Anne Rice – Servant Of The Bones, a book review

Servant Of The Bones is a novel from Anne Rice written
during the mid-nineties. Having written extensively about vampires, mummies and
witches, the story introduces another supernatural creature – the Genie.

Azriel is the son of a Jewish merchant in ancient Babylon. Living amid the
opulence and splendour of the court there, he starts to see the Babylonian god
Marduk. When the members of the court realise this though, they conspire to use
Azriel to invoke a centuries-old enchantment – they drug him up and involve him
in a ceremony to welcome the conquering Persian, Cyrus (no relation to Billie
Ray). When the ceremony is over, Azriel is numb and knows he is dying. However,
he is brought to another place where his body is placed in a caldron of boiling
gold. As the pain overcomes him, he has an out of body experience and his spirit
floats above the cauldron as his body dies and is boiled down to the bones.

The origin story is juxtaposed with Azriel’s modern-day pursuit of the killer
of Esther Belkin. As Azriel attempts to discover who has summoned him, he feels
there is a link to the assassination of Esther and her step-father, Gregory
Belkin – the leader of a notorious cult called “The Temple Of The Mind Of God”.
In a bizarre twist, something more spy thriller than ghost story, Belkin is
planning a Jihad against most of the civilised world, an airborne toxin designed
to kill people in a haze of ecstasy.

Although Rice is visibly veering away from the vampire novel format, many of
the themes behind the character of Azriel remain the same. He’s an immortal,
made immortal against his will, and often craves the finality of death. And so,
with a fair degree of the angst that Rice bestows upon her Vampire creations,
Azriel.

Moreover, we get the usual immortal fodder of snatches of different periods
of history that Azriel has lived through. It’s essentially the same gimmick, but
with a different creature.

Unfortunately, the gimmick gets stretched a little thin, and Azriel is a
difficult character to warm to. No, not difficult, impossible. One minute he’s
the  bringer of grisly death to whoever opposes his master, the next thing, he
answers to no-one and suddenly he’s reticent about ending anyone’s life. To my
mind, Azriel is a dull, inconsistent character.

What’s more, where Rice often excels in her lavish narratives, there’s a
repetitiveness to Servant Of The Bones that makes the book boring to read.
And the bioterrorism storyline was fantastically ahead of its time, but seems a
bit preposterous anyway. There's just a whole jumble of mysticism, religious extremism and other themes that ultimately leave a mess of a novel.

I walked away frustrated. The earlier tale - set in Babylon - is interesting enough, but Azriel's journey through the centuries is dull, and the later storyline about Gregory Belkin is so hammy and ludicrous that I found myself switching off frequently during the inane verbal sparring between the two characters.

All in all, this is not Anne Rice's best work, I'm sure she's well meaning in the themes behind Servant Of The Bones, but ultimately it's a jumble of ideas that ends in disappointment for the reader.