Review: Exit to Eden

Title: Exit to Eden
Author: Anne Rampling (a.k.a. Anne Rice)
Publisher: Dell
Copyright date: 1985
Part of a series? No

I tried to read this book years ago, and stopped halfway through, but I remained interested enough to pick it up again. I'm glad I did. Perhaps my life situation has changed, and that's why I loved it so much this time around -- I'm much more comfortable with erotica now (looking at it as literature, and not just a 'cheap thrill'), and I'm filled with a lot of those falling-in-love passions that consume the main characters of Exit to Eden. The book is full of the sensuality that Rice is known for, mostly through the Vampire Chronicles, and I don't just mean in relation to sex -- smells of flowers, tastes of food, the way things look and feel and sound -- her novels are saturated with sensory description, and it makes reading a lucious experience. Labelling the story as "erotica" seems way too one-dimensional. The combination of the sensory hedonism and the real depth to the philosophies of religion and life that her characters show make this a really layered and meaty love story. I'm not sure I buy these philosophies, and I have some issues with how conventionally the love story is concluded, but I still think Exit to Eden is a very worthwhile read.

Notable quotes:

"'People say S&M is all about childhood experiences, the battles with dominance and submission we fought when we were little that we are doomed to reenact. I don't think it's that simple. I never have. One of the things that has always fascinated me about sado-masochistic fantasies, long before I ever dreamed of acting them out, was that they are full of paraphernalia that none of us ever saw in childhood [...] racks and whips, and harnesses and chains. Gloves, corsets. Were you ever threatened with a rack when you were a kid? Did anybody ever make you wear a pair of handcuffs? I was never even slapped. These things don't come from childhood; they come from our historic past. They come from our racial past. The whole bloody lineage that embraces violence since time immemorial. They are the seductive and terrifying symbols of cruelties that were routine right up through the eighteenth century [...] all the paraphrenalia is the flotsam of the past. And where is it routine today? In our dreams. In our erotic novels. In our brothels. No, in S&M we're always working with something a hell of a lot more volatile than childhood struggles; we're working with our most primitive desires to achieve intimacy through violence, our deepest attractions to suffering and inflicting pain, to possessing others [...] And if we can keep the racks and the whips and the harnesses forever relegated to the S&M scenario -- if we could relgate in all its forms to the S&M scenario -- then maybe we could save the world'" (223-4).
[N.B. - I find the ideas that we are innately violent, particularly sexually, and that there is some kind of collective unconscious memory of past violence very problematic. The idea that relegating violence symbolically to the bedroom as a solution to the world's problems is also extremely reductionist. However, I still find this passage thought-provoking.]

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"But I was thinking the strangest thing: what if, what if it really was something that could happen? What if Martin was right and Elliott and I could have each other like that? What if it was half that good for only a year, a fourth that good for a decade? Christ, that was worth the death of everything I'd ever been before, wasn't it?" (287)