Sitting at the dining room table of her desert compound in Rancho Mirage,
California, Anne Rice rather dejectedly admits: “I’ve never had an
angelophany.”
An angelophanwhat?
“Maybe I’m not pronouncing it right,” sighs the 68-year-old, who, in spite of
the late afternoon heat, is dressed as though she were attending a Victorian
funeral (her leopard-print shirt being the notable exception). “It’s when an
angel reveals itself to a human being. And it’s never happened to me, not
once. I’ve never even seen a ghost, or heard a voice ... absolutely nothing
like that at all. I believe in angels, though — and I think about them
whenever a bunch of seemingly random events produce something very good.
Then again, we must have humility: we can’t claim that God was with us just
because things worked out. It’s like when actors thank God at the Oscars.
Are they saying that God wasn’t with the other people who didn’t win an
award?”
Rice spends a good deal of her time these days troubled by such celestial
matters. The American author might be more famous as the original Queen of
the Undead — her 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire was
adapted into the Tom Cruise/Brad Pitt movie of the same name, and founded a
literary empire that has shifted more than 100 million books — but Rice has
long since discarded her crown. No longer does she turn up to readings in a
coffin. No longer does she get around town in a hearse. And no longer does
she “sign” books by dipping them in blood.
All of this is largely a result of Rice’s 1998 reversion to the Roman
Catholicism of her youth — a change in world view so profound, she marked it
by publishing a first-person novel from the perspective of a young Jesus
Christ, entitled Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. A sequel followed (Christ
the Lord: The Road to Cana) and there are at least another two books in
the series to come. Meanwhile, Rice’s religious fixation continues with her
latest (non-Christ) book, Angel Time, about a CIA assassin who
changes his ways after seeing the light — literally. Surprisingly, the
incongruity of the subject matter (think Jason Bourne meets Songs of
Praise) works rather well. The book even includes a sub-plot involving
persecuted 13th-century Jews in Norwich — of which more later. Rice says the
idea for Angel Time came from her being “really sick of this idea
that the Devil is the interesting one . . .”
Mind you, if the Devil is a crushing bore who you’d never want to get stuck
next to at a dinner party, you wouldn’t guess from the way Rice talks about
her earlier work. While she is careful not to make any boastful claims over
the sudden resurgence in popularity of all things fanged and blood-thirsty —
such as Stephenie Meyer’s hit novel Twilight and the True
Blood television series on Channel 4 (based on Charlaine Harris’s The
Southern Vampire Mysteries) — the author says: “What I think people have
suddenly realised is that the vampire genre is as rich as the western, or
the detective novel.” But why all the interest now? Why didn’t it happen,
say, in the mid-2000s? “I don’t have all the answers,” Rice shrugs. “It’s
too early to see clearly what caused the trend. It could simply be escapism,
which maybe we all feel we need because we’re going through a bad economic
time. All I know is that the concept of an outsider — of the immortal who
you can talk to, who can seduce you — is a very appealing one, and it always
has been.”
Naturally, Rice stands to benefit from all this: 15 years after the movie of Interview
with the Vampire was released, talks with Hollywood studios have resumed
to bring the author’s blood-sucking creations back to either the cinema or
the small screen. “There’s nothing I can announce, but negotiations are
going on,” she says.
As for the defiant claim in The Times last month by the True Blood
producer Alan Ball that he’s never read an Anne Rice novel, the author
doesn’t appear to care. “I love what Alan Ball did with Charlaine Harris’s
books in True Blood,” she enthuses. “There’s so much wit. And he’s
really captured the South with that town, Bon Temps. It’s really just
wonderfully clever.”
While it’s understandable that the post-conversion Rice hasn’t renounced the
work that made her one of the richest authors in the US, it’s a little more
puzzling that she also stands by her other early career — as a writer of
sadomasochistic porn, published under the pseudonym Anne Roquelaure. After
all, the Vatican tends not to approve of such things.
“I wrote those books in the 1980s,” Rice explains. “They’re still out there,
and they’re still doing very well. They’re total pornography, yes, but safe
— a playful fantasy, both gay and straight.” But aren’t they an affront to
her Catholic sensibilities? “I’ve never heard of the books doing anyone any
harm, and I wasn’t into the lifestyle myself,” she says. “I’ve always lived
a fairly conservative life. I’ve never been particularly wild or crazy.”
That’s especially true these days: Rice goes to Mass every weekend and prays
every day. “I feel as though life is a meaningful experience and that when
we die we’ll find out the reasons for everything,” she says. A long pause
follows. Then she adds: “I don’t claim that this is a rational thing, by the
way. It’s no more rational than being an atheist. And it’s still very hard
for me to believe that God intervenes in my life . . .”
In fact, if a divine power has intervened in Rice’s life, he has shown Himself
to be a cruel master. Proof of this can be found in Angel Time: the
protagonist’s upbringing in a dysfunctional New Orleans family with an
alcoholic mother was based on Rice’s own childhood — when the author was
still known at home as Howard Allen O’Brien (she was named after her father,
a postal service worker, but began calling herself Anne as soon as she went
to school). “My mother was very sick with alcohol and eventually swallowed
her tongue or had some kind of seizure,” Rice says. “I don’t know what the
exact cause was, but she died when I was 14. I always thought I could have
done something about it. When I had a big success with my first book, I
thought, if my mother was still alive, maybe I could have saved her. [Angel
Time] is about that bleakness, that sense of decay, that hopelessness in
an alcoholic household. I drank a lot myself for a very long time, but
didn’t face it for years. It was only when my son was born that I finally
stopped.”
