The Virginian-Pilot
                            THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT  
              Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Sunday, September 15, 1996            TAG: 9609110597
SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J4   EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE PATON 
                                            LENGTH:   78 lines

NEW RICE SPIRIT REVERTS TO TYPE

SERVANT OF THE BONES

ANNE RICE

Alfred A. Knopf. 387 pp. $26.

To her dark menagerie of vampires, witches and other supernatural beings, Anne Rice has added a genie. Servant of the Bones gives us Azriel, an intended demon who instead struggles through centuries to find the good in the human and spirit worlds.

Now in the 20th century he hurtles toward confrontation with a TV-church titan who wants to re-establish the West's supremacy with his own resurrection.

Well written as always, full of the author's growing interest in the place of God and of ethics in our times, Rice's 12th novel under her own name nevertheless has a feel of repetition from earlier works. This is more a novel for her large cult of readers than a book of importance across literary genres, as was her last, Memnoch the Devil.

A scholar of the ancient Middle East, on leave from his university to write in his isolated mountain cabin, is stricken with a fever. Unable to help himself, he is saved by a great bear of a man with a mane of curly black hair who brings him water and broth.

But as the scholar watches, his rescuer turns into the image of Gregory Belkin, the wealthy and powerful founder of the Temple of the Mind. Then he changes back. He wraps the scholar in a fur he creates out of the air. He has come to tell his story.

``My name is Azriel. They called me the Servant of the Bones, but I became a rebel ghost, a bitter and impudent genie.''

Azriel, born a Hebrew of Babylon under the Captivity, finds in his boyhood that he has the power to see and talk to the city's god, Marduk. Through this friendship, Azriel enters into a pact with the conquering Persian King Cyrus to release the Hebrews to return to Israel.

Cyrus is crowned, and keeps his word to the Jews. But through a trick Azriel, instead of dying a hero's death, is turned into a spirit, its receptacle his own bones. The centuries of service to endless masters then begin, Azriel being summoned from the bones to do their bidding.

He can, however, clothe himself in flesh.

Azriel travels up into the spirit world, finding its levels: small demons of hatred below, and then larger beings of joyousness, who prevent him from rising farther toward a paradisiacal light he perceives above them. This organization of the spirits echoes the Old Testament vision seen by Rice's Vampire Lestat in Memnoch.

Azriel goes forward through two millennia under greedy and evil masters, performing traditional genie activities such as enemy-killing and gold-conjuring. He can recall little of it until he has a Jewish master in 14th century Europe during the plague. This man, Samuel, barters him to provide safe passage for his five daughters, who are set upon by a mob of French Gentiles attacking Jews whom they accuse of bringing the Black Death.

That horror seems to release the Servant of the Bones from his chains - this is not very well-explained by Rice - and he slays all who try to call him forth afterward, until the 20th century, when he finds himself called. This time the conjurer seems not to be a person, but rather an event: the murder of Esther Belkin, daughter of the world evangelist Gregory.

It remains for the spirit, who no longer knows who he is, whether a creature of Heaven, Hell or Earth, to follow Gregory to a final showdown, in which he is asked to make a sacrifice not unlike the one he made in Babylon.

Rice's fiction seems to be moving away from the mere chronicling of her creatures, toward placing them in the universe of man and God.

In Memnoch the Devil she united with great success this larger aim with her most enduring creation, Lestat.

In Servant of the Bones, though, she hands us a brand-new character who seems at times contrived to the needs of her narrative.

Azriel's quest for the good is a bit plodding, not nearly as exciting as the panther-like Lestat stalking a dark New Orleans street for his next meal of blood. For storytelling value, good may just be less powerful than evil. MEMO: Dave Paton is a staff editor. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Rice by CNB