A Book A Week - Week 45: The Wolves of Midwinter

This week's book:
  The Wolves of Midwinter    by Anne Rice

Grade:   B

 Maybe you can tell because this review is two days late, but, man, I could not get into this book.

Once again I picked up the second novel in a series without reading the first one, but that's not it.  Or not just it.  I think it was the premise that did me in.

The story is that werewolves are real.  No big deal, it's a novel by Anne Rice, so it's not going to be like 'Grapes of Wrath.'  The hero, Rueben, has just been changed into a werewolf in the previous novel, and as this one opens he's been welcomed into the family, so to speak, and begins to learn about his new powers.  But it's Christmas, which werewolves also celebrate, natch, and Rueben's education is interrupted by a ghost.  There are secrets deeper than the werewolves, spirits and ancient things in the deep forest in Northern California.

Seems kind of overwrought, doesn't it?  It was.

Anne Rice has been writing for quite a while, so the prose was very good, with tight descriptions and good pacing.  But the dialogue... there was a lot of it.  A lot.  Conversations that were mostly exposition pretending to be revelations of inner life.  It's a delicate balance, I know, between writing good dialogue for a book and realistic dialogue.  You can't write dialogue the way real people speak, it's unreadable.  But you can't have your characters speak like they're reading from the Encyclopedia Britannica either.  There was lot of Britannica here.  Pages and pages and pages of it.  Back and forth, agonized discussion after agonized discussion.  Just not for me.

One a more technical note, I noticed the narrative broke point of view many, many times.  Rueben is the main character, but over and over again we'd get a paragraph from another character's perspective, right in the middle.  Or, even better, Rueben providing another character's inner motivation.  I didn't care for that either.

Overall it wasn't bad.  Leaps and bounds better than Twilight, thank God.  And I can see where someone else might like the dialogues and personal interplay, but it left me flat.  It felt like a Bronte sister novel, but with werewolves.  Maybe that was her intention all along, to make a Gothic horror out of Romanticism, to put werewolves and ghosts and spirits into Wuthering Heights.  If so, she succeeded admirably, because that's precisely what I found.  It was just not to my tastes. 

Next week:
  Undisputed Truth    by Mike Tyson  with Larry Sloman
I've been fascinated with Mike Tyson since the first time I saw him box.  He's a troubled mix of contradictions trying to resolve themselves, and as he gets older I don't know if he's finding a way to get beyond his past or is in danger of being overwhelmed by it.  I'll read his book to find out.