Excessive Candour
Nobodaddy Days

It's earthquake weather again in Southern California, Tim Powers country, knots in the heart, mangled limbs, recovering humans—what's not to like? Three Days to Never is, pretty clearly, a thematic consort of Declare, its immediate predecessor in Powers' canon, but although the new tale shares that novel's immurement in the mortal coils of 20th-century history, it reads as a counterfactual to Powers' previous unsparing insistence that the past 100 years or so of human life on this planet have been lived in the heart of darkness of theological abomination. Three Days to Never is a dance out of stymie; it is a 12-step to daylight.

We have come a few years further up the scree of history from Declare, which never gets past 1963 or so and never escapes the kind of territory John Le Carre is (frankly) more at home with: Britain After the Rain; Russia in the Years of Plague; the scorpion Middle East poisoning us. This time round we have reached 1987 (playfully, I think, Three Days seems to take place more or less on the 10th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley), and we never really leave the great tympanum of story of the Los Angeles Region, where the HOLLYWOOD sign shines upon the Safe House, where history repeats itself as farce, and farce becomes desiderium. Life is a game which can be played.

In this sounding house of story, a typical Tim Powers plot unfolds. As usual, there is no simple way to do synopsis: Not only are there two opposing Covert Forces attempting to gain control of the Grail-like MacGuffin, which does in the end change the world a few times before evaporating, but the central premise involves time travel, which can never be explained, not really.

A touch of backstory will have to do: In this world, Einstein has had in secret a daughter known as Grammar Marrity at the time of her death in 1987 at a considerable age. The fate of Grammar's family is the ultimate real concern of the novel, which is tied to Einstein's invention in 1928 of a time machine that allows its user to extrude himself out of the normal three dimensions, though to gain access to any larger sphere it is necessary to appease with energy sacrifices the "living categories", the "Aeons" who guard and comprise the gates that must be opened: "All the old Gnostic and Kabbalist literature talks about the Aeons," one knowledgeable villain informs Grammar's grandson, "time and space as demons. And they are demons, believe me."

Einstein's secret history

Certainly Einstein, whom we meet briefly as a ghost living backward in a seance, believes something of the sort, in California, in 1933, when he causes an earthquake by transacting himself through the spheres up time and down, without properly propping himself against "the whirling honeycomb of the world." That's for starters.

A certain proportion of Three Days is spent perplexing lay readers with exegeses of the theological and practical implications of Einstein's discovery, the time travel "maschinchen" he concealed after the 1933 disaster; but this time round—unlike Declare, which is all about the bondage of not getting God right—the only god in evidence is William Blake's cacophonous Nobodaddy, a demiurge who in Three Days had "aeons" earlier created the Vespers, an exceedingly ancient secret society determined to acquire Einstein's invention. The spirit of Three Days—the reason Powers can allow himself to tell his tale as farce—is therefore exempt from responsibility to God; the spirit of three Days is Nobodaddy:

Then old Nobodaddy aloft
Farted & belch'd & cough'd,
And said, "I love hanging & drawing & quartering
"Every bit as well as war & slaughtering.
"Damn praying ..."

Without the eternal God (Powers is a declared Catholic), the world is Nobodaddy days.

Let the fun begin.

After her inexplicable death, Grammar's grandson Frank Marrity and his daughter Daphne are called to her home, where they find the pavement Charlie Chaplin fingerprinted for Grauman's Chinese Theater long before, and which has become part of Einstein's maschinchen (don't ask). At this point, both the representatives of the Vespers, who are Nobodaddy's antic apes, and various agents of Mossad, who are good guys from valiant beleaguered Israel (ask Declare), show up in search of the maschinchen, though it takes many pages before anyone connects Einstein and Aeons and Chaplin into one plot-bite.

A tempest reinterpreted

We are able to identify the primary Mossad agent by the fact that he has a maimed right hand (this is a Powers novel, after all), and a certain relaxation from Powers's habitual strictness with loose women inclines us to live in hope that the most interesting Vespers agent, a young woman who was blinded at the age of 19, and who is able paranormally to see through the eyes of others, will eventually gain some sort of higher vision of things through the eyes of someone good.

This happens, by the skin of her eyes which are of coral made—Shakespeare's The Tempest is quoted dozens of times throughout, giving a sense that Powers means us to understand Einstein to be a kind of Prospero combating the juggernaut of Nobodaddy. I think he means us to remember that, in the end of the play, Prospero's godgame ends in muted triumph: Nobodaddy's minions are foiled, the snares of plot and maya have been dissolved, Prospero's wand (or time machine, or Grail) is cast into the deep waters by his own hand, and Miranda survives.

None of this is exactly clear in Three Days, though Nobodaddy's minions do seem to lose in the end, and Mossad kind of wins; Frank Marrity and the other redeemable characters of the tale do give up drinking, and his daughter survives vile bondage, and the blind woman learns to see through his cleansed eyes (they even sleep together, maybe, and are not punished). But I'm simplifying, and maybe forgetting what I didn't quite understand: Time travel is inherently hard to parse, and Powers is not the most transparent of writers, and it may even be the case, though I don't think it is the case, that the world in which Frank and his blind lover and his daughter survive may be a world alternate to ours, and therefore lesser.

So Three Days to Never may be very much more serious about itself than this reading implies. The dance out of stymie may in fact fail in the end because the dancers are maimed. Powers may not have seriously intended to suggest that any character of his could genuinely 12-step out of Nobodaddy, without God. But I could find no God in the book, and the book ends in peace and closure, and it gives joy. So maybe I'm right to take the joy. Right or wrong, what I think I'm going to do is take the joy.