First Published: 1980
Edition Read: Orb, 2008
ISBN: 978 0 7653 2082 7
Some books seem ho-hum or “not bad” all the way through and then, in the last few pages, end in a blaze of glory. This is one of those books.
This whole post is about the “blaze of glory” in the last couple of pages, so if you don’t want to know about it, you should stop reading. In this case, the spoiler at the ending isn’t so much an event as an idea, but knowing it will still give away the trajectory of the book. It’s not a suspenseful novel, though, so it isn’t like knowing the end of a mystery. Anyway, it’s your choice.
WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW
Charnas’ vampire is an attempt at a more realistic, product-of-evolution-type vampire, so no turning into bats or death by sunlight or fangs that look dramatic but waste a lot of blood. What we have is simply a predator – he needs human blood to stay alive. He doesn’t need to kill and killing makes it more likely he’ll be discovered so, while he does kill, he does it rarely. The important point is that he is a predator feeding on humans who is not a human. The only other thing you need to know is that he lives for a long time partly by hibernation-like sleeps that seem to last decades (maybe centuries) and that while he accumulates knowledge (such as languages) and skills (such as making flint knives), he has more or less no memory of his “past lives.”
What makes the book exciting is that at the end we discover the purpose behind the long sleeps. In every life he begins as a pure predator – a foreign being from a different time learning to adapt, to fit in, to pass as human so that he can safely feed on his prey. He creates a life-as-mask for himself that he uses to secure what he needs. Gradually, the life-as-mask forces him to interact with humans in a social, rather than predator-prey, relationship and, eventually, he realises that he has come to care not just about the mask-life he created, but also about some people. A predator cannot survive if he truly cares about his prey and so he is forced back into sleep, into forgetfulness, into beginning the cycle again decades or centuries into the future.
The metaphor for growth-from-childhood (being in a strange world, creating and defining a life, starting to be defined by the life you made), standing alone, would probably not have enthralled me. However, neither of the two normal trajectories are taken from this point. Traditionally, we either go the Hollywood route and and the vampire realises that he can be part of the world with friends and family living off blood banks and espousing traditional family values, or we go the tragedy route and the vampire’s new-found passion for humanity leads to his destruction. Charnas’ vampire rejects the first option as unrealistic – he is separate and apart, a lion who cannot lay down with the lamb – and rebels against the second option by choosing to kill his consciousness in sleep and amnesia. He will survive as a body and hope that the core of what makes him “him” survives the cultivation of ignorance.
So, despite the fact that the book is about the sad triumph of a murderous predator, it is strangely life affirming. It demands that we accept the existence of a middle path. When the life we made starts to make us in ways we don’t like we need neither come to peace with it nor be destroyed by the realisation. We can choose, instead, to take control and change who we have become. Though the vampire effects re-birth through oblivion, the books provides a quick, almost background, example of a human who goes through the same process with more happy results and so the character of Floria becomes a grace note at the end of the book.
Thus, the book about the monster that experiences true triumph over goodness through self destruction becomes a book about the possibility of better lives for us all. Now that’s a mind bender.
jjlibling
merrychace
man you got way more of that book than i did. my suspicion is that much of the reason is that these themes of self-fashioning strongly appeal to you in a way that they do not appeal to me (i like self-fashioning as much as the next person, but it isn’t a defining part of my conception of life). interesting post, though i’m not sure how much of what you say here is actually in the book, and how much is really about the interaction between ideas in your head and some elements in the book. the book made a small enough impression on me that i’m not really qualified to speak to the question of what messages are present in the book. but i like what you’ve read into it, at least.
Hey, M — thanks for the thoughtful review of my book. For me, it’s a long time ago now — I wrote the book in the late ’70′s! — but Weyland is so fresh in my mind that I have a couple of starts for a new story (book? who knows?) about him in my computer, that I return to from time to time to see if they’re turning into something live. I started working on the character as a direct response to all the romantic hooey I was seeing about vampires as Byronic, blood-sippin’ love machines, which I found absurd and annoying. (My idea of a *good* vampire story is the novel “Let The Right One In”, which most folks know from its very excellent film version, and romantic it ain’t).
Any time you take a folkloric idea and examine it realistically, as if it were scientific fact, you’re pretty much bound to turn up some interesting ideas. Take a look at the early volumes of Charlaine Harris’s “Sookie Stackhouse” books, about a waitress in a one-horse southern town and her growing entanglement with the super-naturals who also inhabit her world, for a good example: though here what’s interesting is the weave of the human culture in a setting that doesn’t often receive this kind of respectful understanding and pride in its fictional handling. You can *feel* the degree to which these books began as a kind of counter-attack against the Laurel K. Hamilton school of woman + monsters story.
Anyway, thanks again, M — you’re the kind of reader that writers like me write for.
Thanks for the comment – it’s a big highlight for me when an author I write about responds to what I wrote (and you’re the first).
I agree with much of what you said about the vampire stories, though it is interesting to note that the later Sookie Stackhouse books become (to some extent at least) what you describe them as a response against.
Small point – I’m not M (she’s my wife, which explains why she is my most frequent commenter). Anyway, thanks for the response and good luck with the new stories. I, for one, would love to see the return of Weyland (or whatever he would be called in his new life).
Hey, I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say GREAT blog!…..I”ll be checking in on a regularly now….Keep up the good work!
- Marc Shaw
Here’s another “blaze of glory” for you, rather more elegant than mine with “Tapestry”, and an astounding achievement: Elizabeth Knox’s “The Vintner’s Luck”, which I have in mind because the film made of it (by the maker of “Whale Rider”) just came through town (and pretty good job, too).
In the book (which you may or may not know, but I can’t describe it without spoilers, so stop here if you’d rather go read it first and then check out my comment, below):
The Angel Zas accompanies a talented French wine-maker, Sobran, through life as Sobran attempts to make a perfect wine and rises in his 19th c corner of the world as his ambitions flower. At the end, Sobran dies peacefully in his vineyard, and his soul returns to Heaven pristine, purified and restored to its original youthful perfection, for (presumably) God to enjoy.
Pristine, purified, perfect — and, you realize, flavorless, or at least basically indistinguishable from all the other similarly reconditioned soul home restored to peak condition as they return from the trials of earthly life.
But Zas, the Angel, has had repeated sips of an ever changing vintage from year to year, rich with the tastes of striving, failure, victory, and all the rest of the complexity of human maturation and age: an ongoing, varied pressing, Sobran’s life as it has unfolded with all its stops and starts and lurches and backward steps.
This, you realize, is why the Angel is a voluntarily fallen one: it chooses *for* that richness and variety, and *against* the perfect sterility of perfection.
To this day, this efflorescent conclusion brings tears to my eyes; and it’s all in the final paragraph of the book.
Brilliant.