Bloody Bones
1 September 2012 01:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlode[Edit to add back the page that fell on the floor before typing and got lost!]
"Bloody Bones" was one Anita Blake book I was specifically looking forward to re-reading; I'd originally devoured it in hectic, compulsive gulps snatched down at three or four different bookshops, nervous all the time that someone might notice I was racing through a single book rather than browsing the stock. I hadn't read it again since, and it had taken me about six months to track down a copy of this volume, so I was really anticipating it.
I remembered this as the book in which Jean-Claude gets to take a major role again; in which Anita holds his hand in the face of approaching dawn and where she allows him to feed on her to save his life, not out of any lust but out of liking and loyalty; the book in which he becomes a person and not merely a monster, and she believes finally that in his fashion he does love her. I remembered admiring the slick use of old legends to provide new -- rather than superpowered -- foes in the shape of fairy magic vulnerable to ordinary bullets but immune to Anita's silver. I remembered crawling for the light with something terrible dragging itself from the coffin behind. I remembered consuming fire.
The reason why it has taken me over five weeks to get round to writing this review, after all, was that what I hadn't recalled from last time was the aura of depression and failure that was left hanging over the book.
In "Bloody Bones", we get to know people... and then they die. Again and again, Anita finds herself trying to protect people who then get killed off: taking a stand and losing. All the torture-games that the local vampires force Jean-Claude and his entourage to undergo are in the name of saving the child who is the sole survivor of the first disaster, whose rescue becomes Anita's justification for over-hasty action and moral compromise throughout the book -- and who is ultimately revealed to have been done away with 'off-screen' anyhow while she was unconscious -- everything was for nothing. She even loses the prized integrity of her mind, forced to submit to Seraphina's compulsions: she is only able to reveal and destroy the vampire nest because she has been bitten and carried off there, and by that time almost all the people we've met have been revealed as villains and/or otherwise killed horribly -- with the exception of Detective Freemont, an interesting cop character who simply disappears from the story, and Dorcas Bouvier, whose ancestral land is bought up to build a plush resort for the super-rich. (Yes, this is summarised as 'setting her free', but after the previous 300 pages have been characterised as showing wicked developers out to destroy 300 years of history in the name of mammon, it leaves a bad taste.)
However, one result of this is that I have ended up re-reading the book several times over the lengthy period I've had it, in the course of repeated attempts to write a review, and once you have got over the general air of futility it is actually quite an interesting entry in the Anita Blake series. I do wonder if Laurell K. Hamilton had been re-reading it herself immediately before writing "Blue Moon", as the later novel turns out to contain a significant number of direct references back to the events of this book, from a mention of Officer Freemount [sic] -- "She's still pissed about a case we worked together" -- to Anita's problems with being to allowed to enter another 'foreign' vampire territory after the outcome of "Bloody Bones", and the re-appearance of the rotting vampire power (too horrific to waste?)
The author has come up with a fresh professional challenge for Anita in her 'day job': not simply a matter of raw power, of raising more and older zombies than anyone else -- although it comes down to that in the end, escalating via the death of a vampire rather than a human enemy at a critical moment in the ceremony -- but instead setting her the task of raising the tangled remains of a mass grave without being able to identify any individual, for the highly practical reason of discovering precisely who was buried there. As a motor to set the plot in action it's an intriguing twist: and the fact that the burials turn out to be part of a magical prison provides a convincing motive for other parties to become desperate to stop any such mass resurrection, even of such a temporary nature.
Of course, it also provides an excuse to get Anita into improbably 'sexy' clothing without invoking any supernatural ceremonies, simply via the argument that a miniskirt can both pass as smart office clothing and fit under overalls!
We learn a little more about her in the course of this book as well: her fear of flying, her Great Aunt Katerine, her childhood after her mother's death. Her mother's death, of course, becomes very important: this is the weak point on which Seraphine chooses to fasten -- and which is very nearly Anita's undoing.
