Of the three Tim Powers novels I've now read, Declare is the best by a long shot: more fully inhabited and emotionally real than either Last Call or The Anubis Gates, with a less complex 'magic system' but set in a larger and more detailed world. Because of the centrality of two lead characters' Catholicism to the story - and presumably Powers's own imaginative sympathy with their concerns - Declare comes closer than those other two novels to feeling emotionally alive, helped along by its historical and conceptual proximity to our own time and place.
But it never quite does, because at day's end it's a Tim Powers magical-espionage novel and not, say, the Alan Furst espionage novel I perhaps foolishly, or at least jarringly in retrospect, read the day before starting Declare. Like the other two, it ends with a tidy victory for the clearly-defined Good Guys, a consoling marriage in the mode of the Elizabethan stage, and a strong, satisfying, transient feeling of I Suppose That's Done Then. Powers is rarely able to write transcendentally, it seems, and so must content himself with writing Well; his strengths lie in plotting and idea-association (imagine, for a moment, Tim Powers's Lost), but in Declare he loads his plot down with one spectacularly big idea - which appears to be, aah, Catholicism, with all that faith's symbolic complexity and vexed relationship to the material world - and it ends up weighing down what might have been a flawlessly executed spies-and-Weird-Stuff novel.
I recommend the book as another of Powers's master classes in plotting and dark urban-fantastic imagination, but with the usual reservations, which can't be discussed without spoilers. I recommend reading Adam Roberts's disappointed, annoyed review before proceeding, not least because the last section of this post jumps off from his remarks about conspiracy, lately a preoccupation of mine. The rest of the review is disjointed, sorry, but it does widen its scope about halfway through, and that material might be of interest to readers not otherwise concerned with Declare itself.
Shall we?
First, the anticlimax: Andrew Hale - the best of the three nearly interchangeable protagonists I've encountered in Powers's books by virtue of his private Catholic agon, which is clearly dear to Powers - kills the rebel angels on Ararat with mathematics, in the form of two shells full of buckshot. That's really it. The climactic 1963 Ararat ascent comes as a colossal letdown in the wake of the thrilling 1948 Ararat sequence, which - unlike the finale - effectively depicts the wild inhumanity of the djinn. ¡Cannibale! yells Elena from horseback, and it's the most human moment in any of the three Powers books I've read so far. Nothing like that in the 1963 sequence...just lots of pitons and axes and literally faceless commandoes climbing through an excruciatingly long narrative passage.
Which brings up a macro-concern with the book: though the Big Problem is the djinn (and specifically the captured djinn that is Russia's 'Guardian Angel'), the focus of the climax (and the long epilogue) is on Hale's relationship with his nemesis/twin Philby, and their notional relationship with Elena. So the great mind-melting conspiracy at the heart of the Cold War fades, throughout the book, into the background, while the supposedly romantic Andrew/Elena pairing and the damagingly symbolically-overloaded Andrew/Philby relationship come to the fore. Trouble is, Powers doesn't actually give Hale and Elena a relationship so much as symbolic proximity - she's the olive-skinned revolutionary romantic, he's the upright Englishman torn by love - and the longest interaction between Philby and Hale takes place over Yet Another Bloody High-Stakes Card Game...excuse me, two of those. The stakes of which represent another of Powers's moments of unself-conscious sexism, and which undercut the (ahem) cosmicism of the djinn plot to bad effect.
Elena is a big step up from the women in Last Call and (especially) The Anubis Gates - a sad total of three female characters between those two novels, as I recall - but ultimately she fades from ambivalent badass spy to weeping virginal madonna in Declare's most acutely disappointing narrative slip-up. Of course she diverts the helicopter rather than shoot Hale down. Of course she short-circuits the GRU brainwashing with a 'Hail Mary.' And of course she's deeply in love with a man she spent three months with, twenty years ago. Why not? The 'heroines' in Last Call and The Anubis Gates marry men they barely know at all; three months almost seems like a step up.
(Do women even bother reading these novels? Ever?)
The spycraft, meanwhile, might be well-drawn; I can't tell. It was detailed enough to carry me along, like the theatre-scrim London of Anubis, but after the much more detailed (yet less intricate) spywork of The Spies of Warsaw I was a little disappointed by the depictions of the Great Game here. Weary romanticism, yes, but bit more James Bond than I'd expected.
Then again, that's hardly the point of a Powers book. The sheer velocity of the story is astonishing: 600+ pocket book pages fly by in a wink. Powers's command of plot is a wonder to behold. So, as with the Coleridge/London/Cairo stuff in Anubis, I feel like a churl complaining about the tradecraft in Declare. If a 10% increase in detail cuts the velocity by 50%, it makes sense to leave it out.
