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kalldimma's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
sisteray's review against another edition
4.0
It’s super clear that Tim Powers did a ton of research to write this book. He makes it clear just how much, because he spares no detail that he found intriguing. If he passionately went down a rabbit hole researching the history of the Soviet Secret Service, or the Bedu, you will know it because he constantly drags you to every point of interest that he found. And with it he binds every detail to reinforce his fiction as a conspiracy nut connects newspaper articles together with red yarn.
I mean, it’s really cool, but I have to admit that there were times where I wished we’d move on with the plot and spend less times with the exposition of one character telling another character the history of something. I mean it’s gracious of Powers to put the “conversation” in an exotic room or garden, but it felt a little imbalanced compared to our hero actually doing stuff.
The main character is a spy so he’s supposed to be be gathering information and going through debriefings, but I wish that he figured something out more himself rather than being told by yet another random operative (especially surrounding his personal backstory).
Seriously for all the long exposition about virtually everything, I still didn’t understand the antagonist power’s plan that the whole book was revolving around. I feel like the supernatural stuff took too much of a backseat to the spy history.
If you are expecting non-stop spy stuff this isn’t it. If you are expecting crazy urban fantasy this isn’t it. It’s a tribute to Le Carré and spy history, with elements of the supernatural punctuating the story, occasionally with bizarre effects. If anything this is a romance set in a spy procedural more than anything else.
But, as dense, slow-paced, and plodding as it is, it weaves a tight knit story that I found quite enjoyable. There’s a lot of mystery that keeps the pages turning, and when stuff does finally happen (and it does somewhat regularly) it gets quite exciting. It’s just that, because of the non-linear structure of the book and the way everything is woven together, you can’t really speed through stuff, as valuable plot points might be buried in the robust descriptions of The Île de la Cité in Paris.
Frankly, a lot of color descriptions and weirdly a lot of information repeated that probably should have been cut. Honestly, if an editor had trimmed off 100 pages from this, I would have loved it rather than merely really enjoying it.
I mean, it’s really cool, but I have to admit that there were times where I wished we’d move on with the plot and spend less times with the exposition of one character telling another character the history of something. I mean it’s gracious of Powers to put the “conversation” in an exotic room or garden, but it felt a little imbalanced compared to our hero actually doing stuff.
The main character is a spy so he’s supposed to be be gathering information and going through debriefings, but I wish that he figured something out more himself rather than being told by yet another random operative (especially surrounding his personal backstory).
Seriously for all the long exposition about virtually everything, I still didn’t understand the antagonist power’s plan that the whole book was revolving around. I feel like the supernatural stuff took too much of a backseat to the spy history.
If you are expecting non-stop spy stuff this isn’t it. If you are expecting crazy urban fantasy this isn’t it. It’s a tribute to Le Carré and spy history, with elements of the supernatural punctuating the story, occasionally with bizarre effects. If anything this is a romance set in a spy procedural more than anything else.
But, as dense, slow-paced, and plodding as it is, it weaves a tight knit story that I found quite enjoyable. There’s a lot of mystery that keeps the pages turning, and when stuff does finally happen (and it does somewhat regularly) it gets quite exciting. It’s just that, because of the non-linear structure of the book and the way everything is woven together, you can’t really speed through stuff, as valuable plot points might be buried in the robust descriptions of The Île de la Cité in Paris.
Frankly, a lot of color descriptions and weirdly a lot of information repeated that probably should have been cut. Honestly, if an editor had trimmed off 100 pages from this, I would have loved it rather than merely really enjoying it.
mparker546's review against another edition
4.0
Another of Tim Powers books, and I have yet to read one that didn't both intrest me, facinate me, and satisfy me.
Short version: British WWII/1960's Spy Thriller with supernatural undertones (loosly based on an actual historical figure).
Short version: British WWII/1960's Spy Thriller with supernatural undertones (loosly based on an actual historical figure).
cathode_ray_jepsen's review against another edition
4.0
This is another one of Tim Powers' secret history-themed fantasy novels, and like the rest it's great fun. The main plot is set during the Cold War, with a lot of back story bits set during the Second World War. Because it's a spy novel, we change settings quite a bit: there are parts set in occupied Paris and in post-war Berlin, as well as Kuwait and Beirut and Mount Ararat. Powers is really good with the little details that bring a setting to life. I liked one passage in particular when the protagonist is travelling through Kuwait dressed as a Bedu and he can't figure out why his robe feels wrong until he realizes that he doesn't have a rifle and a knife the way he would have in the old days.
