From /tmp/sf.4258 Tue Feb 1 04:20:49 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!pipex!uunet!news!dg-rtp!sheol!dont-reply-to-paths From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Yarbro: Out of the House of Life Approved: sfr%sheol@concert.net (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest) Message-ID: Date: 21 Sep 93 01:45:54 GMT Lines: 54 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 dani@netcom.com 'T is with our judgements as our watches, none Go alike, yet each believes his own --Alexander Pope