hen an eccentric London industrialist hires him to give a talk on the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Brendan Doyle has no reason to suspect he is about to become one of the world's first time travelers. But Clarence Darrow has discovered a series of time gates and spent his fortune devising a way to exploit them. One such gate leads to the year 1810, on a night when Coleridge is speaking.
Darrow is out of money, so he has come up with a scheme to charge wealthy poetry fans a king's ransom for the privilege of seeing Coleridge in the flesh. Doyle, an unpromising scholar shattered by his wife's accidental death, is brought along on the time excursion as window dressing—a tame lecturer appended to the event to make it seem more genteel. The evening is a complete success, but as the party prepares to return home, Doyle is kidnapped by agents of the vicious sorcerer who created the time gates. A malevolent entity born in the days of ancient Egypt, this being and his minions are bent on undermining England's political balance, leaving her vulnerable to Napoleon and—they hope—destroying her ability to meddle in African affairs.
Doyle escapes from his captors, only to find himself stranded in time. His only real skill is an encyclopedic knowledge of Romantic poetry and its history—a pitiful defense against the many thieves, werewolves and homicidal time travelers who are soon seeking to recapture him. Barely able to fend for himself, he is an unlikely savior for a country on the brink of a magical assault. Unfortunately, there is nobody else.
A hilarious chase through time
Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates is paced like a speeding train: From the moment of his abduction, Doyle is in constant peril. Magic—once the most powerful force on Earth—has lost some potency by 1810, but the beings on Doyle's trail are unflagging in their quest to turn back the clock and restore Egypt's power. Some books suffer from weak or insufficiently terrifying villains, but this is not one of them. In fact, every reduction in its sorcerers' abilities makes them more desperate ... and more dangerous.
Fondness for Romantic poetry emanates from every paragraph of The Anubis Gates, and Powers shares his affection in a way that endears the 19th century's charms and foibles to readers. Coleridge is far from the only poet with a cameo part. William Wordsworth plays a critical role in one of Doyle's many escapes, and Lord Byron is set up to take the fall for the sorcerer's planned murder of the king. It is an unvarnished delight to watch these well-known figures brushing up against the wicked, mystical underworld.
Some novelists allow their time travelers to alter history as they please, while others trap their characters in webs of temporal paradox. Powers goes down another classic—if somewhat less-frequently taken—path: Everything Doyle knows about history comes to pass, though not always in the manner he expects. Once he knows that events are fixed, he puts his historical knowledge to surprisingly good use. By The Anubis Gates's conclusion, Doyle has an identity among the circle of poets, a fine new body to replace his much-abused original, and decent prospects for a career, fame and even romance.
Evocative and suspenseful by turns, The Anubis Gates is a stylish thrill ride whose unlikely hero and high-stakes adventure leave a lasting impression on the memory.
