She’s ba-aack!
I am pleased to report – even if only for myself – that Merrick is Anne Rice’s best novel in years. I got hooked on the Ricean vampires over a decade ago with The Vampire Lestat, then Interview With The Vampire and Queen of the Damned. I eagerly awaited each new book release, and bought them all in hardcover. However, with each tome came a new nail in the coffin of my Anne-adoration. The last few Vampire Chronicles were so disjointed and convoluted, I was unable to even finish them. I struggled through the hammer-and-anvil prose of Pandora which was as dry, dusty and wasted as its Egyptian desert setting; worse still, I suffered through the endlessly dull chain of sex scenes in The Vampire Armand until I began to wonder if a better title might have been ‘Armand Does Dallas (and the Roman Empire).’
However, before Merrick even came out, the plot description intrigued me and gave me a glimmer of hope. Even though I never could really get into the Mayfair Witch sagas, I’ve read a few and did look forward to see what Rice would do in marrying her supernatural literary offspring. My cautious hopes were further peaked when Rice said in pre-release interviews that she had written Merrick in a very short time, in a blast of inspiration following her diabetes-induced coma. To me, that held promises of a succinct, character-driven story. “Does that mean none of the theological dissertations of Memnoch the Devil?” I prayed – “None of the incessant history lessons of Vittorio?” I dared to wonder.
I was not disappointed. Rice demonstrates once again her gift for spellbinding story-telling and the creation of mythos and magic infused with her own creative twists. Here, in a magnificent tale of immortality, sorcery and the occult, she does her fans proud.
Bewitching and beautiful, Merrick Mayfair is one of the gens de couleur libres, a brethren of New Orleans octoroons Rice first wrote about in Feast of All Saints. She also is a member of the matriarchal family of the Mayfair witches Rice introduced in The Witching Hour. We come to know Merrick through the storytelling of David Talbot, a former member of the Talamasca (an ancient secret society that chronicles supernatural phenomena and harbors preternatural ephemera), recently made a vampire by Lestat. (As for Lestat, he does make an appearance here, but he is still lying in a catatonic state since imbibing the blood of Christ– yes, the actual blood of the Messiah; not that cheap wine they give you in church – in Memnoch the Devil.)
While very good, this is not the book to begin with if you have not read Rice before. It would behoove you to start with Interview With the Vampire, then read Tale of the Body Thief, and finally The Witching Hour. Those books will give you a much better understanding of the characters presented within Merrick. (The main ones being David Talbot and Louis Pointe du Lac.) Merrick herself is a brand new creation, and a delightfully welcome one: she’s a feisty, passionate voodoo priestess with a penchant for rum, and the ability to communicate with the dead. And therein lies the rub – while it comes fairly late in the book, the focal point and the lure of this book is that Merrick is there to raise the spirit of the departed child vampire, Claudia.
For those of you familiar with the book or the film Interview With The Vampire, you know that Louis turned Claudia, a very young child, into a vampire and she was later destroyed by betrayal coupled with the heat of the sun. Now the perpetually melancholy Louis is obsessed with raising her ghost to make amends; he suffers agonizing guilt for condemning Claudia in the first place and needs reassurance that she has moved on to a happier existence. She has not. In fact, she has a few choice words for Louis…
Along the way, Louis and Merrick fall in love. While love is always at the root of every Vampire Chronicle, here it is dropped in the reader’s lap without any ado. There seems no impetus for them to fall so hard for each other – they just do, and of course at first sight. Although the tale is told from David’s POV, the story would have benefited from either Merrick or Louis explaining some of their feelings and motivations to him. (This oversight is not a victim of the abridgment; I confirmed the lack of substance with friends who have read the entire novel.)
Actor Derek Jacobi (most recently seen in Gladiator) does an outstanding job reading this book. One of Britain's most distinguished stage performers, his superlative performance here should come as no surprise. He remains best-known to most Americans for his stunning portrayal of the titular Roman emperor in the television event I, Claudius, but I hope he will also continue to make a name for himself in the world of audio books. He’s one of the few readers I will seek out, regardless of the material.
The combination of Rice’s return to good writing and Jacobi’s excellent rendition make this audio book a keeper.
Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson
