A little girl protected and raised under the watchful eyes of Lestat and Louis finally has the chance to grow up.
Prince Lestat is, aptly for a book with the title of a royal heir in its name, a book about lineages. Of genetics, cultures, histories, wealth, secrets, knowledge. Parents and children, for better or for worse. Over and over, Prince Lestat is a book about parents and children, and how children are heirs to the world their parents provide them.
Louis, Claudia’s other father alongside Lestat, plays a key emotional role in Prince Lestat, despite comparatively small time onstage in the drama. One of the times when he’s mentioned — or, rather, pointedly omitted — is when Armand is talking about how his household feels about Antoine, a young musician not seen in the Chronicles since Interview with the Vampire.
Armand loves Antoine, Benji loves Antoine, Sybelle loves Antoine. Everyone in the household is mentioned but Louis. But how could Louis be expected to love him, really — this other melancholic, dark-haired, sensitive soul that Lestat fell hopelessly in love with? The figure who was on the other side of the townhouse fire that night so long ago, the other of two back-ups in the battle being fought between Lestat and Claudia? There’s a distance between them that would take time and effort to cross — and that distance is the shape of Claudia’s absence.
There is one character in Prince Lestat who goes some way to inherit this void left by Claudia as her home: a little girl named Rose.
Almost all of Louis’ appearances in the novel are in the role of protecting, comforting, or offering counsel to Rose. When she’s near-death with fever, just as Claudia was just before she became a vampire, it’s Louis who comes to save her — and, in this same act, he’s saving an imprisoned child from captors who would let her die, burning the place down to ashes in his wrath, finally managing to do what his immolation of the Theatre des Vampires failed to do for the already-killed Claudia.
Lestat considers himself to be Rose’s parent, and her his child, but he makes a conscious decision to be a parent at several steps’ remove. Where he once deliberately made Claudia a vampire in order to keep Louis close to him, he’s now lived long enough in the world to know that there’s no point in trying to make something love you by holding it captive. On the contrary, he expresses his love for Rose by setting her as free as he can: he wants her to have the chance to do all the things that being alive and growing up means.
Rose makes the mistakes that any bright young woman might: stealing the family car for a night out in her teen years and falling foul with the cops, getting a heart-wrenching crush on a pretentious, self-obsessed poetry professor at college.
But the Vampire Chronicles are often stories of how frail and fraught with peril existence is, be it mortal or immortal, and the deprivations that Rose undergoes are just as clearly the experiences of real-life young women as her minor foibles are: she’s rejected by her biological family, she experiences terrible institutionalized abuse at a juvenile home, she is stalked, she has her face burned by acid at the hands of a violent and entitled man.
Claudia’s wrath came from the fact that she would never grow up; Rose’s own growing-up demonstrates how difficult that journey can be, but also how vital it is to developing as a person.
Much will be made about how this book is a ‘return to form’ of the earliest Vampire Chronicles, but as a long-time reader of Anne Rice’s books I feel this misses how important her evolution as a writer and as a philosopher are to the creation of this novel. The emotional and spiritual journeys that Lestat and Louis go through in this book, in particular, reminded me of nothing so much as the explorations of existential truth in Rice’s Christ novels — which are, of course, about parents and children in the most fundamental of ways. For all of the geographic scope of this novel, the most important journeys are internal ones, and I can’t imagine Louis and Lestat reaching their eventual destinations without the places Rice went as a writer along the way.
The difference between Claudia’s story and Rose’s, in the end, comes down to this shift in perspective on the part of Lestat and Louis. Not only about what it means to be family, and what it means to love someone, but also what it means to be a mortal or immortal, what it means to be alive or to die, and how much being alive or dying has to do with change.
The pair of vampire parents who counsel and guide Rose in her maturation towards adulthood would probably have never become the people that they are if they hadn’t gone through the horrific errors and failures of trying to be Claudia’s parents. In the end, it’s not just Rose who grows and changes: Lestat and Louis remember the past well enough to avoid repeating it.
In a book full of spirits and lost companions, at least one ghost is finally quiet.