Customer Reviews

The Feast of All Saints

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Here - coincidently on this night of All Souls - floating through my brain are thoughts on this Anne Rice novel, which indeed is one of her best.

Before I mention all that this fine novel is, let me state precisely what it is not: It's not a book to be read quickly - for if you are used to reading through things briskly, with the urgent anticipation of the next read always at hand - then this one is sure to frustrate you; It's not an eventful or an adventurous storyline - though A.R. has written quite a few fast-moving tales, this one is slow and meticulous in both movement and detail; There is no absolute line drawn between the hero and adversary in this plot - every character is given a point of view in order to be understood, and elaborated upon until for certain it is understood.

This is a novel unlike most novels. Set in New Orleans before the Civil War, FEAST OF ALL SAINTS is the story of a distinct yet veritably unknown society of people - numbering approximately 18,000 at that time - they were the free people of color. Free people of color were individuals of white and black mixed blood. They were a fragile society made up of those hovering between the established white population and the slaves. The unique and complex city of New Orleans gave this well-educated and interesting group of people a place in which to flourish. In fact, Voodoo queen Marie Laveau was a free person of color. Inarguably, her life has already been explored in works of both fact and fiction. Yet in this well-researched novel, Anne Rice brings to life fictional characters and gives such insight into the lives of these fascinating people as has likely never been seen.

The protagonist, Marcel, is an adolescent whose parents are Phillipe, a wealthy & prominent plantation owner with a family outside New Orleans, and Cecil, his mistress, a free person of color. He is blond and blue-eyed, but with distinct African features - "combined in an unusual way that was extremely handsome and clearly undesirable." Marcel's younger sister Marie, however is dark-haired, beautiful, and could pass for a white person.

Marcel is growing up assured of the knowledge that his father will send him to Paris to be educated as soon he is of age. Christophe, an author and free person of color who has been educated in France, becomes his mentor when he returns to New Orleans to open up a school. He also has two close friends - Richard, son of a wealthy undertaker, and Anna Bella. With every person in his life, there is a uniquely complex relationship.

This, I must say, is very much a coming-of-age story. Yet - it rises above even that as it intertwines like a patient kind of poetry the feelings of isolation wrought from being misunderstood. It gives credence to the certainty that there can actually be drawn from within the soul of a person (and that all people possess certain qualities of the Saints) that which can overcome even the most intense adversity.

This was only her second novel - after INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE. As in her first book, her characters are insatiable in their quest for meaning to their existence, yet are isolated from society. This novel differs in that Marcel is not left with feelings of desolation as was Louis. Marcel seems in all respects to be much more further evolved - which in so many ways reflects the spirit of this fine author - for this protagonist grows to be able to envision the many possibilities his future holds.

Roughly the first two hundred pages of this book deal with a young boy enrolling in a new school. In the process, the book tells us who this boy, Marcel Ste. Marie, is and brings passionately and atmospherically to life his people and their world. It's fascinating. It avoids cheap thrills to unfold like old fashioned literature into a great sensuous flower of a story that doesn't let go. Hints of Rice's customary obsessions are present in this early book but they are very restrained and so gain tantalizing power.

The book deals with the free people of color in 19th century New Orleans, mixed-blood descendants of freed slaves- the proud old families who have established themselves as tradesmen and planters but also the children of white planters' quadroon mistresses. All are oppressed in subtle ways and walk a narrow path of propriety in response. Abandoning their heritage for more racially tolerant Europe is a constant temptation. Even the most refined, educated and prosperous members of the old families cannot vote. A respectable white planter must not be embarrassed by the second family he maintains with his mistress and all assume a mistress's pretty daughter will follow her mother's profession.

Marcel, his sister Marie, his friends Richard and Anna Bella come of age in this environment with poignantly intense youthful enthusiasms, affections and anxieties. Anything their elders cannot face has been kept from them until they reach the age when their world's injustices become unavoidable. They then find themselves at odds with traditional ways that formerly provided meaning and certainty. The story that develops can't be summarized but it builds to such a pitch that when you reach the words in this review's title you might just cheer aloud, as i did. This is historical fiction at its best.

I have read nearly all of Anne Rice' works - the erotica, the vampire books, the Mayfair witch books, etc. - and this book is second only to Cry to Heaven. Just as in that vivid and lovely book, Rice has chosen a distinct period of history and an obscure group of people, and brought them to nearly palpable life.

Years after reading this book, it's atmosphere and clearly drawn scenes linger in my memory. I had never known of the "gens de couleur libres" of New Orleans until this book. Rice has done an incredible job of bringing the time, place, and people to light. And the book brought such an engrossing human drama along with the knowledge, that it cannot be forgotten.

Beautiful.