Pity he couldn't have left out the 'gypsies,' though. Another distasteful holdover from Anubis. How can an author sharp enough to name his sorcerer 'Dr Romany' fall back on such contemptibly lazy 'gypsy' stereotypes? Why not have Hale take on a brigade of greasy wop soldiers for colour?
Lovecraft looms behind this story: the ironic Crucifixion at Dunwich, the damned Antarctica expedition, rendezvous in underground passages, long-lost alt-religious tomes, bargains with sanity-stealing powers from beyond, and of course the ultimate revelation - and temporary suppression - of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. But Powers's Catholicism angles these elements toward the Manichean setup of the 'Mythos' revisionists like August Derleth, rather than the bitter 'cosmicism' of HPL himself. Hale blends bits of Henry Armitage with some of Le Carré's spies - with a little bit of Luke Skywalker (or is it Anakin? or is that Philby's role?) thrown in, destiny/powerwise. Hale takes Raymond Chandler's modern knight schtick to a thuddingly literal conclusion - naturally reciting bits of the Pater Noster at appropriate moments, in case we've missed the point.
OK, I've got to disagree with Adam Roberts on some stuff here:
Amongst the several things this book is saying are (for instance) that Communism is a fanatical quasi-religious cult for which its followers are actively eager to die; and that events recounted in the Bible (specifically Genesis) are literally true. To which I say: hmmm.
The implication here is that there's something fishily Right about the book's setup and, arguably, its payload.
I initially mistook his first claim; he's right, that is indeed how Powers portrays the Soviet spies. BUT. It's not Communism as such that they're willing to die for; the ones who head back to Moscow to be 'shown the truth' are those who've had contact with the Divine, and of course Russia's 'guardian angel' has presided over that nation since the 1880s, not the 1920's.
To the extent that Communism and Catholicism are opposed forces in Declare, it's not because they're ideologies, but rather incompatible mysteries. Attitudes toward the unknowable. After all, Stalin tries to purge the USSR of the acolytes of the djinn; what's on Ararat is out of his imaginative reach. Communism exerts a hold over its adherents in the book, sure, but no more than 'England' (abstractly and variously defined) does over Hale, Theodora, and their crowd. And the SOE boys do swear to kill their brothers if the Crown demands it.
So I suppose I disagree with Adam on the political content or allegorical nature of the various mysticisms (national, supernatural, etc.) at war in the story. Several reviewers have referred to the djinn as 'weapons,' but I didn't get that sense from the book at all - Powers isn't writing 'A Colder War' here (which in any case rightly treats those who'd weaponize Cthulhu as fools). Roberts isn't making that claim either. But by linking the content of the fantastic premise (holy texts are literally true, crosses and ankhs have superpowers, the USSR is empowered by a literal deal with a devil) to other, more transparently political conspiracist talk (9/11 as an inside job, etc.), I think Adam is politicizing what Powers might take for an ideologically neutral setup - the 'power of faith,' or 'willingness to open up to the divine,' or something like that, in a specifically Catholic flavour.
Yet the endpoint of all this imaginative wrestling with things-as-they-are is the beastly angelic choir on Ararat, and those who are initiated into their mysteries - Philby, Hale, Elena - get that way at the expense of their own humanity. ¡Cannibale! and all that, complicit in the massacre of the men on Ararat. The Bible might be literally true, in part, but Powers maps that setup (straight out of every historical fantasy story ever told, ever) onto a compelling bit of Weirdness, the ability of certain humans to tap into a hidden symbolic order through ritual action, even unwittingly, which is just too creepy to do anyone any good. In other words, Powers happily (guiltily? defensively?) rubs his Yahweh all over our Lovecraft, but he definitely doesn't do away with HPL's darkness.
Which makes the political dimension of the book less straightforward again. The English spies don't want to eliminate the djinn; like any other imperialists, they're happy to leave local (angelic) warlords set up all over the place, so long as (1) they only bug brown/yellow folks and (2) they don't help the Soviets. And the Soviets prop up Communism with an explicitly theistic magical bargain. (How post-ideological of them!) And the agencies that deal directly with the djinn are for the most part unwelcome in, or unacknowledged by, their own countries - the Prime Minister serves the SOE, not the other way around, and the GRU have to hide from the KGB...
The 'conspiracy' here, in other words, isn't about accumulating worldly power or propping up the human Elect. Mostly it's about maintaining the boundary between the Merely Physical and the Divine - no wonder the Berlin Wall is the site of one of the book's two best sequences. Powers does well with symbolically-overloaded action setpieces, and that's as overloaded as it gets. The 'shot that topples the Soviet empire' is fired on Mount Ararat in 1963, but by that point it hardly seems to be about the USSR at all - after all, we know who 'wins' that Cold War. The whole thing seems to be about working around the existence of the angels. The political stuff is a smokescreen for the Real Story, but in a very different way from, say, the government-toppling Illuminati myth (which encodes fears of Jews/Catholics/Masons/Others in an explicitly cultural-political narrative).
