Kyle Kerr

Angel Time

02/3/10 | Books, Reviews | 1 Comments

I’ve been hearing for years about how amazing Anne Rice is.  She’d written the hugely successful Vampire Chronicles series, the Mayfair witches books, the Sleeping Beauty erotica trilogy… but I’d never read one of her stories.  I’d always wanted to, but something always kept me away.

What’s funny is that I read her son Christopher Rice’s first three books before I ever picked one of hers up.  He’s a talented writer himself and I think he has a long career ahead of him.

What about her turned me off so?  To be honest, it was her very public return to the Catholic Church and her pledge to devote the rest of her life’s work to Him.  Even though I’d never read a word of her writing, I somehow felt betrayed… mostly because of the knowledge that her son is gay and her decision seemed like a slap in the face.  How could she rejoin a religion that is bent on condemning her son’s soul to hell?

Forgive me my rant, because that’s not how I feel now.  I’ve had a love/hate relationship with religion for a long time, and it has taken many years to sort through my conflicting feelings towards it.  I’m not a religious person by any means, but moreso in the sense that I despise organized religion.  I don’t like the messages they preach and I think it is despicable that they use God as an excuse to spread their own bigotry and hatred.

Myself, I’m agnostic.  You heard that right… I’m not an atheist.  I’m a scientifically oriented person, but I believe there are things that can’t be explained by science, so my mind isn’t completely made up.  Though I don’t go to mass or pray, I still believe in God in my own way and have my own respect for Him.  I believe that Jesus was a real person who tried to change the world for the better and ended up pissing off the bigots of his time to his unfortunate end (which is why I don’t believe he would stand for the hateful things his followers claim to preach in his name…).

However, I now know that not everyone who is a Catholic follows all of the same beliefs.  There are those who follow the rule of tolerance and love, and that’s where I now realize Anne Rice is.  She has never stopped being supportive of her son, and is a strong advocate for Gay Rights.  In a way, I saw in myself some of the same attitudes that some of His more fanatic followers have, and I wasn’t giving her a chance just because of her religion.  There was something seriously wrong with that.

So one day I decided it was time to delve into her stories.  I eased myself in with a viewing of the adaptation of her first novel, Interview with the Vampire, and instantly fell in love with her characters and their story.  I bought the book that day and finished it within a week.

There are many things one can say about Anne’s writing, about her captivating stories, her lyrical prose… but what I found myself so absorbed in was her voice.  It was one of my more magical reading experiences, and I couldn’t believe how she kept up such language on every page of the book, in every sentence, every word.  There was nothing extraneous, every word was important and helped to paint the picture of this beautiful world.  I’d enjoyed the storyline as a movie, but reading the novel was an experience on a whole different level.  She’d found an instant fan, one who’d been writing her off unfairly for years.

All that being said, I received a copy of her newest novel, ANGEL TIME, for Christmas (note the irony in THAT), and it was the first book of the new year that I read.

Here’s a small description of the book from Publisher’s Weekly:

“[…] this kickoff to bestseller Rice’s new Songs of the Seraphim religious romance series centers on hired assassin Toby O’Dare, a one-time aspirant to the priesthood until personal tragedy unmoored his life. Guardian angel Malchiah visits Toby, who’s just consummated his latest kill, and offers him redemption for his sins. After accepting the offer, Toby is whisked away to 13th-century England, where, in the guise of a Dominican friar, he becomes the protector of a Jewish couple accused wrongly by the gentile populace of having murdered their young daughter for her conversion to Christianity.”

To be fair, the book started out slow.  There’s a lot of exposition from Toby, who we only know as Lucky at this point, over his life as an assassin and his longing to believe in God.  I love exposition (as a literary writer myself), so knew enough to give the book a chance.  Again, I was amazed by Anne’s lyrical words, the way she could weave together sentences and paragraphs and pages as if from the finest silk.  Though beautifully woven, she almost lost me in the second chapter after a lengthy description of a hotel.  Even though I knew it had to be important, I wasn’t deep enough into the story to care just yet.  But still I gave it a chance.

And that’s when Malchiah came into the picture.  He’s an angel that has been following Toby for almost his entire life.  He promises to absolve Toby of his sins, to get him back into God’s good graces.  As a way of getting Toby to believe he was real, he recites Toby’s childhood in great detail, things Toby never revealed to anyone in his current life.

That’s where the story really started for me, hearing about poor but determined Toby as a young boy, oldest of three, trying to follow his faith and manage a corrupt father and alcoholic mother at the same time.  His innocence and pure spirit are captivating, and it makes his loss all the more heartbreaking.  Once he leaves home for New York City, circumstances lead him to his first kills, but you know that he is completely in the right for what he does.

The story takes an interesting turn there, as Toby gives himself over to His services and is transported back in time (because in Angel Time, time as we know it does not exist), and he has to protect the Jewish parents of a young girl who the town’s Catholics believe murdered her because she wanted to convert to Christianity.  In this time, we get to hear from Fluria, the girl’s mother, about her own struggles with love and religion, because as a Jewess, she fell in love with a Christian, and people were killed in those times for much less.

In the end, this story is about love and Toby’s struggle to find faith and his place in the world.  Again, I fell into the trap of believing the story would be preachy, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth.  It wasn’t in the slightest.

I’m fascinated with religion, by the characters and the stories they tell.  Religion is a topic I bring into a lot of my own writings, in various ways, for that reason.  And this is a story that anyone, of any religion or belief system, can enjoy.

I follow Anne on Twitter and was happy to learn that she recently finished edits on the next book in her new Songs of the Seraphim series, The Dybbuk, and it is scheduled for an October 2010 release.  It’s definitely on my To Buy list… I’m even considering picking up her Life of Christ series.  I figure I owe her the benefit of the doubt in this case.

Until next…

Kyle W. Kerr