As opponent and master vampire Seraphina forms an interesting contrast to the other female nemesis we have met, Nikolaos from the first novel. Where Nikolaos was evil in the body of a vicious child, Seraphina is the first elderly vampire we have seen in a world where everybody seems to become undead young and beautiful. She is old enough to be sexually condescending to Jean-Claude (though 'catamount', a panther, is not, as LKH supposes, a synonym for 'catamite') -- to have known him "when he was a little vampire -- freshly dead" -- and to trigger Anita's mother-complex. She is also powerful enough to smash any attempt at psychic resistance and make straight-out combat quite impossible.
Jean-Claude himself does indeed, as I had remembered, get to play a much more active role in this book than in the last few. We learn a lot about his past from this conflict with vampires who knew him as a powerless underling -- and we learn for once of his human existence, not as the storybook aristocrat of his customary pose, but as a flogged French peasant.
At the start of the book Anita is still fretting about how to get away from him ("He'd never let me go.... The real trick was how to break free without anybody dying"), but she insists on his leaving his own territory to support her without taking the time for diplomatic negotiations -- a serious mistake which in fact gains nothing at all (save, one suspects, the opportunity for the author to enjoy a gratuitous 'sleepover' set-up!) Over the course of the book, however, Anita actually comes to rely on him to a surprising degree, working together as a team: she is prepared to accept a pose as his "human servant" without constantly pushing back. Jason is tricked into what he assumes will be voyeuristic games but turns out to be psychological torture -- but Jean Claude actually volunteers for a fight he knows he cannot win: to save Jason.
I'm afraid I found that his 'death' actually had very little emotional impact this time round. I don't know if it is simply poorly written, or if it is an inevitable result of knowing with hindsight that the character in fact survives for another dozen books; but I found far greater the impact of the scene only a page or so later where Anita finds herself caught in the position of needing to shoot him herself in order to stop him draining her to death.
And as before, he is far more appealing when uncertain and vulnerable than in arrogant seducer mode: "I love you, ma petite, as much as I am able..." (It is an intriguing comment on my memory that in reality Anita does not take his hand as the dawn comes: she is on the verge of it but holds back.)
The creature 'Rawhead and Bloody Bones' itself (apparently a genuine Scottish legend, though not one I've ever even heard of) proves to be as much a victim as anyone less, imprisoned to be fed upon first by Magnus and then Seraphina. It kills 'wicked children', but this is simply its function in the world -- "It is what I do. What I am." And Anita's leaguing with the monstrous Xavier to kill it although it offers her no threat proves a greater betrayal a moment later as the true culprit taunts her: "I fed him my victims when I grew tired of them".
Because Anita and her allies are seriously over-matched -- and because like Nikolaos for much of the book Seraphina is nominally an ally -- many of the horror sequences in this book consist not of action but of things that Anita is forced to witness. Perhaps the most disturbing is the scene in which she and Larry are forced to drop their protection and allow the vampires to kill their former employers before their eyes in the vain hopes of saving the hostage boy... but even in the finale, where all the vampires are destroyed, Anita is in no direct danger. It is not only full daylight but bright sunlight, and Seraphina cannot possibly escape; the horror is in the continuing mind-link that forces Anita herself to experience every detail of what she has done.
Various features of the series that will later become prominent can be traced back to this book: Jean-Claude himself remarks upon her long-hair-fetish (see Magnus Bouvier for example), while Laurell K. Hamilton's devotion to describing every detail of every outfit that anyone wears started to feel rather obvious around this stage. Jason's non-stop sexual innuendo seems to have its origin here (in "The Lunatic Café" he was more concerned with eating her), and this is where she first discovers the power to raise vampires 'from the dead' in broad daylight.
And of course this is the point at which Anita finds she can no longer regard Jean-Claude as one of the monsters any more: although the way that this is phrased (he has "crossed that line that a handful of other vampires have crossed") leaves me wondering which other vampires of Anita's experience the author can possibly have had in mind. I can only suppose that Anita is now classifying the Master of the City with the likes of small-time hood Willie McCoy...!