I think Powers both likes the shapeliness of this magical border-drawing and -crossing and -maintaining, and can't help injecting his story with his own experience of sensuous Catholicism. (The mention of a pipe organ chord at a crucial moment of angelic encounter was, for me, one of the richest moments in the book; as a once-upon-a-time Catholic 19-year-old who wept over his sexual 'sins' in a cathedral in New York City, I know/knew exactly what that painful clarity feels like. But then I'm an atheist who prays and might be afraid of ghosts, so...) But I don't think the symbolic layer here is meant to reduce to, or even primarily relate to, a real-world political order.
Powers's depiction of actual Communism is way, way, way too thin for that. He doesn't even bother making Moscow sinister; it's just exhausted, a citywide afterparty. Because, y'know, God's not there, or something, but they've got their ghul.
I loved Declare. Sort of. It annoyed me - particularly the shabby way Powers sets up Catholicism as a kind of substitute for religious Communism, which is structurally necessary in the book's symbolic register (and its notional 'characterological' register) but is really inadequate and silly as actual psychology - but I very literally couldn't put the book down for two days. I mean I carried it everywhere and opened it up at every spare moment. It took less than three days to read...with childcare taking up much of my time and attention.
As a piece of pulp fiction it's as good as can be.
And I guess that's my one-line 'review,' because why bother with the other stuff? It shouldn't win the Clarke award, absolutely not (isn't that for new books?), but I understand why people like it; if you don't want it to be anything but what all of Powers's novels seem to be, a machine for the delivery of flawlessly timed and plotted Cool Magical Ideas, it will hit you right in your pleasure center.
But that leaves the real point of Adam's review, which - once you sail by the bit where he makes it clear that he really, really didn't like the novel and it really, really shouldn't have been nominated for the Clarke award - is about conspiracy.
Before we get there, though, let's take one sentence to be deeply uncomfortable with Powers's few sore-thumb references to homosexuality - always, here, in the context of mind-violation and rape. Got it? Are we all annoyed and disappointed? OK, moving on then.
Declare is a novel of conspiracy, yes, but it isn't about conspiracy in the way, say, Foucault's Pendulum and Illuminatus! and The Crying of Lot 49 are. Those novels all depict and critique (the idea of) networks of secret organizations; Powers just has a fun time wheeling one out. (Indeed the second half of the book isn't a conspiracy story at all, it's a 'knight climbs mountain to defeat nemesis and save princess' story that happens to have spies in it.) That said, all Powers's 'secret history' novels seem to add up to a kind of consideration of the idea, or in any case an anatomy of his own relation to Secret Stuff, which can (to a certain extent) stand in for other conspiracists' ideas.
It seems to me that Powers is interested in his conspiracies only to the extent that they embody the idea of Something Else, Something Hidden, Something Darker and Greater Than Us. Yes, with all the capital letters. Whereas, say, Glenn Beck - to the extent that he is, apparently, a cynical carnival barker in addition to, obviously, a mentally-ill paranoiac - wants to do something with his conspiratorial talk, which is (don't let's let on that we know) take back the United States for its former social-hegemons, i.e. people who look and dress and talk and vote just like Glenn Beck. Powers has no more of that ambition than Lovecraft did; Yog-Sothothery is a shaggy-dog joke (they're not really real!) with a didactic edge (and humans are specks of space dust!), which is a tempting interpretation of e.g. the Tea Party's crowd-madness...but let's not fool ourselves with 'comfort.' They really mean it; Powers doesn't.
But then Powers also doesn't get into his own 'magical thinking' the way Pynchon/RAW/Shea/Eco do. He does channel the startling electric current that secret thinking can provide, but his subject in Declare is the encounter with the symbol-set itself; we know that the USSR crumbles and that Philby dies in 1988, so like Lovecraft, Powers is just trying to show us that moment of contact, a sense of how small is the world we see, compared to What Truly Is. (Not for nothing does Powers keep coming back to 'give him the truth' as ironic-Lovecraftian agentspeak for kill!) To me, the best tales/ideas of conspiracy promise endless multiplication of meaning and possibility; Powers just wants to send us up the mountain to shoot an angel or two, having shared in the chilly recognition that we aren't in control of it all. Of anything, really.
Good conspiracy-stuff is always about an unimaginable They, who remain distant, ineffable. Secular absent God, in a way. (Bob Dobbs, for instance. Though of course the SubGenius books are stupid and childish Conspiracy-stuff.) Powers sticks angels on earth and gives us math-bullets that can magically kill them, buying wonder on the cheap, a little.