Of course, since this is a Tim Powers novel, there's hidden magic in the world that most people don't know about. That comes through right away in the sort of prelude, which is a flashback to a scene from the protagonist's past where he's escaping Mount Ararat after something non-specified has gone horribly wrong, and all "his men" are dead; and he talks about having seen them lifted into the air by some mysterious force. We learn very quickly that the magic in this universe comes from djinn, which are powerful, mysterious magical beings that are pretty unpleasant to be around. The djinn aren't actually on-screen very often, so most of the world building is done by having characters obliquely refer to the djinns' powers; which I thought was much more effective than simply describing them doing horrible things would have been. Powers does a good job of setting up the 'real world' bits and of incorporating the magic into the background.
The plot is split between the forties and 1963. We find out right away the the protagonist, Andrew Hale, was involved some sort of covert operation called Declare in 1948. Of course everything went horribly wrong and that's what he's escaping from in the prelude. At the beginning he's being reactivated by his old handler and told that he's being sent back to Ararat to finish the operation. The plot skips back and forth to when Hale was recruited as a boy, and his career as a spy in the Second World War and immediately after. It's all very well set up. I particularly enjoyed the way Powers set up what I thought of as "suspense cycles": he'd introduce some new plot point or mystery or question or odd behaviour very frequently, and then you he would resolve it sometimes on the next page, sometimes in the next chapter, sometimes not until the end of the book. He didn't do this so often that the reader gets hopelessly confused as to what's going on, but there were always a few questions on your mind. "How does this bit of magic work?" "Why did that character do that?" "What made Hale suddenly remember that event?" It made for a very engaging read.
Of course there are the overarching questions of what happened on Ararat and what the Soviet's plans are with the djinn. That all gets wrapped up at the end, of course. I thought the conclusion was just the tiniest bit unsatisfying, but it certainly wasn't a cop out. The plot was really very well constructed overall.
The protagonist is a British spy called Arthur Hale and the story revolves around him and Kim Philby—who was a real person: a Soviet spy who became a high-ranking officer in the British secret service—and Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bedinga, who is a Spanish-born Frenchwoman who became a Comintern spy and later defected to France (not a spoiler, we're told that early). Hale is a pretty interesting character: we're always told about his loyalty to the secret service. The first part of the book is his back story: we hear about how he was recruited when he was seven years old. His mother introduced him to Jimmy Theodora (who is our standard shadowy man-behind-the-man type of character) and told him "these are the King's men: they deserve our loyalty". That's something that Hale keeps repeating to himself throughout the book. There are actually quite a few times when Theodora does something horrible to Hale to set up an operation—he has one of Hale's friends killed quite near the beginning—but Hale never really considers defecting or trying to get out of the job or anything like that; he just keeps telling himself "these are the King's men: they deserve our loyalty". I thought that was sort of an odd aspect about his character, but it's actually dealt with pretty well by the end of the novel. And, of course, because this is a Powers novel, Hale has some mysterious connection to the magical aspect of the world that he doesn't understand, and that's dealt with pretty nicely as well.
Kim Philby is the antagonist (obviously, since this is a spy novel and he's a famous traitor). I thought the characterization was a bit weak here: Philby's just a really nasty guy. We're introduced to him as he's interrogating Hale. Philby figures out that Hale is working for Theodora, and since Philby and Theodora work in rival secret service agencies, he of course takes an immediate dislike to Hale and spends much of the rest of the book trying to humiliate and insult him. But then: Philby was a real person, so maybe he was a just a vindictive bastard and Powers is portraying him accurately. We get a lot of stuff later on about his relationship with his father, and his dedication to family life: he's not a completely one-dimensional character, but I still would've liked to hear more about why he defected to the Soviets, which isn't really touched on at all.
Elena has a bit more development than the rest of the characters, but it's still a little flat. When we first encounter her she's a very passionate communist, but she has a terrible experience in Moscow (which we find out about near then end), has a religious experience and defects. Hale falls in love with her (as tends to happen to Powers' protagonists), and they have—shall we say—a bit of an up and down relationship. She never feels like she's just there to provide Hale with some motivation, but the love-interest plot does feel just a little artificial at times.
In this book, magic comes from djinn, which are sort of elemental spirits. We meet one made out of water, one made out of wind, djinn that live in the air are mentioned: that sort of thing. Djinn are really unpleasant to be around: we hear about them killing people in all sorts of horrible ways, and some of them require human sacrifice in order to get them to do what you want. It's never quite clear what their powers are, exactly, but they're apparently interesting to the various governments involved in the Cold War. There are also some people who can use the magic personally in limited ways (Hale is one). To do this you have to tap into a sort of rhythm that the djinn use to communicate, which Hale does to make himself immune to people's attention and to do Morse-code transmission under difficult circumstances. I think the idea is taken from H. P. Lovecraft's short story "The Music of Erich Zann". I always like reading about the magic in Powers' books: you always get the feeling that it follows rules and there's never any question about why the characters don't just use magic to solve all their problems. They don't because magic is horrible and bears terrible costs. There's a really great bit where Hale is being inducted in the secret service, and he has to swear loyalty to his country. Theodora asks him a bunch of questions like "Would you kill an apparently innocent person if we ordered you to? Would you live out the rest of your life in disgrace for the good of your country?", and finally, "Would you use magic against magic if we asked you to?"