"Bloody Bones" was one Anita Blake book I was specifically looking forward to re-reading; I'd originally devoured it in hectic, compulsive gulps snatched down at three or four different bookshops, nervous all the time that someone might notice I was racing through a single book rather than browsing the stock. I hadn't read it again since, and it had taken me about six months to track down a copy of this volume, so I was really anticipating it.
I remembered this as the book in which Jean-Claude gets to take a major role again; in which Anita holds his hand in the face of approaching dawn and where she allows him to feed on her to save his life, not out of any lust but out of liking and loyalty; the book in which he becomes a person and not merely a monster, and she believes finally that in his fashion he does love her. I remembered admiring the slick use of old legends to provide new -- rather than superpowered -- foes in the shape of fairy magic vulnerable to ordinary bullets but immune to Anita's silver. I remembered crawling for the light with something terrible dragging itself from the coffin behind. I remembered consuming fire.
The reason why it has taken me over five weeks to get round to writing this review, after all, was that what I hadn't recalled from last time was the aura of depression and failure that was left hanging over the book.
In "Bloody Bones", we get to know people... and then they die. Again and again, Anita finds herself trying to protect people who then get killed off: taking a stand and losing. All the torture-games that the local vampires force Jean-Claude and his entourage to undergo are in the name of saving the child who is the sole survivor of the first disaster, whose rescue becomes Anita's justification for over-hasty action and moral compromise throughout the book -- and who is ultimately revealed to have been done away with 'off-screen' anyhow while she was unconscious -- everything was for nothing. She even loses the prized integrity of her mind, forced to submit to Seraphina's compulsions: she is only able to reveal and destroy the vampire nest because she has been bitten and carried off there, and by that time almost all the people we've met have been revealed as villains and/or otherwise killed horribly -- with the exception of Detective Freemont, an interesting cop character who simply disappears from the story, and Dorcas Bouvier, whose ancestral land is bought up to build a plush resort for the super-rich. (Yes, this is summarised as 'setting her free', but after the previous 300 pages have been characterised as showing wicked developers out to destroy 300 years of history in the name of mammon, it leaves a bad taste.)
However, one result of this is that I have ended up re-reading the book several times over the lengthy period I've had it, in the course of repeated attempts to write a review, and once you have got over the general air of futility it is actually quite an interesting entry in the Anita Blake series. I do wonder if Laurell K. Hamilton had been re-reading it herself immediately before writing "Blue Moon", as the later novel turns out to contain a significant number of direct references back to the events of this book, from a mention of Officer Freemount [sic] -- "She's still pissed about a case we worked together" -- to Anita's problems with being to allowed to enter another 'foreign' vampire territory after the outcome of "Bloody Bones", and the re-appearance of the rotting vampire power (too horrific to waste?)
The author has come up with a fresh professional challenge for Anita in her 'day job': not simply a matter of raw power, of raising more and older zombies than anyone else -- although it comes down to that in the end, escalating via the death of a vampire rather than a human enemy at a critical moment in the ceremony -- but instead setting her the task of raising the tangled remains of a mass grave without being able to identify any individual, for the highly practical reason of discovering precisely who was buried there. As a motor to set the plot in action it's an intriguing twist: and the fact that the burials turn out to be part of a magical prison provides a convincing motive for other parties to become desperate to stop any such mass resurrection, even of such a temporary nature.
Of course, it also provides an excuse to get Anita into improbably 'sexy' clothing without invoking any supernatural ceremonies, simply via the argument that a miniskirt can both pass as smart office clothing and fit under overalls!
We learn a little more about her in the course of this book as well: her fear of flying, her Great Aunt Katerine, her childhood after her mother's death. Her mother's death, of course, becomes very important: this is the weak point on which Seraphine chooses to fasten -- and which is very nearly Anita's undoing.