That's maybe the most annoying thing about the book - its lack of ecstasy. Not just the difference between throwing up our hands (HPL) and putting up our dukes (Howard, Powers, etc.), but the way the plot-mechanical stuff and intrusive Catholicism of Declare keep undercutting the pleasure of the idea-tangle itself. It all gets solved at the end, with guns and prayers no less! Grr.
So what I'm coming around to saying, basically, is that novels of conspiracy are all about What if? Possibility, the not-yet-known, the slow revelation of secret forms among comforting formlessness. And for much of its length Declare is just that: 'adventurous expectancy,' in Lovecraft's term. For all that time it's a hell of a good adventure novel. Then Powers wraps it all up with a bow and attaches a card marked 'Yours in Christ,' and it's hard not to feel cheated - especially given the lingering sense of wonder attached to the djinn, the impossible strangeness of the angel that presides over the laying of the cornerstone in Berlin, the alien majesty of the 1948 Ararat revelation...it's not a failure, it's a disappointing choice. OK.
But political conspiracies are not actually about that. In the end, most real-world conspiratorial cabals are pretty simple - they have to be. The Illuminati-as-popularly-imagined, the X-Files group, the Satanic secret alt-Trilateral Commission, simply can't support their own weight in the real world's thin air.
Glenn Beck's conspiracies are complicated precisely because they're fake, but the conspiracies themselves are just justifications - no one watching his Worry Hour cares about their content or shape, only the reassurance that Our (White) (Right-Thinking) America Is Under Attack.
What separates his rants from, say, Gravity's Rainbow is that Pynchon wants to bring us to (1) apprehension of the depth at which things in the world are connected, not just politically, and (2) a kind of psychedelic rapture-of-release, a break with unitary mythologies. If it's All True, Man, then we're a lot less likely to be sucked into religious fervor for any interest group's One Truth; the connectedness is the trans-political point. (Remember the proximity of Pynchon's psychedelic-conspiratorial thinking and, say, Eastern mysticism; think of John Crowley too. Have you read Crowley's Hesse essay? Oh, you oughta. You gotta.)
In Declare, Powers has to split the difference between his Church's One True Program and his invocation of Lovecraft's crazy-making cosmic indifference; he leans churchwise in the end, but not right away.
Well, he's not Pynchon.
Magic, it seems to me, is one of Powers's real subjects: magic as (somewhat Lovecraftian) cosmic math, or cognitive self-modification, or historical escape (or deep historical connection)...and this is where the (let's call it) occult tradition's magical thinking can split decisively from the paranoids' conspiracy-schtick. By understanding magic as metaphorical - even when giving it concrete form in a fictional context - Powers and his fellows skip past the narrowness of the rube's magical thinking (I'll believe whatever takes the edge off this week) and move toward a kind of aesthetic appreciation of historical ways of being. The actual loonies, along with the cynical players who finance or imitate them, insist on historical ignorance, after all - a cascade of facts devoid of actual connection, resistant to any mapping to the mere lives of humans. So you get Atlantis and Reptoids and the Elders of Zion, instead of (respectively) the literary/didactic function of Atlantis, or the conceptually-difficult notions of evolution/fitness/chance that form humanity's mundane origin story, or the relentless persecution of Jews that requires Elders-of-Zion mythmaking...but if you dig guys like Charles Fort (not a conspiracist as such, far as I know, so much as a more general occultist) then you recognize the difference between the conspiracist-aesthete's rigorous, demanding suspension of disbelief and the paranoiac's monomaniacal insistence on One Story, However Complicated.
And it appears I've just argued that Alan Moore is not in fact as crazy as Dave Sim, despite my previous insistence to the contrary. Huh.
It seems to me that the difference between benign and malignant conspiracy-stuff is in the placement of the didactic emphasis: the former will happily rave about how Everything You Know Is Wrong, but the latter - the dangerous stuff, the cynical stuff - adds the rider that We Can Show You What's Really Going On, Trust Us. The difference between intellectual independence and ideological dependence, in other words.
Which is, curiously enough, one of the buried, problematic throughlines of Powers's book, one that seems to culminate in the two heroes happily deciding on Trust Us as a perfectly satisfactory endpoint. 'Grace, not magic,' Elena says, as she and Hale seemingly become invisible to the police in Red Square. It's the most jarring moment in a book that contains several of those.
Or as Gob Bluth would say, 'IT'S AN ILLUSION, MICHAEL. A TRICK IS SOMETHING A WHORE DOES FOR MONEY.' In the end, Powers seems to take pleasure in tricking us. Like Adam, I resent that. But I maintain that most of Declare is concerned not with the trick - with 'winning' over the audience - but with the illusion: the feeling of complicity and wonder and (in)credulity and anticipation and above all ecstatic purpose that is, after all, not only the point but the substance of magic itself.
