Bring On The Monsters!
Jul. 1st, 2007 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselMay 2007
Declare - Tim Powers - HarperTorch, 2001
* *
John Le Carre is not one of my favourite authors. I have read two of his novels (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, if memory serves) and didn’t think much of them. The dingy, largely undramatic milieu that he creates is undoubtedly truer to real-life espionage than the fantasy worlds of Bond and his ilk, but I find it hard to warm to his grey and unlikeable characters or care about their obscure and convoluted motives. Tim Powers’ attempt to liven up the genre with a twist of the supernatural is therefore welcome, but sadly his impersonation of Le Carre is too accurate and makes this yet another book that isn’t as good as The Anubis Gates.
The problem, as usual, is one of excessive length and its ennervating effect on the writing, in this case exacerbated by the flashback-heavy structure Powers has chosen for his tale. We are first introduced to Andrew Hale, an English spy, as he is re-activated after fifteen years of semi-retirement following the disasterous failure in 1948 of an operation on Mount Ararat, codenamed Declare, where five SAS officers lost their lives. Other than a couple of pages of prologue we learn next to nothing about what happened, which means that the first third of the book, covering Hale’s childhood and activities in occupied Paris in 1942, has no great relevance for the reader. The Parisian digression would be all right if Hale were an interesting character, but he is a classic Le Carre hero, patriotic, bland and obedient, and the admittedly impressively detailed descriptions of the spycraft in which he engages are not enough to make up for his lack of fire. There is some trademark Powers weirdness - a radio picks up a peculiar rhythmic signal broadcasting, apparently, from the heaviside layer - and a developing relationship with the fiery Elena, a Communist agent, but that is all that happens in the first two hundred pages. By which time the reader - well this one at least - is yelling “forget all this relationship rubbish, bring on the monsters!”
Alas, the monsters, when they finally appear, are something of a disappointment because they are essentially a re-tread of an idea from a previous Powers book, complete with dodgy pseudo-scientific rationale. The characters are also mis-handled - the introduction of Kim Philby as a protagonist is a nice idea and Powers does a good job of providing an explanation for some of his more peculiar reported quirks, but the result is that Elena, the most interesting character in the book, is more or less thrown away in the second half as Philby’s story takes precedence. The flashback plot structure requires the description of what happened in 1948 to interrupt the build-up to the climax, fatally weakening the narrative drive. If Powers had told his story in straight chronological order it could have formed the mid-book climax, giving the story a much better shape.
I must admit that I begin to despair of Powers. I keep reading his books in the hope that one day he will write something that will match the superb Anubis Gates, but, as with the films of Tim Burton, I am constantly disappointed. This may explain why I have perhaps been overly harsh. This is not a bad book in many ways - the action scenes are well handled, there has clearly been some meticulous research, and the rituals and secret history surrounding the supernatural elements are as quirky and inventive as ever. It’s just that he has done so much better. I fear that for me he will always be a one-good-book author. Though at least that’s one more than John Le Carre...
Declare - Tim Powers - HarperTorch, 2001
* *
John Le Carre is not one of my favourite authors. I have read two of his novels (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, if memory serves) and didn’t think much of them. The dingy, largely undramatic milieu that he creates is undoubtedly truer to real-life espionage than the fantasy worlds of Bond and his ilk, but I find it hard to warm to his grey and unlikeable characters or care about their obscure and convoluted motives. Tim Powers’ attempt to liven up the genre with a twist of the supernatural is therefore welcome, but sadly his impersonation of Le Carre is too accurate and makes this yet another book that isn’t as good as The Anubis Gates.
The problem, as usual, is one of excessive length and its ennervating effect on the writing, in this case exacerbated by the flashback-heavy structure Powers has chosen for his tale. We are first introduced to Andrew Hale, an English spy, as he is re-activated after fifteen years of semi-retirement following the disasterous failure in 1948 of an operation on Mount Ararat, codenamed Declare, where five SAS officers lost their lives. Other than a couple of pages of prologue we learn next to nothing about what happened, which means that the first third of the book, covering Hale’s childhood and activities in occupied Paris in 1942, has no great relevance for the reader. The Parisian digression would be all right if Hale were an interesting character, but he is a classic Le Carre hero, patriotic, bland and obedient, and the admittedly impressively detailed descriptions of the spycraft in which he engages are not enough to make up for his lack of fire. There is some trademark Powers weirdness - a radio picks up a peculiar rhythmic signal broadcasting, apparently, from the heaviside layer - and a developing relationship with the fiery Elena, a Communist agent, but that is all that happens in the first two hundred pages. By which time the reader - well this one at least - is yelling “forget all this relationship rubbish, bring on the monsters!”
Alas, the monsters, when they finally appear, are something of a disappointment because they are essentially a re-tread of an idea from a previous Powers book, complete with dodgy pseudo-scientific rationale. The characters are also mis-handled - the introduction of Kim Philby as a protagonist is a nice idea and Powers does a good job of providing an explanation for some of his more peculiar reported quirks, but the result is that Elena, the most interesting character in the book, is more or less thrown away in the second half as Philby’s story takes precedence. The flashback plot structure requires the description of what happened in 1948 to interrupt the build-up to the climax, fatally weakening the narrative drive. If Powers had told his story in straight chronological order it could have formed the mid-book climax, giving the story a much better shape.
I must admit that I begin to despair of Powers. I keep reading his books in the hope that one day he will write something that will match the superb Anubis Gates, but, as with the films of Tim Burton, I am constantly disappointed. This may explain why I have perhaps been overly harsh. This is not a bad book in many ways - the action scenes are well handled, there has clearly been some meticulous research, and the rituals and secret history surrounding the supernatural elements are as quirky and inventive as ever. It’s just that he has done so much better. I fear that for me he will always be a one-good-book author. Though at least that’s one more than John Le Carre...
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-02 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-31 09:38 am (UTC)I enjoyed this book a good deal more than you did, though I agree that Anubis Gates (and, IMO, On Stranger Tides) are better.
It seems to me that characterizing it as "attempt to liven up the genre" says more about your dislike of the genre than it does about Powers' motives for writing the book. If he agreed with you, I doubt he would have started the book in the first place. I may be wrong, of course. If you know that was his intent, I stand corrected!
I agree that the rather Lovecraftian structure is not always effective, and would be interested to see a version with a more linear approach. But I liked the way the monsters were handled (prefiguring the Atrocity Archives, etc.) and I agree there are some vivid action sequences.
The biggest strength of the book (as you sort of note) is just how much of it is non-fiction. I can't help but admire that if you were looking for facts to prove that none of this ever happened, you'd have some difficulty finding them. Fun!
Anyway, bottom line for me is that if you like spy thrillers (I do) and you like Tim Powers, this is a great book. If you don't like spy thrillers, then...this is still basically a spy thriller, so you won't like it. That's not really Powers' fault. If you actually *want* a supernatural spy thriller, this is probably the best anyone has done so far.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-04 01:33 pm (UTC)