beautiful monsters

I'm probably just jealous

For weeks I looked forward to reading Daylight by Elizabeth Knox. It sat beside my desk, 356 pages to reward me when I survived all the end of term deadlines. And it started off well. There seemed to be a few interesting characters wandering around in beautiful places, and I’d been assured by Bill Manhire that the vampires in Daylight were as believable as the angel in The Vintner’s Luck.

In the first chapter there were even a few passages that made me smile. When Bad’s girlfriend gave him a motivational book, he “gave the book a decisive little shake. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘This can be my – what do they call it? – my vade mecum.’ (They had visited a library of illuminated manuscripts in Florence and had admired the incunabula.) ‘This can go with me,’ Bad said. Then, ‘But perhaps you shouldn’t.’”

Unfortunately, a few pages later the book started to go downhill and never fully recovered.

It wasn’t that there was anything terribly wrong with it. I mean, Elizabeth Knox is a fine writer, and she hasn’t done anything inexcusable. It’s just… there were so many little things that grated that by the time I reached the last chapter I was sick of the book. I kept reading because there was one particular piece of information I wanted to find out, but unfortunately it was never revolved.

The vampires in Daylight aren’t quite like those in Buffy (from which I have acquired most of my vampire related knowledge). For a start they don’t seem to be evil, at least not all the time. Also they don’t have fangs, as such. They have spines on the roofs of their mouths, and a nasty habit of biting people’s tongues.

Now if I were a kiwi bloke travelling through France and I suddenly came across these pale skinned characters with glowing white hair lurking around in cave systems biting people’s tongues, I’d freak, to put it mildly. My mind would be racing with questions. Aren’t vampires a myth? What’s with the hair? Aren’t they supposed to go for necks, not tongues? Where the hell is the nearest escape route?!” But none of the humans in Daylight go through this sort of dilemma. They wander around oblivious for several chapters, and then one day they calmly think to themselves “these guys are vampires,” and then rush to join the tongue-biting action.

Oh well, I didn’t really care about any of the characters to start with. It was too much of a struggle keeping up with their stories and I felt too distant from them. There was a lot of indirect speech, and long passages of dense prose. The same narrative style that seemed refined and elegant in The Vintner’s Luck became splattered with gory blood sucking details in Daylight. After a while it got kind of relentless. I’m inclined to agree with Charlotte Grimshaw from the Listener when she says “the problem here, more than anything, is one of empathy. How are we to feel as this threesome gnaws away? Is it sex, or dinner, or a nature scene from National Geographic?”

Other minor details annoyed me throughout the book. At one point a vampire is worried about running out of oxygen, which didn’t sit well with earlier accounts of vampires being shot or falling from great heights then patching themselves together and going on being un-dead. And near the end of the story it is suddenly revealed that one of the central characters is Indian, but this doesn’t seem to make any difference to the story, so I kept wondering why it was suddenly brought up a few pages from the end.

The story touches on some interesting philosophical issues, but none of them are explored in any depth. Unsurprisingly one of the central questions raised is, are vampires evil? Any more so than humans? Occasionally the vampires in Daylight are overcome by violent and bloodthirsty lusts, but we never really find out how they feel, why they kill some people and yet become emotionally attached to others, or why some of the vampires seem to be all evil and others seem to be mostly human. And their lovemaking is thick with cliches and empty abstractions - more tedious than erotic.

One of the highlights of the novel was when one of the vampires realised that the vampire cells were like a virus, gradually replacing the human cells and taking control of her body. She wonders "whether it was possible that a soul could go to God piecemeal... she hoped her own soul was going to God like a slow vapor, like the mist lifting as daylight comes." However nothing interesting comes from the theory, or the vampire.

The most interesting character in the book is Daniel’s mother, and she only appears for a few pages. At an event last year Elizabeth Knox read the passage about Daniel’s childhood home, filled with deliciously disgusting details. “The rats were supposed to run outside and die, driven by their thirst. But the house was sodden and there was always laundry left soaking for days in a soup of fermented soap, so the rats stayed indoors. They plunged in agony through the walls. One managed to run into the circuit behind an outlet, and died there, died and cooked. Daniel and his mother went about for weeks with powdered herbs pressed to their noses. The lights went out, one by one, their Bakelite collars cracked and unable to hold the bulbs anymore. Daniel made his way about in the dark, his hand running across the fibrous, fraying walls of piled newspaper.”

I actually started to care about Daniel’s mother – she came alive for a few pages… unlike the other characters who spent most of the book bleeding, sucking, fucking, or all of the above simultaneously. In retrospect, I should have just appreciated the passage Elizabeth read as a wonderful short story, and not bothered with the novel.

But that’s just my opinion - don’t let me stop you from reading the book. Emma Donoghue says it is “quietly enthralling, unnerving, erotic… a dazzler.” You may well be dazzled. I wasn’t.

Posted by Fionnaigh at July 8, 2003 12:41 AM