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Tanith Lee’s Dark Dance
May. 7th, 2005 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joysilenceLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)
Tanith Lee’s Dark Dance is a slow-moving book, but intentionally so. What I love is the way she creates an atmosphere of inertia. The heroine, Rachaela, seems incapable of action, in fact she hardly interacts with the world at all. She works in a bookshop, and the world of books is more real to her than the real world. She then discovers that she is linked to the Scarabae, a family of vampires who are also cut off from the world, like insects (beetles) preserved in amber. Her attempts to escape the Scarabae are frustrated by her own apathy, but escape them she must.
One of Tanith Lee’s preoccupations is transformation, especially in the sense of alchemy. Male and female are not discrete categories in her world, and neither are the living and the dead.
As always with Tanith Lee, the prose is gorgeous. The atmosphere is overpowering with claustrophobia and tainted sexuality. To really enjoy this book you have to accept that the slow pace and the lack of action are the whole point of the book. Not one of her very best books, but extremely good nonetheless.
dfordoom)Tanith Lee’s Dark Dance is a slow-moving book, but intentionally so. What I love is the way she creates an atmosphere of inertia. The heroine, Rachaela, seems incapable of action, in fact she hardly interacts with the world at all. She works in a bookshop, and the world of books is more real to her than the real world. She then discovers that she is linked to the Scarabae, a family of vampires who are also cut off from the world, like insects (beetles) preserved in amber. Her attempts to escape the Scarabae are frustrated by her own apathy, but escape them she must.
One of Tanith Lee’s preoccupations is transformation, especially in the sense of alchemy. Male and female are not discrete categories in her world, and neither are the living and the dead.
As always with Tanith Lee, the prose is gorgeous. The atmosphere is overpowering with claustrophobia and tainted sexuality. To really enjoy this book you have to accept that the slow pace and the lack of action are the whole point of the book. Not one of her very best books, but extremely good nonetheless.
