OF LOVE AND EVIL (THE SONGS OF THE SERAPHIM)
By Anne Rice
Published by Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95
Ten years ago novelist Anne Rice made a public show of re-converting to Catholicism. Now she is making a public show of repudiating the church. No longer, in all good conscience, can she be anti-gay, anti-secular humanism, anti-life. But as the protagonist observes in the Georges Bernanos novel The Diary of a Country Priest: “Faith is not a thing which one ‘loses,’ we merely cease to shape our lives by it.”
That said, on to Rice’s latest work. If you like a book that begins, “I dreamed a dream of angels. I saw them and I heard them in a great and endless galactic night,” then this is the one for you. This was my first foray into Anne Rice and it was not, I must say, the book for me.
The book opens at the Mission Inn in Riverside, Calif. A former paid assassin, Toby O’Dare, is now on the side of good. Toby killed his last victim at the Mission Inn. He has also (inexplicably, vaguely) chosen it as the site of his reunion with Liona, the gal he got pregnant 10 years before and ditched, and the son he’s never met.
We don’t know how or when Toby converted from his old life, the reason for and substance of the conversion, or why, when Liona and the kid show up, they for no good or apparent reason adore Toby at first sight.
We don’t know other than to be given to understand that the protagonist of a novel that purports in 160 pages to dispose of the subjects of both love and evil doesn’t have time for such trifles.
Toby Junior (for of course he’s been named after his “dad”) attends a private Jesuit school, is so smart he’s poised to skip a grade, and displays an instant, unconflicted worship for the father who abandoned him before birth. Liona has “a tiny bit of pink handkerchief in her breast pocket, and her purse was patent leather pink, and so were her graceful high-heeled shoes.”
She, naturally, has remained chaste since her liaison with Toby: “I was darned determined [the kid] was never going to have stepfather of the month.” Toby, naturally, has not remained chaste, though he hastens to assure her, “Money was exchanged. It was never ... intimate.”
“You’ve always been such a gentleman, Toby,” Liona gushingly replies. Huh? Because he goes to prostitutes?
But Rice reserves her most purple prose for the angel Malchiah (who looks to Toby “rather like a perfect human being”):
“Beloved,” he whispered. “I need you once again. I will need you countless times. I will need you till the end of time.”
This is angel not as spiritual guide but as combination idealized gay lover and press agent (no wonder the guy’s wearing a suit). Malchiah’s entire mission, it transpires, is to allow Toby, who already looks good, to continue looking good. To get the girl who, without lifting a finger, he’s already won. To cooperate with Toby in one of humankind’s most adolescent delusions: that the demand to be loved without actually changing can ever be fulfilled.
Toby has to be one of the most static “heroes” in the history of books. In one chapter he is time-traveled to medieval Rome. In the next, he effortlessly solves the mystery of the poisoner. In the next, he meets and foils Satan. Finally, his mere presence prompts the disclosure of a decades-old secret resolving the such-as-it-is plot.
This is cardboard love, cardboard evil. Nothing is at stake. No one much hungers, except Toby, narcissistically. There is no fleshed-out backstory, no tension, no drama, no authentic transformation. “I count upon your generous and educated heart,” Malchiah assures Toby as he sends him off on his supposedly salvific mission, but we don’t get a generous and educated heart without suffering.
To love and to be loved requires undergoing the real hero’s journey of hardship, loneliness, insecurity, failure, and backbreaking labor. In fact, the one fascinating aspect in Of Love and Evil is how Toby unconsciously mirrors the artist who is “loved” not for the excellence of his or her work, but for perpetuating the illusion that we get to be the stars of our respective journeys toward redemption.
We all wrestle with our work, our faith, the convictions that shape our lives. In the personal realm, I wish Rice all the best in finding something else by which to shape hers. Because if Of Love and Evil is any indication, as a writer she may be something worse than what she purports to repudiate. She may be anti-literature.
[Heather King is the author of three memoirs: Parched, Redeemed and the forthcoming Shirt of Flame: A Year with St. Thérèse of Lisieux. She lives in Los Angeles. Her Web site is heather-king.com.]
