Subject: Yarbro: Out of the House of Life

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: 21 Sep 93 01:45:54 GMT

When I learned that Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's "Out of the House of Life"
wouldn't be appearing in paperback -- it's going from hardcover to Tor's
trade-paperback imprint -- I turned to the library for a copy.  Just as
well:  It's the weakest of the St-Germain-et-al novels to date, and I've
better use for my limited shelf-space.

The more interesting component of this novel is the glimpse of St. Germain's
early years in Egypt.  Unfortunately, that glimpse comes to about twenty
pages of text, in the form of letters to Madelaine de Montalia.  The other
four-hundred-odd pages are the story of Madelaine's efforts to become a
serious archeologist, in a post-Napoleonic Egypt which has little tolerance
for European women, and among male colleagues who have little more.

It's not a very interesting story, and the elements which might have made
it so are not used to good effect.  The most notable of these elements is
the fact that Madelaine is a vampire -- but this fact is virtually
irrelevant to the story, almost no element of which would have had to be
changed were she not a vampire.  The look at archeology in its infancy
would have added to the story, but beyond making it clear that it involved
a fair bit of looting, and that Egyptologists were only beginning to learn
about ancient Egypt, Yarbro doesn't pay much attention to this element of
the story.  And few Egyptians will have anything to do with archeologists
(except on a cash basis), so the usual well-researched look at a past
culture is almost absent.

What we're left with is a story which is motivated almost entirely by the
fact that the head of the expedition into which Madelaine has bought
herself is the Snidely Whiplash of archeologists.  His repertoire of
relations with the opposite sex seem to be confined to 'seduce', 'compromise',
and 'rape', (if all else fails, 'murder'), and his professional ethics are
no better.  As a single foreign woman, Madeleine is suspect in any case --
spied upon by her servants, unable to turn to the law for recourse,
constrained to remain as far above suspicion as possible -- but without his 
readiness to incite local suspicions, or even take direct action against
her, this would probably not rise above the serious-irritant level. 

If you're not an avid Yarbro fan, give this a miss.  (If you are, the
advice presumably comes too late.)

%A Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn
%T Out of the House of Life
%D December, 1990
%I Tor
%O $19.95
%P 446 pages
%G ISBN 0-312-93126-3

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

   'T is with our judgements as our watches, none
   Go alike, yet each believes his own
		--Alexander Pope