Unfortunately, the tragedy in Rice’s life didn’t end with the death of her
mother. Later, after the author married her childhood sweetheart, Stan Rice
(the painter and poet), the couple lost their five-year-old daughter to
cancer. Twenty years later, Stan also died of cancer. That was followed by
Rice’s home town, New Orleans, being ravaged by a storm of biblical
destruction: Hurricane Katrina.
Today, Rice says she doesn’t blame any of these things on God. Instead she
attributes her survival to guidance from above. If she hadn’t converted to
Catholicism before finding out about her husband’s terminal illness, for
example, she says she might not have been able to handle it. (“Faith came
back to me,” is how she describes the moment when she realised that she
wanted to take Communion again. “It was a total surrender.”) Likewise, she
wonders if God’s will was involved in her getting a sudden urge to leave New
Orleans — and put all of Stan’s paintings into storage in Dallas — only
months before the city was hit. “The way I left New Orleans like that, the
timing, it was really bizarre,” she says. “Of course, it may have been sheer
coincidence. And if it was God’s work, what does it say about the people who
were drowned?”
Rice certainly had sound reasons to leave: after her husband died, she wanted
to be closer to her son, the novelist Christopher Rice, who lives in West
Hollywood. At first she settled in the wealthy seaside enclave of La Jolla,
near San Diego. The incongruity of the pallid, nocturnal Rice living within
walking distance of a beach didn’t last for very long, however (“I
couldn’t stand the marine fog”), so then she moved to her present base in
Rancho Mirage, bordering Joshua Tree National Park. She lives in the 8,000
sq ft compound with her sister, Karen, and her staff. Her son also has a
room there. Now there’s talk of another move, this time farther west to Los
Angeles, to be closer to the opera.
But even though Rice hasn’t touched alcohol since 1979 and has normalised her
work hours — she used to type through the night and go to bed in the morning
— her health appears to be deteriorating rapidly. Indeed, she looks almost
theatrically unwell. “I’m a type 1 diabetic,” she explains. “I’m very
brittle. I can’t have meat in my diet any more, and I get very sick when I
travel. I went to Israel recently, and it was hard. There’ll be no more book
tours. I do Skype appearances instead.” Meanwhile, her energy levels are
kept up by the six or seven Diet Cokes she gets through in a day (she claims
to drink only a third of each).
Because of her health, Rice hasn’t been able to return to the Big Easy since
she left. But she was able to go back there in her own imagination via the
narrative of Angel Time. In fact, the series of which the book will
become a part — the second instalment has already been handed in to the
publisher — is allowing Rice to go wherever she wants to: the storyline
revolves around a time-travel element. Hence the sub-plot about the Jews of
Norwich, based on the real historical case of St William of Norwich, a child
who was said to have been the victim of a ritual murder by the entire Jewish
population of the town in the 12th century (it remains the first known case
of a so-called medieval “blood libel”). Of course, Angel Time
has also given Rice the chance to experience something else through her own
imagination: the appearance of an angel.
Or an angelophany, as she puts it.
But as Rice gets up from her chair to give a brief tour of her house, it’s
hard not to wonder if it’s more than an angel she’s looking for. In every
room of her house, there are literally hundreds of life-sized dolls: most of
them girls, and most of them roughly the same age — about 5. Rice has been
known to buy them for as much as $50,000 apiece.
“I like this one here, the black-haired one,” she says, pointing at a doll
standing next to a sofa. “I like the melancholy expression on her face.
Y’know, it’s funny, people look at my dolls and they see a theme. They think
I’m looking for my lost daughter.”
SMALL TALK
On Twilight I haven’t read much Stephenie Meyer, but she struck
a chord. She took vampires and put them in high school, which, it turns out,
was a stroke of genius. Who would have thought that?”
On US politics A lot of my Christian friends assume that I’m a
Republican. A lot of the people who knew my early work assume that I’m a
Democrat. The Obama victory meant more to the world than I ever foresaw. I
remain a Hilary Clinton fan. I hope she runs for President in future.
On killings sponsored by the state (the subject of Angel Time) I
have a terrible feeling that the CIA still does [kill people]. But it’s hard
to know who to trust on that subject. And I suspect that probably there is
such a thing as justifiable killing. I would kill to defend my life or my
son’s life.
On her fans I got my first anti-Semitic e-mail as a result of this book
[Angel Wings]. I almost picked up the phone and called the police. It
came on Facebook. It asked me how I could defend the Jews. I just had to
shut it down. But really, there are very few fans who are crazy. Most people
are just interested in the books as books — they enjoy them for what they
are.
BIOGRAPHY
Early years Born Howard Allen O’Brien (after her father) in New Orleans
in 1941, she changed her name to Anne during her first year at school. She
had a Catholic education until 1958, when the family moved to Texas, where
she went to university and married her childhood sweetheart, the poet and
painter Stan Rice.
Family In 1972 the couple’s daughter, Michele, died aged 5. In 1978,
just before their second child, Christopher, was born Anne wrote Interview
with the Vampire. After Christopher’s birth the couple stopped drinking
and in 1989 the family returned to New Orleans to the house that would
become the setting for six of her novels and where Stan did more than 300
paintings. Stan, to whom Anne was married for 41 years, died in 2002 .
Religion After several years describing herself as an atheist, she
returned to Catholicism in 1998.
Success Her books have sold nearly 100 million copies.
Angel Time by Anne Rice is published by Chatto & Windus at
£17.99. Buy
this book
Your Comments
Order By: