Anne Rice's Religious Writing

Lestat, as he moves us through his existence, is increasingly tormented by the question of salvation and even sainthood. He takes us through his first sexual experience in 200 years with Gretchen in The Tale of the Body Thief, then anguishes over his love for Rowan Mayfair (but cannot actually have sex with her) in Blood Canticle.

Rowan Mayfair, though she never puts her questions in the context of God, explores the same questions more philosophically. Like Lestat, she is concerned with morals - right and wrong, natural versus unnatural. Even Mona, the "wanderslut," acts upon her moral conviction when she first learns of her pregnancy by announcing the baby will be delivered and raised by Mona ("this is a Catholic family...we don't do away with babies" ~Taltos). Later, she carries her grudge against Rowan for the reason that she feels Rowan is directly responsible for taking a newborn - Mona's newborn - away from its mother.

Then there was Louis, who searched from the very beginning. In life, he had no answer for the loss of someone he loved (in the book, his brother; in the movie, his wife and child) so he wanted to end his life. When his life became a sort of living death, "undead," he had no choice but to search for meaning to his existence. Again, same questions, different framework.

Michael Curry, though he had separated from the Church (as had Rice at the time she wrote the Mayfair trilogy), still exhibited a desire to see, if not necessarily worship, at the altar of his childhood. Though his tour through St. Mary's is nostalgic more than anything else, he is still thrilled at the prospect of a traditional, beautiful white-dress wedding.

Granted, not all of Rice's characters are tormented souls, but the most famous of them certainly are. If Pandora and Vittorio were searching souls, I must have missed it, but they certainly had their anguish and their sense of what was good and right to them according to the time and culture their lives took place in. Can we say Azriel was not searching for some kind of meaning, or the man who talked with him, hearing the story of how Azriel became the Servant of the Bones? Was not Triana Becker in a similar torment (the most autobiographical fiction character Rice ever wrote about; I thought Violin was one of her best and most underrated novels)? Though her torment, on the surface, seemed to be about her compromised talent for playing the violin and her own confidence, what we see under the surface is extreme guilt and pain for the people she has lost.

Authors write about what they know, what interests them and what concerns them. When I sit down to write (not on this site), I write from those three elements. You could also say that writers also pursue what obsesses them. In that way, writing can be cathartic, but also can give us greater understanding as we see the things our minds have created spelled out before us. Getting it down on paper (or word processor) allows us breathing room; it allows us to explore different aspects of the story and it grows from there, becomes richer and the things we weren't aware of about ourselves and the world we live in become apparent.

It was apparent to me that Rice's most enduring characters endured because she put more into them than others. The specific "thing" she put into them was an ongoing spiritual torment that could not be resolved; there was no neat beginning, middle and happy ending. Indeed, characters struggled to establish a beginning in order to find a path through the middle they were muddling through to get to that elusive happy ending.

So it is with religious fiction. How is Toby O'Dare any different? Like Lestat, he started out wanting to be a priest, appreciate the arts, but became a killer because death visited him too early. Instead of a walking dead body, we have a walking dead soul. The parallels are in fact astonishing.

I don't think it was Rice's intention to reshape anything from the past to make it fit into her current context. It just happens that this is the major theme behind her life's work, and her life itself. This is what is the most apparent in her work because this is one of the most critical things to her as a person. I think fans appreciate that more than they will admit. It's easy to be scared off by the label "religious fiction" but this is hardly the first time in history that religious fiction has been written or published in any guise.

If you look at the backside of the jacket to Angel Time, you see that what looks like clouds are in fact angels - millions upon billions upon trillions of angels, angels beyond count is what the picture implies. Some could be Roman, some Egyptian, some Chinese, some English, some South American, some Indian...or they could all just be. They could speak English, or Spanish, or French, or Africaans...or they could have a language all their own that no living person could ever learn. They could be black, brown, white, pink, blue, yellow...or they could be of indeterminate color. I'll bet they know a lot about Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Wicca, Shinto, atheism...

Can they fly, or do they use teleporters? The angels in the picture seem to all have wings but are those our own metaphor for how we perceive their ability to be mobile in the atmosphere? To us, the only things that fly in the air have wings. Naturally, we are going to assign these heavenly creatures an anatomy that requires wings for flight. Does that mean they could be part raptor without the talons?