Rice’s New Vampire Defies Disbelief

Bringing George Orwell into a discussion of Anne Rice may seem excessive, like using siege artillery to knock the aphids off your rose bushes. Still, Orwell, pondering the relationship between an author’s belief system and the value of his or her work, had something interesting to say in his 1946 essay, “Politics vs. Literature.”

“The best books of any one age have always been written from several different viewpoints, some of them palpably more false than others . . . The most we can ask of [a writer] is that he genuinely believe in what he is saying, and that it shall not be something blazingly silly.

“Today, for example, one could imagine a good book being written by a Catholic, a Communist, a fascist, a pacifist, an anarchist . . . one cannot imagine a good book being written by a spiritualist . . . or a member of the Ku Klux Klan.”

The line surely moves. Half a century later, belief in communism may seem no less silly than belief in ghosts. And fiction surely allows the writer more latitude for eccentricity than the political discourse Orwell had in mind. Still, he would insist, there is a line; and on which side of it does Rice fall with her vampire tales (“Vittorio” being the second volume in her second series of them)? Whether she literally believes in the blood-sucking undead is almost beside the point. She writes as if she does.

“I went to Florence to receive this manuscript directly from Vittorio de Riniari,” Rice tells us with a straight face in the afterword to this novel. Vittorio, a young nobleman in 15th century Italy, has been snacking on human gore ever since and aims to enlist the chronicler of “that band of strange and romantic vampires in and from the Southern New World city of New Orleans” to explain and justify himself.

In the Dark Ages, it seems, vampires ruled the night as thoroughly as humans ruled the day. In the Renaissance, however--the age of Cosimo de Medici, the architect Michelozzo and the painters Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi--the growth of learning and commerce has tipped the balance toward the light. The vampires, their domain shrinking, lash out, overrunning the remote castle of Vittorio’s family and killing all the inhabitants except him.

Vittorio, a handsome 16, is twice spared by Ursula, a foxy vampire who was sold as a child bride to the fanged leader of the Court of the Ruby Grail in France two centuries before. Some human feeling survives in her. Later, when God’s own angels give Vittorio the chance to avenge his family by slaughtering all the court’s vampires, his love for her gets in the way.

This is one of Rice’s shorter novels, and its intensity never flags. Vittorio’s antique diction suits the fantastic atmosphere she wishes to create. Her descriptions, as usual,are swooningly sensuous, and one extreme emotional state--horror, rage, grief, bewilderment, exaltation--follows another. Rice’s world is a humorless one--a single ray of irony would destroy it, just as sunlight consumes vampire flesh--but its bold chiaroscuro of good and evil must comfort many readers, once they get over the shock. It’s the standard fundamentalist view, only inverted: The profane implies the sacred.

And Rice comes up with one haunting metaphor. Vittorio enters the town of Santa Maddalana, a seeming paradise without unwanted children, troublesome youths, sickness or deformity. The town’s leaders, he discovers, have agreed to hand over their undesirables to the vampires. We need not believe in the undead to recognize how, in so many ways, we, too, try to secure our prosperity and respectability by making deals with evil once the sun goes down.

Metaphor, indeed, is the level on which fiction of this kind aspires to be taken seriously. Rice’s vampires are clearly stand-ins for artists, for herself. They feed off the stuff of life and make of it something artificial but enduring; they achieve immortality not through virtue but through daring transgression. Silly? Of course, but as Orwell added: “If the force of belief is behind it, a worldview which only just passes the test of sanity is sufficient to produce a . . . work of art.”