"I made it an ironclad rule
that I could not change
or disregard any of the recorded facts,
nor rearrange any days of the calendar –
and then I tried to figure out
what momentous but unrecorded fact
could explain them all."
—Timothy Thomas Powers
Andrew Hale is a spy for MI6, mysteriously recruited when he was just a boy with the blessing of his mother, he is the creature of James Theodora of the SIS. In 1963 Hale is reactivated after having performed his duty during World War II, he is finally lead to complete a secret operation centered around Mount Ararat called Declare that eventually causes the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Although the novel revolves around a city of djinn, the mythical beings described both in the Koran and the Thousand and One Nights, it is also a "secret history" of the famous Soviet double agent Kim Philby.
Powers weaves this story expertly, if not eloquently, using carefully researched facts, mixed, modified and explained by Middle Eastern mythology and glossed by the Kippling novel Kim, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Wordsworth's Prelude and the book of Job 38:4 from where the name of the fictional covert operation Declare is taken:
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Declare, if thou hast understanding.
It is also strongly sourced by St. John Philby's book The Empty Quarter (Rub' al Khali) St.John, father of the famous spy named Kim, who's name is taken from Kipling's novel of the same name. This is the kind of double and triple ironies you can expect from any of Power's secret history novels, from the tarot centered story of the Fisher King in his Las Vegas set Last Call, to the spiritual science of Albert Einstein and Charles Chaplin in the time travel extravaganza, Three Days to Never.
Powers delivers the goods with a story that makes perfect, if supernatural, sense, does not lean too heavily on these supernatural elements, nor abuse their flexibility and provides a narrative complex enough to be entertaining of it's own accord as a spy novel. Indeed, if one were entertained by such things, one might get lost in the Wikiverse looking up all the references in just one Powers' novel.
I went looking for Tim Powers at Half Price Books and found books in the mystery, sf, and regular fiction sections. I think it speaks well of a writer that he is that hard to classify.
ReplyDeleteHe's a genre blender. I've only read two, Last Call and Declare. Last Call is good in that it's fast paced and has a lot of characters that are rather Lynchian in their weirdness. I didn't like the ending, but the build up is excellent.
ReplyDeleteRereading Declare with an eye to making this review better. Taking notes on Kindle is great as it updates to all my other devices.
I was thinking of how to make Declare into a movie. Elements of one of his novels is going to be included in the new Pirates of the Caribbean. I hope they gave him a lot for it.