The vampire queen gives voice to Jesus
Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, By Anne Rice, Knopf, 336 pp., $27.95
In the Author's Note at the conclusion of ''Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," Anne Rice -- best known for her series of novels constituting ''The Vampire Chronicles" -- seeks to explain her return to the Catholic Church after having left it at age 18, while still reassuring her supernatural-loving fans that they should stick with her. ''After all," she writes, ''is Christ Our Lord not the ultimate supernatural hero, the ultimate outsider, the ultimate immortal of them all?"
And indeed, on the first page, Rice none-too-subtly presents us with the struggle that is at the core of this book: Jesus' attempt to come to grips with how and why he is special, understand where his powers came from, and reconcile his divine origins with his corporeal life.
The book opens as the 7-year-old Jesus responds to the bullying of a kid named Eleazar by feeling ''the power go out of me" and causing the boy to drop dead. Fortunately, he's able to sneak back into Eleazar's house and revive him. But having a child who can both smite other kids and bring them back to life can strain relations with the neighbors. So when Joseph has a dream telling him that King Herod has died, he decides that it's time to move the family from Alexandria, Egypt, back to Israel.
Before they leave, Jesus overhears Joseph explaining to Mary why they must go to Nazareth and dare not return to Bethlehem. He alludes to the star, the shepherds, the men from the East, and other mysterious events. When Jesus clamors for an explanation, Mary denies him one but promises to reveal all ''when the time comes." And so, in case we missed it the first time, Rice's authorial voice bellows from the page that Jesus is on a quest to discover his past and, in so doing, his future.
It is evident that Rice has done her homework. This novel -- the first of four planned books on the childhood of Jesus Christ -- is rich in political and religious detail, describing the Jewish rituals of the time against a political backdrop of both collaboration with and rebellion against the Romans. It is structurally sound as well, with Passover observances in Jerusalem serving as bookends that mark the start and finish of Jesus' seventh year (and, with the foreshadowing of which Rice is so obviously fond, the finish of his life on earth as well). And though Mary, Joseph, and James are not significantly more complex than Christmas pageant characters, Rice does what she can within the constraints imposed by her fealty to the Gospels.
Unfortunately, unless one is infused with a religious reverence as deep and genuine as the author's apparently is, reading it may feel somewhat like homework as well. Rice has boldly chosen to write in the first-person voice of Jesus. But writing from the perspective of a 7-year-old is always a risky move, and in this case, the gamble does not pay off. She relies on simple, declarative sentences and repetition to create a sense of innocence, but the effect is merely tedious. Despite that, the story she's chosen to tell is almost engaging enough to appeal as much to fans of vampire stories as to those of Bible tales. As literary feats go, that's a near-miracle.