As opponent and master vampire Seraphina forms an interesting contrast to the other female nemesis we have met, Nikolaos from the first novel. Where Nikolaos was evil in the body of a vicious child, Seraphina is the first elderly vampire we have seen in a world where everybody seems to become undead young and beautiful. She is old enough to be sexually condescending to Jean-Claude (though 'catamount', a panther, is not, as LKH supposes, a synonym for 'catamite') -- to have known him "when he was a little vampire -- freshly dead" -- and to trigger Anita's mother-complex. She is also powerful enough to smash any attempt at psychic resistance and make straight-out combat quite impossible.
Jean-Claude himself does indeed, as I had remembered, get to play a much more active role in this book than in the last few. We learn a lot about his past from this conflict with vampires who knew him as a powerless underling -- and we learn for once of his human existence, not as the storybook aristocrat of his customary pose, but as a flogged French peasant.
At the start of the book Anita is still fretting about how to get away from him ("He'd never let me go.... The real trick was how to break free without anybody dying"), but she insists on his leaving his own territory to support her without taking the time for diplomatic negotiations -- a serious mistake which in fact gains nothing at all (save, one suspects, the opportunity for the author to enjoy a gratuitous 'sleepover' set-up!) Over the course of the book, however, Anita actually comes to rely on him to a surprising degree, working together as a team: she is prepared to accept a pose as his "human servant" without constantly pushing back. Jason is tricked into what he assumes will be voyeuristic games but turns out to be psychological torture -- but Jean Claude actually volunteers for a fight he knows he cannot win: to save Jason.
I'm afraid I found that his 'death' actually had very little emotional impact this time round. I don't know if it is simply poorly written, or if it is an inevitable result of knowing with hindsight that the character in fact survives for another dozen books; but I found far greater the impact of the scene only a page or so later where Anita finds herself caught in the position of needing to shoot him herself in order to stop him draining her to death.
And as before, he is far more appealing when uncertain and vulnerable than in arrogant seducer mode: "I love you, ma petite, as much as I am able..." (It is an intriguing comment on my memory that in reality Anita does not take his hand as the dawn comes: she is on the verge of it but holds back.)
The creature 'Rawhead and Bloody Bones' itself (apparently a genuine Scottish legend, though not one I've ever even heard of) proves to be as much a victim as anyone less, imprisoned to be fed upon first by Magnus and then Seraphina. It kills 'wicked children', but this is simply its function in the world -- "It is what I do. What I am." And Anita's leaguing with the monstrous Xavier to kill it although it offers her no threat proves a greater betrayal a moment later as the true culprit taunts her: "I fed him my victims when I grew tired of them".
Because Anita and her allies are seriously over-matched -- and because like Nikolaos for much of the book Seraphina is nominally an ally -- many of the horror sequences in this book consist not of action but of things that Anita is forced to witness. Perhaps the most disturbing is the scene in which she and Larry are forced to drop their protection and allow the vampires to kill their former employers before their eyes in the vain hopes of saving the hostage boy... but even in the finale, where all the vampires are destroyed, Anita is in no direct danger. It is not only full daylight but bright sunlight, and Seraphina cannot possibly escape; the horror is in the continuing mind-link that forces Anita herself to experience every detail of what she has done.
Various features of the series that will later become prominent can be traced back to this book: Jean-Claude himself remarks upon her long-hair-fetish (see Magnus Bouvier for example), while Laurell K. Hamilton's devotion to describing every detail of every outfit that anyone wears started to feel rather obvious around this stage. Jason's non-stop sexual innuendo seems to have its origin here (in "The Lunatic Café" he was more concerned with eating her), and this is where she first discovers the power to raise vampires 'from the dead' in broad daylight.
And of course this is the point at which Anita finds she can no longer regard Jean-Claude as one of the monsters any more: although the way that this is phrased (he has "crossed that line that a handful of other vampires have crossed") leaves me wondering which other vampires of Anita's experience the author can possibly have had in mind. I can only suppose that Anita is now classifying the Master of the City with the likes of small-time hood Willie McCoy...!