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juushikaTitle: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
Author: Anne Rice writing as A.N. Roquelaure
Published: New York: Plume, 1999 (1983)
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 253
Total Page Count: 52,618
Text Number: 152
Read For: recommendation by my friend Adena & reading books about BDSM, checked out from the library
Short review: The Prince wakens Beauty from her century of sleep—and then, as his reward for saving the castle, takes her as his prize. He leads Beauty back to his kingdom, where foreign princes and princesses are trained to be sexual slaves, willingly submitting to the most "depraved" desires. The fairy tale premise strips the story of characterization and justifies an unbelievable land where Beauty and a hundred other royals undergo public and state-sanctioned humiliating display, oft-repeated spankings, and sexual encounters which never require consent. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty has a few darkly erotic moments but quickly disintegrates into repetition, and lacks character growth which might grant it some sense of purpose. I do not plan to read the sequels, and I do not recommend this book.
Initially, the premise of Claiming appears to have beautiful simplicity, but this simplicity is its biggest downfall. An untouched Beauty, woken from endless sleep into vivid life by a Prince—the concept leads easily into sexual overtones. However, fairy tales are brief and reiterative, and trade character for archetype: the sleeping Beauty, the warrior Prince. Rice maintains both aspects. She cannot sustain the simple concept over a novel's length, and the story quickly becomes repetitious: humiliation, spankings, sex, humiliation, spanking, sex. Beauty believes that each instance is worse than the last, but it's hard for the reader to agree. Not much varies besides the order of events, and sometimes a slave is tied up for a while or there's a bit of sodomy, but other than that the book drives in the same circle until the end. Beauty and Prince have little characterization outside of their titles, and while Beauty eventually encounters characters with names and the ghost of an identity, on the whole characterization is kept to a minimum. Without characterization, there is no character growth and no one for the reader to identify with and care about, stripping the story of any sense of purpose.
To be fair, the whole book is not a cycle of simple repetition. Claiming has a few moments of dark eroticism, where the encounter is conceived in such a way that it is appealing to the sympathetic mind (which is to say that the content tends towards idealized sexual violence not unlike BDSM, and may not suit all readers). Such moments, however, are the exception rather than the rule. The number of spankings, each one just like the one before, is so exaggerated that one begins to wonder if Rice has a fetish. On a less humorous note, the variations on sex and punishment tread on the edge of objectionable—not because the two can't be intermixed, but because Rice intermixes them without stopping for consent. To a certain extent, the fairy tale setting justifies this: the Prince's kingdom is an absurd land stripped of characters and run on fetishized sex, wholly unbelievable and therefore excused from rational details like reasonable doubt and sexual consent. But the setting can't excuse the fact that the book begins when the Prince rapes Beauty to wake her and then orders her into slavery against her will. Nevermind the fact that Beauty is forever aroused by her trails—the fantasy of the entire book is still tainted.
There is ample room in literature for erotic fairy tales—especially for eroticism that reveals or revels in the darkness of human nature. (The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter is a breathtaking example of such, and I highly recommend it.) The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, bogged down by blank-faced characters and dozen of identical spankings, plummets where it should soar. The result is a novel with only moments of erotic interest, never thought-provoking or intriguing but instead unbelievable, repetitious, and slightly unsettling. Rice cannot maintain the concept over a mere 250 pages, and I doubt that the two sequels are any better—I don't plan to read them. I was disappointed by this book, and I don't recommend it.
Review posted here on Amazon.com.
For interested readers, there is also a glorious, spoiler-and-sex heavy review by Yahtzee (of Zero Punctuation) of the entire Sleeping Beauty series. It's much funnier than my review and also entirely accurate, and I recommend it even if you never plan to read the books.
Author: Anne Rice writing as A.N. Roquelaure
Published: New York: Plume, 1999 (1983)
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 253
Total Page Count: 52,618
Text Number: 152
Read For: recommendation by my friend Adena & reading books about BDSM, checked out from the library
Short review: The Prince wakens Beauty from her century of sleep—and then, as his reward for saving the castle, takes her as his prize. He leads Beauty back to his kingdom, where foreign princes and princesses are trained to be sexual slaves, willingly submitting to the most "depraved" desires. The fairy tale premise strips the story of characterization and justifies an unbelievable land where Beauty and a hundred other royals undergo public and state-sanctioned humiliating display, oft-repeated spankings, and sexual encounters which never require consent. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty has a few darkly erotic moments but quickly disintegrates into repetition, and lacks character growth which might grant it some sense of purpose. I do not plan to read the sequels, and I do not recommend this book.
Initially, the premise of Claiming appears to have beautiful simplicity, but this simplicity is its biggest downfall. An untouched Beauty, woken from endless sleep into vivid life by a Prince—the concept leads easily into sexual overtones. However, fairy tales are brief and reiterative, and trade character for archetype: the sleeping Beauty, the warrior Prince. Rice maintains both aspects. She cannot sustain the simple concept over a novel's length, and the story quickly becomes repetitious: humiliation, spankings, sex, humiliation, spanking, sex. Beauty believes that each instance is worse than the last, but it's hard for the reader to agree. Not much varies besides the order of events, and sometimes a slave is tied up for a while or there's a bit of sodomy, but other than that the book drives in the same circle until the end. Beauty and Prince have little characterization outside of their titles, and while Beauty eventually encounters characters with names and the ghost of an identity, on the whole characterization is kept to a minimum. Without characterization, there is no character growth and no one for the reader to identify with and care about, stripping the story of any sense of purpose.
To be fair, the whole book is not a cycle of simple repetition. Claiming has a few moments of dark eroticism, where the encounter is conceived in such a way that it is appealing to the sympathetic mind (which is to say that the content tends towards idealized sexual violence not unlike BDSM, and may not suit all readers). Such moments, however, are the exception rather than the rule. The number of spankings, each one just like the one before, is so exaggerated that one begins to wonder if Rice has a fetish. On a less humorous note, the variations on sex and punishment tread on the edge of objectionable—not because the two can't be intermixed, but because Rice intermixes them without stopping for consent. To a certain extent, the fairy tale setting justifies this: the Prince's kingdom is an absurd land stripped of characters and run on fetishized sex, wholly unbelievable and therefore excused from rational details like reasonable doubt and sexual consent. But the setting can't excuse the fact that the book begins when the Prince rapes Beauty to wake her and then orders her into slavery against her will. Nevermind the fact that Beauty is forever aroused by her trails—the fantasy of the entire book is still tainted.
There is ample room in literature for erotic fairy tales—especially for eroticism that reveals or revels in the darkness of human nature. (The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter is a breathtaking example of such, and I highly recommend it.) The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, bogged down by blank-faced characters and dozen of identical spankings, plummets where it should soar. The result is a novel with only moments of erotic interest, never thought-provoking or intriguing but instead unbelievable, repetitious, and slightly unsettling. Rice cannot maintain the concept over a mere 250 pages, and I doubt that the two sequels are any better—I don't plan to read them. I was disappointed by this book, and I don't recommend it.
Review posted here on Amazon.com.
For interested readers, there is also a glorious, spoiler-and-sex heavy review by Yahtzee (of Zero Punctuation) of the entire Sleeping Beauty series. It's much funnier than my review and also entirely accurate, and I recommend it even if you never plan to read the books.
