Thorne, his long sleep interrupted by the waking and
rampaging of the Vampire Queen Akasha, is now driven to find the one who made
him, the one he saw in his visions – Maharet, one of the two oldest vampires in
the world
He emerges from his icy tomb to seek his own kind – and finds
Marius, the Roman, Child of the Millennium, Former Keeper of Those Who Must be
Kept. And avid biogorapher – who recounts his history to the Norse vampire
Thorne emerges from his centuries of sleep, trying to
find answers, trying to find his creator, trying to find some explanation for
what happened in the vampire world. At first it seems lucky that he runs into
Marius, ancient roman vampire who knows all the answers, but as he’s taken to Marius’s
home he realises the dreadful truth… he had fallen into the hands of The
Biographer Vampires and their Endless Exposition.
Despite having known Marius for less than a few hours,
this poor vampire is then subjected to Marius’s entire 2,000 year old life
story (as an added bonus, he also tucks in the story of Eudoxia, a vampire he
met along the way). I honestly think these books aren’t even trying to come up with
a plausible explanation for why these vampires feel a need to info-dump their
entire histories with the most purple of prose – just randomly dropping it on a
stranger will do now. Thorne wanted to know about the events of Queen of the Damned, it would have taken
exactly 10 minutes to sum up the (limited) plot of that book! No-one asked you
your life story, Marius!
To be fair, though, this is one of the better
interminably long, over-detailed biographies in the series because a) Marius is
a relatively relevant character and b) we get a good sense of him in this book
which we haven’t seen elsewhere (unlike, say, The
Vampire Armand which was repetitive and added nothing new).
We get a good insight into Marius’s character as time and
again he repeats the same patterns – Marius needs company. Not just vampire
company (though for much of his existence he seems to need or crave a vampire
companion), but human company as well especially when he was younger
(relatively speaking), often throwing open his home for people to join him in
parties and salons – far more so. In some ways he’s very much a product of his
time and place: he’s a Roman. He’s very civilised, very social and, tellingly,
pretty arrogant. Which is a wonderful repeated sense I get of Marius which is
well done because I get this sense while seeing through Marius’s eyes AND
without Marius himself conceding the point. But Marius is Roman, the civilised
man in the world of barbarians who need to be educated. From a young age he was
entrusted with the duty of keeping Akasha and Enkil safe and repeatedly drank
Akasha’s blood making him much much stronger than pretty much every vampire he
met. There’s a lot of fuel to that arrogance but once you see it, it puts
everything else into a whole new context with Marius.
Like the vampires he always has with him – he says he
likes to be a teacher, but ultimately with both vampires and humans he wants to
be the AUTHORITY – teacher, mentor, patron, father-figure (and lover at same
time because it’s the Vampire Chronicles)
up to and including his latest companion. Everyone is subservient to him, every
vampire has had to look up to him or been in a weaker position than him – and any
vampire who argued with him gets a completely disproportionate response from
him: Pandora, Mael, when Armand defied him (and a great deal of Marius’s
distrust of Armand seems to stem as much from his unwillingness to follow
exactly the path Marius laid down as anything else), any vampire he has been
with. He even has a completely childish snit with and Mael because they won’t take on Zenobia – who Marius has no
time or inclination for; never once considering that if he didn’t want to take
on a student then maybe nor did they? In turn it raises a question about why
Marius wants humans around him – is it a desire for civilised company? Or is it
a need for an entourage to lord it over?
It also puts into context the semi-frequent disasters
that blight Marius’s life – is it because he’s too close to humanity? Is it
because his overarching obsession with Those Who Must be Kept distracts him? Or
is because, as we see hinted at over and over, the arrogant Marius is too
careless and too sure in his own abilities to take precautions?
This is why, I think, Blood
and Gold is much better to many of the other books – because I finished it
having learned something new and quite important about one of the most
important characters of the series. I ended it without feeling that it was
pointless or skippable.
Now, while I say it was useful and brought insight, that’s not to say it wasn’t also dreadfully dreadfully dull and more purple than Barney on acid. The overdescriptiveness of this series gets on my last nerve, the melodrama makes me laugh (at it, not with it) and, honestly, can everyone stop seeing a complete stranger and 2 seconds later declaring how much they love them. In a previous review I said that the series would have to delve into the deep history of every pizza boy who visited – well we’d also have to put up with random vampires declaring their utter adoration for the bearers of cheesey bread!
And while there is original content, there’s still a huge
amount of recap of previous books – Marius’s time with Armand is there in vast
detail which I’ve already read in The
Vampire Armand as is a chunk of Queen
of the Damned and The
Vampire Lestat. Thrown in on top of that is lots of history – not in a
particular deep or interesting way, more like a Wikipedia recitation to provide
a backdrop to Marius’s long centuries.
In terms of minorities we don’t really have anything.
Even when vampires seem to come from places you’d think would have or have had
a high percentage of POC, but we have creamy skinned Egyptians and red haired
Mesopotamians and blond people everywhere. Pandora has an Indian companion –
but he feels more like a random reference than a character
In terms of LGBT people, Marius is bisexual and we finally
have a lesser focus on the whole “bisexual men like the kiddies” theme that has
saturated this series (and the Mayfair Witches).
We still have Marius and Armand’s relationship but at least we dwell a little
less on how much he loves his child-likeness. And it says a lot that I’m
actually looking at “hey, he’s sexualising the underaged less!” as some kind of
positive!
We have a number of women who have the potential to be
strong and interesting – Eudoxia, Pandora, Bianca, Zenobia – but inherently
whenever they develop to a point where they’re not in Marius’s shadow they
leave him – because of the aforementioned arrogance. But I am glad to see they
do make that break from him.
My end result is that I didn’t hate this book nor was it
headacheworthy to read and I even finished it with a sense that something was
achieved. But it also felt like work and didn’t feel fun. Damned with faint
praise is the very best I can manage. It won’t hurt, it’s not terrible and if
you read it before bed you will probably go to sleep nice and quickly.
