Interesting Development. Comments?

[groovychk]

Newsweek Article - The Gospel According to Anne

The queen of the occult has been gone awhile. What's Anne Rice been up to?
Getting healthy, finding God—and writing her most daring book yet.


---

By David Gates

Newsweek

Oct. 31, 2005 issue - Sometimes
Anne Rice won't leave her bedroom for days on end—and neither would you. Glass
doors open onto a terrace that looks over the red-tiled roofs of La Jolla,
Calif., to the Pacific Ocean. A live-in staffer brings meals to the table at the
foot of her ornately carved wooden bed, which faces an ornately carved stone
fireplace. She exercises in a huge bike-in closet. She's got two computers and
enough books to last her a year. Splendid isolation? Splendid, sure. But she's
often got family visiting in a downstairs guest suite, she reads The New York
Times every morning—"Nicholas Kristof is a hero to me"—watches news "till I
can't stand it anymore," and spends up to an hour and a half a day e-mailing
with her extraordinarily faithful readers.

They've been worried about her.
After 25 novels in 25 years, Rice, 64, hasn't published a book since 2003's
"Blood Chronicle," the tenth volume of her best-selling vampire series. They may
have heard she came close to death last year, when she had surgery for an
intestinal blockage, and also back in 1998, when she went into a sudden diabetic
coma; that same year she returned to the Roman Catholic Church, which she'd left
at 18. They surely knew that Stan Rice, her husband of 41 years, died of a brain
tumor in 2002. And though she'd moved out of their longtime home in New Orleans
more than a year before Hurricane Katrina, she still has property there—and the
deep emotional connection that led her to make the city the setting for such
novels as "Interview With the Vampire." What's up with her? "For the last six
months," she says, "people have been sending e-mails saying, 'What are you doing
next?' And I've told them, 'You may not want what I'm doing next'." We'll know
soon. In two weeks, Anne Rice, the chronicler of vampires, witches and—under the
pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure—of soft-core S&M encounters, will publish "Christ
the Lord: Out of Egypt," a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ
himself. "I promised," she says, "that from now on I would write only for the
Lord." It's the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan's "Slow Train
Coming" announced that he'd been born again.

Meeting the still youthful-looking
Rice, you'd never suspect she'd been ill—except that on a warm October afternoon
she's chilly enough to have a fire blazing. And if you were expecting Morticia
Addams with a strange new light in her eyes, forget it. "We make good coffee,"
she says, beckoning you to where a silver pot sits on the white tablecloth.
"We're from New Orleans." Rice knows "Out of Egypt" and its projected
sequels—three, she thinks—could alienate her following; as she writes in the
afterword, "I was ready to do violence to my career." But she sees a continuity
with her old books, whose compulsive, conscience-stricken evildoers reflect her
long spiritual unease. "I mean, I was in despair." In that afterword she calls
Christ "the ultimate supernatural hero ... the ultimate immortal of them
all."

To render such a hero and his
world believable, she immersed herself not only in Scripture, but in
first-century histories and New Testament scholarship—some of which she found
disturbingly skeptical. "Even Hitler scholarship usually allows Hitler a certain
amount of power and mystery." She also watched every Biblical movie she could
find, from "The Robe" to "The Passion of the Christ" ("I loved it"). And she
dipped into previous novels, from "Quo Vadis" to Norman Mailer's "The Gospel
According to the Son" to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's apocalyptic Left Behind
series. ("I was intrigued. But their vision is not my vision.") She can cite
scholarly authority for giving her Christ a birth date of 11 B.C., and for
making James, his disciple, the son of Joseph by a previous marriage. But she's
also taken liberties where they don't explicitly conflict with Scripture. No one
reports that the young Jesus studied with the historian Philo of Alexandria, as
the novel has it—or that Jesus' family was in Alexandria at all. And she's used
legends of the boy Messiah's miracles from the noncanonical Apocrypha: bringing
clay birds to life, striking a bully dead and resurrecting him.

Rice's most daring move, though,
is to try to get inside the head of a 7-year-old kid who's intermittently aware
that he's also God Almighty. "There were times when I thought I couldn't do it,"
she admits. The advance notices say she's pulled it off: Kirkus Reviews' starred
rave pronounces her Jesus "fully believable." But it's hard to imagine all
readers will be convinced when he delivers such lines as "And there came in a
flash to me a feeling of understanding everything, everything!" The
attempt to render a child's point of view can read like a Sunday-school text
crossed with Hemingway: "It was time for the blessing. The first prayer we all
said together in Jerusalem ... The words were a little different to me. But it
was still very good." Yet in the novel's best scene, a dream in which Jesus
meets a bewitchingly handsome Satan—smiling, then weeping, then raging—Rice
shows she still has her great gift: to imbue Gothic chills with moral complexity
and heartfelt sorrow.

Rice already has much of the next
volume written. ("Of course I've been advised not to talk about it.") But what's
she going to do with herself once her hero ascends to Heaven? "If I really
complete the life of Christ the way I want to do it," she says, "then I might go
on and write a new type of fiction. It won't be like the other. It'll be in a
world that includes redemption." Still, you can bet the Devil's going to get the
best lines.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

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Comments

[drkbish.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

I'd stopped reading Anne Rice's work a long while back, but something like this is so far out of left field from what she's done before that it might be worth taking a look at. Besides which, the fact that she's willing to alienate her fans to produce something SHE feels she needs to write puts my estimation of her up a few notches.

(And no, I'm no faithful Christian - or faithful anything for that matter - but this does pique my curiosity a little.)

[groovychk.livejournal.com]

I'm intrigued as well. I'll have to check it out. Memnoch the Devil was a pretty interesting read.