Review: Wondrous, Brutal, Profound
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 26, 2013
I am not going to pretend to be an expert on vampire tales, however many of them I've read of late. I don't particularly like vampires, it's just that I keep falling in love with authors who write about them. This time around, I'm besotted.The Fifth Empire is an old-school vampire tale. Its vampires have fangs, real fangs, and talons. Some of them are truly ancient and sleep at times in sepulchers. They have super-human strength, but no sympathy for, or even interest in humans, except as prey. In this often brutal book, even those vampires who have become connoisseurs of the various flavors and shades of blood do not see us as any more than ambulatory meals. These vampires certainly don’t sparkle or turn all love-sick at whiff of a human female.The Fifth Empire is also a fantastically gory tale. Once one has made it through the many altercations between vampires and zombies, vampires and humans, and vampires with each other that littler its pages, one has the sense that they have encountered every possible form of dismemberment and mutilation known to humans--and non-humans alike. This delicate reader had to hold her stomach to keep going, but the blood-thirsty will no doubt find it delectable.Ambroziak is a skillful and versatile writer. Readers of A Perpetual Mimicry will remember her lush prose, her skill for description, and the myriad sensory details that pressed themselves upon her angelic protagonist in his embodied form. In The Fifth Empire, writing in the voice of Vincent du Maurier--the book takes the form the journal he keeps as events unfold--Ambroziak employs a very different style. Vincent, whose age is measured in millennia, has become inured to anything that isn’t blood, and that compels him, altering his verbiage noticeably only when, starving or fighting, he is forced into contact with it. Even the devotion he feels for his beloved partner, Bryon, the impulse that motivates his every action, is more thought than feeling or lived experience. His writing about anything other than liquid sustenance is, therefore, brisk and detached, almost unforgiving, a style that drives the plot forward ceaselessly, and which makes the book almost impossible to put down.The Fifth Empire is a book about loss. When we meet Vincent, he is beset on every side and starving to death perhaps, but he is at least surrounded by his “family,” and ensconced in a kind of home along with his soul mate. Before the books is over, he will be forced to give up all these things, propelled on a kind of odyssey in an attempt to survive and to protect Evelyn, his young, pregnant, human charge.For this reader, the most delicious parts of the book are the interactions between Vincent and Evelyn. What, The Fifth Empire asks, is a hardened vampire to make of an innocent who offers him her own blood, knowing that his survival is in no way separate from her own? One imagines one sees the archetype of Valmont in our hero at these times. But you will have to read the book for yourself to see how the dynamic unfolds...I appreciated that The Fifth Empire did not end on a cliffhanger, as trilogies are increasingly wont to do these days (however much I love a good cliffhanger too). I appreciated that we were given a moment to catch our breath at the end, and how, in a nod, perhaps, to Candide, Vincent settles down to cultivate his garden. At the same time, I was left in a state of anticipation; plenty of perils linger in the margins, ready to menace our hero and make things interesting in future volumes, as unresolved plot arcs continue. The second volume is already on my Kindle.But what is most profound about The Fifth Empire is the way that it hints (it would be ham-fisted of it to do any more than hint) at redemption. In so doing, it asks us to consider--and as far as I know, it is unique in the genre--how the relationship between vampires and humans might change if, suddenly, humans became scarce in number. Would vampires willingly hunt us to extinction if it meant their own end? Would they be able to stop themselves from consuming any one of us, to ignore their short-term hunger, in order to secure their own long-term subsistence? Can those once accustomed to taking whatever they want to satiate their lusts learn to cherish the precious resources on which they--though they perhaps would rather not face this truth--depend? In other words, The Fifth Empire asks us not only to consider what might become of Vincent, but also of ourselves.