|
|
Title | Angel Time
| |
Author | Anne Rice
| |
Cover Art | Gustave Dore
| |
Publisher | Seal Books - 2010
| |
First Printing | Knopf Publishing - 2009
|
|
|
|
Title | Of Love and Evil
| |
Author | Anne Rice
| |
Cover Art | Gustave Dore
| |
Publisher | Vintage Canada - 2012
| |
First Printing | Alfred A. Knopf - 2010
|
| |
|
Category | Christian Lit
| |
Warnings | None
| |
Main Characters | Toby O'Dare, Malchiah
| |
Main Elements | Angels
| |
Website | ---
|
|
 Angel Time
Anne Rice returns to the mesmerizing storytelling that has captivated readers for more than three decades in a tale of unceasing suspense set in time past—a metaphysical thriller about angels and assassins.
The novel opens in the present. At its center: Toby O’Dare—a contract killer of underground fame on assignment to kill once again. A soulless soul, a dead man walking, he lives under a series of aliases—just now: Lucky the Fox—and takes his orders from “The Right Man.”
Into O’Dare’s nightmarish world of lone and lethal missions comes a mysterious stranger, a seraph, who offers him a chance to save rather than destroy lives. O’Dare, who long ago dreamt of being a priest but instead came to embody danger and violence, seizes his chance. Now he is carried back through the ages to thirteenth-century England, to dark realms where accusations of ritual murder have been made against Jews, where children suddenly die or disappear . . . In this primitive setting, O’Dare begins his perilous quest for salvation, a journey of danger and flight, loyalty and betrayal, selflessness and love.
Of Love and Evil
“I dreamed a dream of angels. I saw them and heard them in a great and endless galactic night. I saw the lights that were these angels, flying here and there, in streaks of irresistible brilliance... I felt love around me in this vast and seamless realm of sound and light... And something akin to sadness swept me up and mingled my very essence with the voices who sang, because the voices were singing of me...”
Thus begins Anne Rice’s lyrical, haunting new novel, a metaphysical thriller of angels and assassins that once again summons up dark and dangerous worlds set in times past. Anne Rice takes us to other realms, this time to the world of fifteenth-century Rome, a city of domes and rooftop gardens, rising towers and crosses beneath an ever-shifting layer of clouds; familiar hills and tall pines...of Michelangelo and Raphael, of the Holy Inquisition and of Leo X, second son of a Medici, holding forth from the papal throne...
And into this time, into this century, Toby O’Dare, former government assassin, is summoned by the angel Malchiah to solve a terrible crime of poisoning and to search out the truth of a haunting by an earthbound restless spirit—a diabolical dybbuk.
O’Dare soon discovers himself in the midst of dark plots and counterplots surrounded by a darker and more dangerous threat as the veil of ecclesiastical terror closes in around him.
As he embarks on a powerful journey of atonement, O’Dare is reconnected with his own past, with matters light and dark, fierce and tender, with the promise of salvation and with a deeper and richer vision of love.
This year I was reading a theme of gods/angels/demons, and every October I read something by Anne Rice, so as luck would have it, she wrote a duology that fit perfectly...plus I've run out of Vampire Chronicles to read!
I can't say I loved it, in fact that's probably true of most of Rice's book. There's something about her vampires where I can plow through even the most ridiculous of plot lines, but her other books don't have that benefit. I do enjoy her writing style, but I struggled a bit with the premise in this one. Not so much that Toby was an assassin, but that as a teenage kid with little worldly experience would start his career by taking out half of the mob in New York singlehandedly. And then, under all that, he's still a good guy, supposedly working for The Right Man and doing good in the world by taking bad guys out of it, but we don't really know who that Right Man really is, other than he is very kind to Toby.
Then an angel shows up, whisks Toby back to England's dark past, where Jews live in terror of being persecuted. Now I know Rice, even in her Vampire tales, had a tendency to touch on Christian topics and I was expecting it here, but I guess I was bit disappointed about the lack of actual supernatural bits? Which sounds weird but Malchiah doesn't show up much. We're either in Toby's past, or we're in our distant past...where Toby somehow adapts instantly? Like no stomach issues due to the way foods were prepared? He didn't catch anything due to the poor hygiene? He may have studied the time period, and the language was handwaved by some angel magic, but still, even if you know the words, you need to know the right way to put them together to avoid offence, what expressions where in common use, etc.
Well, it wasn't really a tale about time travel, it was a tale of a murderer for hire redeeming himself by saving lives instead. The rest I guess didn't have to entirely make sense, and as a sorta historical novel it was interesting enough. But on the whole, it was mostly forgettable. Like I said I'll read anything with Lestat in it, but here none of the characters meant much to me, our protagonist didn't come off as realistic (did I mention that not only was he a killing expert but he plays the lute in his spare time?), the angel wasn't around enough to mean anything to the reader except as a means by which to do an info dump of Toby's past and then toss us to fend for ourselves in centuries past. It had some promise, we'll see what the next one is like next year, since we've sorted out Toby's personal history we'll be able to bypass that right into the actual story (though character info dumps are pretty standard Rice fare, but visiting a vampire's history is just so much more interesting!)
October 2023
Alright, not my kind of book. The first 50 pages was just Toby talking about his closeness with God, and whether or not he was worthy to become part of the lives of his girlfriend and son he had ten years ago, before he became an assassin. The next 50 pages is more interesting, he's whisked back in time to solve the mystery illness of a Renaissance man in Rome, thus saving his Jewish doctor friend from taking the blame. The next 50 pages was solving the mystery of a haunting of the house this Jewish doctor was staying in, again saving him from being accused of summoning a dybbuk. And then another 50 pages of Toby trying to clean up his old life and wipe out any evidence that could come back to haunt his family, and again more thoughts on God and whether he's worthy to rejoin his family.
Honestly, there wasn't much plot. The solving of the mystery illness was the only interesting bit. Even the dybbuk mystery, while sorta interesting, was just a giant info dump of one man's feelings of guilt as opposed to a real story. The 100 pages at the start and end of the book just bored me (if you are into Christian literature you might enjoy it but a hundred pages of saying how wonderful God is and how unworthy the narrator doesn't make for much of a plot, and I'm not a fan of angst in general, I don't like it in YA novels and I didn't like it here).
Next...I'm not sure the point of the whole time travel thing. Nice that one doctor living 400 years ago gets his prayers answered...but why is Toby fixing things in the past? There must be millions of people suffering in the present day for him to help? Wasn't there a single "bad guy seeking redemption" in Renaissance Italy that could have helped the doctor? I mean it would avoid the handwaving required for Toby to spontaneously speak Italian and know all the mannerisms and speech patterns of Renaissance Italy so that he wouldn't stick out as some kind of freak.
Basically these are books that appear to be driven by one thing, Rice needed an excuse to examine a moment in history when Jews were being persecuted. But instead of writing a novel about that moment in time, she came up with this crazy premise of this killer for hire in the present day that has to go back and help them to save his own soul. After all only 50% of the book actually took place in the past, so this historical event isn't in fact the core part of the novel, which would have made it feel interesting, rather than an afterthought, a backdrop for Toby's redemption. I found I couldn't be made to care that much, or learn very much, aboutt he fate of Jews in this time and place, because this story was more about Toby doing a good deed to help expunge his bad past.
Finally, Rice clearly intended to write at least one more book in this series since it ends with a cliffhanger. But much as I hate leaving a series unfinished, I'm ok with not having to read more of this.
|
