic and religiously themed fiction since 1976. Of Love and Evil is the second in a new series, Songs of the Seraphim, in which former assassin Toby O’Dare seeks to atone for his past in the service of a new master, the angel Malchiah.
In the first novel, Angel Time Toby is sent to 13th Century England to defend falsely accused Jewish citizens. Now he must travel to 15th Century Rome to save a Jewish doctor from accusations of witchcraft and murder.
The doctor, Vitale, lives in a house haunted by a dybbuk, while one of his Gentile patients is wasting away in a most suspicious manner. Toby must discover who is poisoning the ailing man and find a way to lay the restless spirit to rest before Vitale is condemned to prison or worse. While there, he meets a mysterious man who seeks to persuade him that God, Heaven, and Hell are mere superstitious beliefs that hold him back from further spiritual growth and learning. However, he makes the mistake of attacking Toby’s faith “through reason, rather than [his] shaky self control”.
Rejecting such arguments as invalid because the stranger (later revealed to be a devil) cannot prove the non-existence of God, Toby escapes the proffered temptation and returns to complete his mission, more certain of his faith than ever and determined to continue on the path to redemption. Herein lies my biggest problem with the novel.
Although it returns to Rice’s recurrent themes of good, evil and the search for meaning, it is florid, overblown and badly written. Any semblance of story is subsumed by exaltations of God and the rejection of an atheistic world as barren, unconvincing and cold: “I love You. I love You who made all things and gave us all things and for You I will do anything, I will do what it is You want of me. Malchiah, take me. Take me for Him. Let me do His will!”
It may be that, having produced on average a book a year since the early 80’s, Rice is writing on autopilot, or a reflection of the fact that in 2004 she decided ‘henceforth write only for the Lord’. Whatever the reason, the end result is a novel that is not worth reading.
https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/offering-subsumed-exaltations-god
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