Pandora
By Anne Rice
Knopf, 353 pages, $19.95
Happily, Anne Rice’s “Pandora,” her first in the “New Tales of the Vampires” series, is not nearly as erotic as “The Vampire Chronicles,” so fans who read her for that purpose can be forewarned. Better you should just sit down to enjoy the unbridled camp akin to that of “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.”
This time, the topics are enigmatic gods and goddesses. However, take away the erotic component of a Rice novel and you’re left with a flow of undifferentiated prose. There’s a description of being carried on a litter through a market, unconvincing dialogue about reason versus passion and a tale that begins with one bad brother selling out the rest of his family.
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Pandora, originally named Lydia, began life in 15 B.C., the daughter of a rich Roman senator. When she was a precocious, Ovid-spouting 10-year-old, she met a tall, blond barbarian soldier named Marius.
Fast-forward 20 years, two marriages, two divorces and a lot of post-Augustan angst. Lydia’s father and brothers are killed in a plot triggered by the bad brother, and she escapes to Antioch, in Turkey near the Syrian border. On her journey there, she has blood-filled dreams of Egypt that seem to be fragments of an earlier life, or maybe something she picked up as a young woman hanging around the Isis Temple in Rome.
In Antioch, she is able to mourn her father, and finds the experience similar to the initiation rites of the Temple of Isis. Of course, the reader knows that she will meet Marius again, that he will initiate her into the dark gift, the eternal life of a vampire.
And she does, and he does.
What’s difficult about reading Rice is compensating for a contemporary sensibility. People who cut their teeth on Mel Brooks movies and Monty Python skits have to be willing not merely to suspend but jettison disbelief to swallow a sentence like, “They will not let the murderous Piso return, and Sentius gathers to himself all who served under Germanicus.”
What happens to Pandora, a name she took to disguise her Roman roots, and Marius after their fiery, and vividly described, co-mingling of blood, is same old same old. He insists on the world of reason; she prefers the energies of dreams and mysticism. They quarrel for 200 years or so, then part. But not before a surprisingly concise summation of how Christianity encompassed and drew from existing ideas.
Pandora unleashes more evils than she realizes when she becomes a vampire. Rice, like any good vampire maven, uses fiction to make everything work out–until the sequel.