When I visited New Orleans for the first time a few years ago, I took a walking tour of the Garden District that included Ann Rice's house (complete with black limo outside). I also noticed small outbuildings that were referred to as `garconierres.' When I questioned their purpose, I was told that boys were housed away from the main house in order to sow their wild oats in private. They were encouraged to eat, drink, be merry, take mistresses, and generally get the devilment out of their systems before adulthood and the need to marry, begin a family, and take over their fathers' businesses became expected of them.
The Creoles played a large part in this aspect of New Orleans society, and our tour guide said the best novel detailing all the permutations of Creole life was this one, Ann Rice's The Feast of all Saints. So I bought it.
Like all of Rice's books, it's overly long and wordy: I understand it's part of her contract with her publishing house that they will not edit out or change one single word of her manuscript as submitted. That's a shame, because I feel this would have been a better book if it had been a shorter book. I found myself skimming whole pages in places.
Nonetheless, it's a terrific 19th Century story of the gens de couleur libre, or the Free People of Color who were destined to be a distinct race caught between two worlds: slaves and owners. It was the Creole women who frequently became the mistresses of the white men. Descended from a mixture of races including African, French, and Spanish, they played (and continue to play) a unique role in the history of New Orleans.
At its heart, The Feast of All Saints is a coming-of-age story of Marcel, the child of a Creole woman and a wealthy, white plantation owner who has promised to send him to Paris to complete his education when he comes of age. It's also the story of Marcel's younger sister, who could pass for white; his mentor Christophe, another free person of color, and a few others of his friends. It's a story of struggle against alienation and of complex, intertwined relationships.
It deserves slow and careful reading, for it's rich with detail and passion - but man, it sure is loooong and repetitive in many places.

This book, along with the Baroque Italian novel _Cry to Heaven_, are curiosities among Anne Rice's oeuvre-- straight-up historical novels without any supernatural elements. And despite the lack of vampires, despite the fact that the only "witch" in the book is a madam pretending to practice magic, I firmly believe that _Feast of All Saints_ is Rice's best work. I first read it six years ago, pulling an all-nighter because I couldn't bear to put it down, and I reread it every year or so.

_Feast of All Saints_ is set in antebellum New Orleans, among a subculture known as the Gens de Couleur Libre (Free People of Color). They were people of mixed race, descended from white planters and their black mistresses. While their lives are circumscribed by myriad rules, and they are forever considered second-class citizens, they have also grown complacent about the ways in which they are fortunate. Perhaps the most shocking thing I learned from this book was that the Free People, conveniently forgetting their own heritage, often kept slaves. Sometimes the slaves were even blood relatives of their owners. One of the best themes in the novel is the character Marcel's realization that he is luckier than he believes. It was an accident of birth that he was not born the legitimate heir to his rich white father. But it was also an accident that he was not born into the unsung ranks of the field hands. Rice paints a vivid portrait of this society, with its complex rules, strange bigotries, and dreams--a society where looking a little more black or a little more white than your peers might make all the difference in the world.

But lest you believe this is just a Stuffy Novel about Deep Social Issues, it's also a darn good story. Rice illuminates the society through the eyes of four young people growing up and coming to terms with it. Marcel, intellectual and arrogant, dreams of the artsy life in Paris--but must learn to come to terms with himself in New Orleans. Richard's parents have built an elegant, polite bourgeois dynasty--but Richard will have to give up his true love if he wants to inherit it. Anna Bella, pitied for her African features, is sold into a liaison with a white man who loves her but can never acknowledge her publicly. And quietly intense Marie, considered beautiful because she looks white, is pushed toward a career at the quadroon balls, where she can make her family's fortune--but lose her self-respect. These four engrossing characters, plus many more, struggle to find self-respect and love in the face of all the rules. Reviewer "odilon" is right--the line "You are coming with me. Now." is the finest moment of this book, the words thundering through the characters' world. You'll be pumping your fist in the air and cheering, or crying, or maybe both. (I seem to remember I accidentally woke my roommate up the first time I read that scene.)

Another reviewer complains of Anne Rice's misogyny. I'm tired of it too, but it isn't really evident in this book. The female characters, even the contemptible ones, are as well fleshed-out as the males. I don't really mind if some of the women are unsympathetic, as long as they're not cardboard. Some of the most fascinating characters in _Feast_ are women.

I'm surprised that Anne Rice fans like this book at all; about all it has in common with her other books is New Orleans & purple prose. Which is precisely why I like it!

"The Feast of All Saints" was Rice's first published novel. The setting & theme set it smack dab in the historicals market, altho the lack of graphic sex & bodice ripping probably disappointed those early readers. It wasn't until Rice hit the jackpot with her Vampire Chronicles that "Feast..." was reprinted & became a steady seller. It still ranks (along with "Cry to Heaven") as a curiousity to those fans.

