THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 20, 1995 TAG: 9508180589
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE PATON
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
MEMNOCH THE DEVIL
The Vampire Chronicles
ANNE RICE
Alfred A. Knopf. 354 pp. $25.
With every installment of Anne Rice's chronicles, the vampire Lestat grows in power, thirsts for a wider knowledge, gives his emotions fiercer play and pushes the limits of his existence.
In Memnoch the Devil, Lestat's limits propel him all the way to God in Heaven and the Devil in Hell.
The novel's question: Will Lestat offer himself as a Prince of Darkness second only to the fallen Archangel? The answer: Perhaps, if it is God's will.
With Memnoch, Rice has written the novel of her life, throbbing with action and emotion on its surface and deep in its well-realized expression of ideas and themes. Lestat, introduced 19 years ago in Interview With the Vampire as an icy-cold monster, has labored since then to be understood as a fiery romantic and here reaches his goal.
Lestat has disturbed the ancient mummified vampires of Egyptian times; read the biographies of his victims in their blood as he drank; gained the power of flight, then soared to the sun in a sort of suicide try. In the last Lestat novel, The Tale of the Body Thief, he took the ultimate risk, trading his undead body for a human one and only retrieving it at the last moment with the help of his human friend David Talbot, chief of the Talamasca occult society.
To save Talbot, whose spirit was hurled into a young Latino's body, Lestat turned him into a vampire. As Memnoch opens, the pair are in New York. Lestat stalks a particularly intriguing victim, Roger, a collector of religious art, who has financed his life with violent drug-pushing and taken pains to conceal his doings from his alluring televangelist daughter, Dora.
But as Lestat pursues Roger, he is conscious of a presence making itself known to him - an aura of monstrous power, with a muffled beat of great wings. Raging, Lestat kills Roger, but the man returns immediately as a ghost, finds Lestat and gulps Southern Comfort with him in a Manhattan bar as he tells the vampire his daughter's life story.
Lestat, shaken, tries to encounter Dora in the old New Orleans convent building where she makes her home. He succeeds, but first he meets, in ordinary human form, the Devil. They grapple, and Lestat learns that they are close equals in strength.
The Devil states his case: ``My name is Memnoch . . . don't look it up in a book because you'll never find it. . .
``I am here to ask your help! I'm tired and I need you.''
Weeping, Lestat demands proof of Memnoch's identity. He hears the cautions of other vampires, but against their advice asks Dora for counsel. Unafraid, she bids him to hear Memnoch's story.
Rice thus sets the stage for a journey that is a modern concordance to Dante's Paradiso, if not the Inferno. The focus is on Memnoch as an Archangel, who loves God and pursues commands from the deity. According to his nature, however, he questioned the course of creation as animals appeared, suffered for it and evolved to human form.
Bidden by God to study man, the angel made love to a Palestinian beauty, in a perfect expression of Rice's own insistence on the sexual act as a portal of mystery and ecstacy. ``A purely living miracle,'' Memnoch calls it.
As with any examination of the Devil, Rice begs the question of the origin of evil and of free will. If the Archangel sinned and was cast out, was this not intended by God from the start?
``My endeavors are not irreconcilable to heaven, surely, or I would not be allowed to do what I do,'' Memnoch tells Lestat, whose senses are seared and stretched nearly beyond sanity by his travels.
Rice has found such a perfect vehicle for her expression here, and delved so deeply into her universe, that she may find it impossible to surpass Memnoch the Devil. This may well be the end of Lestat in print, at least as a narrator. He has nothing more to find, and his closing words - ``Let me pass from fiction into legend'' - are a benediction, from a bloodsucker who has tasted the blood of Christ. MEMO: Dave Paton is a staff editor. by CNB