Rice Proves That Vampires Can Be Just as Dreary as Mortals

Vampire stories reflect the human condition. Grant Anne Rice and her readers that much. Vampires live forever by drinking people’s blood. We live our mortal span by eating other species and exploiting the less fortunate of our own. We don’t have fangs, but we do have “daisy cutter” bombs and Darwinian economics. Primal sin underlies our intellectual and artistic achievements, even our love, just as blood-guilt haunts the vampire.

In Rice’s novels, the comparison flatters us--surely one of the secrets of her popularity. Her vampires have style. Take Marius, the narrator of most of “Blood and Gold.” He’s an ancient Roman senator, no less, initiated into the vampire realm by Druids in Britain. He loves literature and art, mourns the 5th century sack of Rome by the Visigoths, rejoices in the Italian Renaissance and considers making the painter Botticelli a vampire to confirm the affinity of their souls.

He doesn’t, of course. Marius is an ethical and sentimental ghoul. He pines for his lost love, the blood-drinker Pandora. He bites only evildoers’ necks. Mysteriously and effortlessly rich, he spends his gold on hideaways for Enkil and Akasha, king and queen of the vampires, who are as immobile as statues but contain the “sacred core” of the race. In the pre-Christian era, somebody set them out in the sun; they survived, but lesser vampires all over the world were killed or scorched.

From his luxury box, Marius watches 2,000 years of Western history parade by. In Constantinople, he battles the alluring but evil vampire Eudoxia. In Venice, he witnesses the Black Death. In England, he observes the rise of the Talamasca, the Rice-invented monastic order whose incestuous relationship with vampires resembles the chummy enmity of cops and crooks.

It’s all a story Marius tells in modern times to Thorne, a Norse blood-drinker who has slept under Arctic ice for centuries. Thanks to vampiric ESP, Thorne has dreamed of a revolt against Enkil and Akasha and the seizure of the sacred core by others.

He has “seen” Marius and an old Rice favorite, the vampire Lestat, participate in these events. Awake at last, Thorne wants a full account, which Marius, momentarily freed of the loneliness that is the undead’s heaviest burden, is happy to give him.

It’s a long story and, by Rice’s standards, not an exciting one. Too much time needs to be filled in with sumptuous descriptions of clothes and interiors and with links to the rest of her ever-expanding “Vampire Chronicles.” Marius avoids the sun, he hunts, he guards the king and queen (known as Those Who Must Be Kept) and longs for closer contact with humans. Over and over.

He justifies his existence by writing or painting--efforts that come to little, because he lacks an audience. His emotions follow the same tired circle: He’s guilty. He’s lonely. Out of loneliness, he sins. That makes him guiltier. And lonelier.

In an earlier Renaissance tale, “Vittorio, the Vampire,” Rice imagined a world in which vampires, grown strong during the Dark Ages, were still a threat to human civilization. In “Blood and Gold,” for all their supernatural powers, vampires hardly matter. They watch as weak, short-lived humans do all the heavy work--destroying and reviving the glory of Rome, dying of the plague and making immortal works of art.

Vampires are dilettantes--this is the unintended message of “Blood and Gold.” They do little harm to the world and no good, despite their spiritual pretensions. Unlike people, vampires are boring--a truth that won’t stop Rice from writing her stories, or fans from reading them, but maybe, just maybe, should.