However, this is a review of this book. How does "Feast of All Saints" stand up as a story? Pretty well. The first half of the book is slooowww, mainly alot of introspection, descriptions & general atmosphere. The plot itself (what there is of one) doesn't really get going until page 300 or so. Even then the reader spends more time inside the heads of the characters rather than observing events. What sets this book apart is the depiction of New Orleans in the antebellum period, & Rice's ability to recreate the life of the quadroons, octoroons & others who were considered "colored" even tho they may only have been 1/16th African! It is almost impossible to imagine what these "gens de colour" felt as they were discriminated against by their own relations while still owning slaves themselves & continuing the racial divide that created them. Rice does a marvelous job of bringing their day to day life to a modern world.

I think the popular imagination tends to associate Anne Rice with vampires, witches, and generally supernatural subjects. I know that previously I myself had read only The Witching Hour and several books from the Inteview with a Vampire series. But The Feast of All Saints is one of an entirely different genre. Anne Rice writing historical fiction? No way! But here she is, doing it with the same exquisite skill that makes all of her other works so successful.

But first, for your information, the synopsis from the back of the book:

In the days before the Civil War, there lived a Louisiana people unique in Southern history. For though they were descended from African slaves, they were also descended from the French and Spanish who had enslaved them. They were the gens de couler libre--the Free People of Color--and in this dazzling historical novel, Anne Rice chronicles the lives of four of their number, men and women caught perilously between the worlds of master and slave, privilege and oppression, passion and pain.

Which is actually a quite accurate description, except that there are certainly more than four people chronicled in this book. What I find most impressive about this novel, I think, is the lush realism Rice infuses into each of her characters. This isn't just a story about a few people's lives - it's an an incredibly vivid painting of an entire world that is as foreign and fascinating to our modern minds as any fantasy creation. Rice has an amazing ability for doing this--constructing entire universes complete with an endless number of lifelike characters. In The Feast of All Saints, she does this again, building the world of the gens de couler libre in the minds of her readers with exquisite detail and grace.

The subject matter itself is a thorny one. This book is about the lives of several people of color living in a world where their race is an unshakeable part of every daily interaction - demeaning, galling, and always present. Initially, I was reluctant to read about this - racial issues are a depressing enough part of real life without having them rubbed in my face during my leisure reading! Yet Rice addresses these issues with the appropriate amount of care that they deserve--and no more. This novel isn't meant to be a treatise about the evils of slavery and the old lifestyle of legalized racial inequity. It's simply a story about people. Yes, race is perhaps the single greatest issue the characters face, but they're not just people of color. They're also simply human beings with the same dreams, hopes, and passions as any other, and over the course of the novel they become very human to the reader indeed.

That said, the difficulties encountered by the gens de couler libre on account of their race are not ignored; in fact, they really make up the core storyline of the novel. But the people of color whom we follow are not idealized creatures of endless virtue and patience, nor are the white characters they interact with demonized as evil slaveholders. Both are a product of the time and culture in which they live, and Rice makes that abundantly clear. This isn't meant to be a modern critique of a historical situation, but a sensitive, sympathetic account of people living in a culture and lifestyle that has been gone for more than a century. And if their lives seem to be more dramatic, at once more ugly and noble than our lives today - well, what's the point of reading historical fiction if there isn't some measure of drama to be idealized in a time that is past?

But I'm rambling. Yes, I enjoyed this novel very much. There aren't very many books that can capture my attention so thoroughly anymore. There's something about Anne Rice's writing that is, quite simply, enthralling. She manages to capture the essense of every scene she details without succumbing to the demon of yawn-inducing over-description. That is what makes her writing so deliciously rich and sensual - almost a sinful pleasure to read. If you're looking for something to savor and lose yourself in for a while - this is something for you.

This absorbing melodrama explores the complex hierarchal and insular community of white upper class landowners and their "free" mulatto mistresses and their progeny. Set within the larger context of 19th century New Orlean's slave society, Anne Rice recreates the unique power dynamics within these relationships which don't always have a predictable outcome. Fascinating because it is based on historical facts.

I have loved Ann Rice since my first encounter with her books. I read first Exit to Eden then Belinda, The Vampire Lestat and many more. I have not been touched by a book as I have been with this book. As a well read West Indian woman I was impressed not only with her acurate portrayal of New Orleans, I was blown away by her extensive knowledge and reference to the Haitian revolution the time period and the effects on the Mulatto class in New Orleans. I honestly could not put this book down and devoured it in two days. I tend to read at least 5 books at once but this I had to give exclusivity to.

Again Anne Rice has out-done herself, I'm now reading the Pandora series but I know that I will re-read Feast of All Saints over and over. Bravo Anne again you have blown me a way with your talent. RDC

Anne Rice has managed to write the best, most historically correct piece of historical fiction about the free people of color of Ante-Bellum New orleans that I have ever read. This coming of age story about a young man coming to terms with himself, his culture, and the world in which he lives is at times both beautiful and disturbing. Anne Rice has atrue understanding of these people and this period of New Orleans history which indicates hours of research. The characters truly come alive and the story is heartbreakingly real. You'll love it! You have to read it!