In his author's note to Declare, Tim Powers mentions John Le
Carre, right off; and in a blurb on the back cover of the advance copy of
the trade edition of Powers' new novel, Dean Koontz mentions John Le
Carre, right off. So I think I might as well join the gang.
In the great series of thrillers he set in the 20th century,
John Le Carre (the name just came to me), depicts a world of gray
mundanity, abyss-deep but shot through with moments of valor. It is a
world irradiated by the long vectors of plague of the Cold War; later
novels, like The Tailor of Panama (1996) are set in niche enclaves
rocked by the aftermath of all the failed history of our time. His
characters, those who survive, earn their survival. Professional spies
like George Smiley--he appears in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
(1963) and the set of linked novels beginning with Tinker Tailor
Soldier Spy (1974)--are figures of genuine nobility in the fallen
world. It is a world of murk and quicksand, but no arcane secret--no voice
of God, no small still voice of Behemoth beneath the surface of events, no
Yosemite Sam in a burning bush--can tell us why we fail, or die, or gain
respite. It is a condition of the world to be fallen, not a sentence from
which we seek parole.
Declare takes off from this world, way off. Like Le Carre's
books, it is bound deeply into the political events that soured so much of
the 20th century; and Powers tends, like Le Carre, though rather less
fluently, to create a narrative structure which spirals back and forth
through time, approaching significant moments (very warily) from varying
points of view, at varying rates of speed. And Powers's speaks here in a
gingerly, too-deep-for-tears, depressive voice sometimes reminiscent of
John Le Carre. But (in contrast to Le Carre's invariable practice) Powers
depicts real people--in particular the British/Soviet double/treble agent
Kim Philby, who is a major character--and by depicting them in a fallen
world, curses them. Declare, far far more bleakly than Le Carre's moral
fables of self-help among the fallen, tells us that we are sinners, tells
us that the 20th century has been ungodly.
The engine of evil at the heart of Declare is supernatural,
which takes us terminally far from Le Carre. Djinn--or, in Powers's
Catholic vision, fallen angels whose "thoughts are kinetic macroscopic
events, wind and fire and sandstorms.... things in motion"--have
infested the world since before the Flood. One of these fallen angels,
abducted from Mount Ararat in the 1880s, has been protecting Russia, and
later the Soviet Union, ever since. The story of Declare is the story of
a century of attempts, on the part of secret arm within the secret
services of Britain and France, to destroy the djinn, most of whom inhabit
Mount Ararat, though not at the site of Noah's ark (the publisher's blurb
is wrong about that; I think Noah's ark was too holy for Powers to feel
comfortable with; the ark described here, he makes very clear, is some
other ark). In a coda, the fallen angel who has been protecting Mother
Russia is also dealt with.
A
dizzying race through time
The telling of Declare is entirely consistent with the
knottedness of its underpinnings, and with the congested psyches of its
protagonists, who are as tortured and pinned-butterfly as Catholics are
likely to be in a novel which mixes sex (nix on that, basically, in this
book) and obedience and realpolitik and sin and stuff. No sane reviewer
would attempt to replicate the circlings and recirclings of the story as
Powers lays it down. Remorselessly, he shifts us back and forth and forth
and back from 1941 to 1945 to 1948 and 1963, up and down a dozen
escalators of flashback and backstory and infodump, from England to France
to Turkey to Kuwait to Beirut and back again, and forth once more. Hints
and adumbrations of the ultimate meaning of it all are more than numerous;
by the end of the book, which is very long, it is very nearly impossible
to remember when we learned what.
Here is the story. Andrew Hale, begat by a father unknown to him,
is recruited as a small child by Jimmie Theodora (a great Le Carre name
that) into the British secret service hiding within the secret service,
and through the orifices of which it operates the campaign known as
Declare. Hale is, in fact, Kim Philby's half-brother, and Philby has had
supernatural concourse with djinn from away back. Philby's dervish-dance
of betrayals of one country after another, and the fact that djinn can
only perceive either half-brother when they are physically linked and
therefore seem as one, make it inevitable that Hale will spend much of his
adult life awaiting the climax of the century--the moment when Declare can
make proper use of him, and the djinn can be disposed of.
Why we
have become who we are
While doing so, he falls in love with young Elena Ceniza-Bendiga
in Paris during the war; does research into the djinn abduction in 1883;
attempts to wipe out the Ararat djinn in 1948 but fails; goes into deep
cover as a professor in England until 1963, when the climax does finally
come. On the way, we are introduced to a dizzying plethora of governmental
agencies, British, French and Soviet, almost always identified by acronyms.
Philby is drawn masterfully by Powers. Hale and Elena play a tortured game
of love, one familiar to readers of Catholic novels.
None of it, in a sense, matters, really. The human protagonists
who clamber through the knotted interstices of the telling of Declare
are, in the end, scrim coating (but failing to conceal) abomination. For
what the text makes us believe Powers means us to believe is that it is
literally an abomination to consort with an angel fallen from God; and
that the history of the last century has been acted out in terms of an
unholy consort.
Declare is far too caught in infodump and psychic stymie ever to
move fast, or in one direction; and it shuns pleasure; and it is hard, for
secular readers, not to wonder why we are blaming fallen angels, even in a
work of fiction, for what we have done to ourselves. But there is a kind
of triumph here, too. Writing for an audience unlikely to share his sense
of sin, Powers has created a 20th century worse than we had
previously imagined. His answers to the dilemmas of our fallen states may
not be of a sort most of us can witness. But the obduracy of his own
witness is like a rock. Declare is the rock.
Subterranean Press has issued a limited edition of 474 signed copies as well as a
lettered edition of 26 signed copies. Each copy of the Lettered edition contains
an original illustration
by the author. Though both of these have sold out, copies may be found through
book dealers in the collectors' market.
-- Editor