I'd heard Lovecraft's name mentioned in connection with these books a couple of times, but I don't think the themes are really the same. In all of Lovecraft's work there's this idea of cosmic horror: the protagonists discover that the universe doesn't work the way they think it does, doesn't care about humans, and is full of all sorts of horrible stuff; and they usually go mad or something. Declare doesn't cover that territory so much: the djinn are treated as just another part of the universe. A really powerful and unpleasant part, to be sure, but not really more important than humans the way they would be in a Lovecraft story. If H. P. Lovecraft had written this book, the entire universe would be pretty much there for the djinn.
There's a lot of discussion about loyalty as well. I thought it went over some of the same territory as [b:The Drawing of the Dark|5094|The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower, #2)|Stephen King|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1309281704s/5094.jpg|2113248]. Hale is working against the Soviet Union pretty much just because he's from the West and they're on the other side. It's not that the Soviets are evil because they're using magic, because the good guys use magic too (although the Soviet Union does do some pretty horrible things through the course of the book). Powers' puts us in the big conflict between the West and the Soviets and Hale fights for the West because that's where his loyalty is, and for no other reason. He never talks about fighting for democracy or anything to that effect—and he even joins the local branch of the communist party while he's at university—he just has this loyalty to England and the West and that's enough for him. I'm not sure if we're meant to think that this is good or bad, but it's quite a strong theme through the book.
The writing style is excellent, of course. Powers descriptions are really strong, as I mentioned, and he's very funny when he wants to be. He'd been writing for twenty-odd years when this was published, so he's very experienced and capable of really solid prose.
I thought this was a very enjoyable book: the plot and the writing were solid and it was great fun reading about the magic and the spy-craft intrigues. Some of the characterizations were just a little weak and I could have done with some deeper exploration of the themes, but still a great read.
Of course, since this is a Tim Powers novel, there's hidden magic in the world that most people don't know about. That comes through right away in the sort of prelude, which is a flashback to a scene from the protagonist's past where he's escaping Mount Ararat after something non-specified has gone horribly wrong, and all "his men" are dead; and he talks about having seen them lifted into the air by some mysterious force. We learn very quickly that the magic in this universe comes from djinn, which are powerful, mysterious magical beings that are pretty unpleasant to be around. The djinn aren't actually on-screen very often, so most of the world building is done by having characters obliquely refer to the djinns' powers; which I thought was much more effective than simply describing them doing horrible things would have been. Powers does a good job of setting up the 'real world' bits and of incorporating the magic into the background.
The plot is split between the forties and 1963. We find out right away the the protagonist, Andrew Hale, was involved some sort of covert operation called Declare in 1948. Of course everything went horribly wrong and that's what he's escaping from in the prelude. At the beginning he's being reactivated by his old handler and told that he's being sent back to Ararat to finish the operation. The plot skips back and forth to when Hale was recruited as a boy, and his career as a spy in the Second World War and immediately after. It's all very well set up. I particularly enjoyed the way Powers set up what I thought of as "suspense cycles": he'd introduce some new plot point or mystery or question or odd behaviour very frequently, and then you he would resolve it sometimes on the next page, sometimes in the next chapter, sometimes not until the end of the book. He didn't do this so often that the reader gets hopelessly confused as to what's going on, but there were always a few questions on your mind. "How does this bit of magic work?" "Why did that character do that?" "What made Hale suddenly remember that event?" It made for a very engaging read.
Of course there are the overarching questions of what happened on Ararat and what the Soviet's plans are with the djinn. That all gets wrapped up at the end, of course. I thought the conclusion was just the tiniest bit unsatisfying, but it certainly wasn't a cop out. The plot was really very well constructed overall.
The protagonist is a British spy called Arthur Hale and the story revolves around him and Kim Philby—who was a real person: a Soviet spy who became a high-ranking officer in the British secret service—and Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bedinga, who is a Spanish-born Frenchwoman who became a Comintern spy and later defected to France (not a spoiler, we're told that early). Hale is a pretty interesting character: we're always told about his loyalty to the secret service. The first part of the book is his back story: we hear about how he was recruited when he was seven years old. His mother introduced him to Jimmy Theodora (who is our standard shadowy man-behind-the-man type of character) and told him "these are the King's men: they deserve our loyalty". That's something that Hale keeps repeating to himself throughout the book. There are actually quite a few times when Theodora does something horrible to Hale to set up an operation—he has one of Hale's friends killed quite near the beginning—but Hale never really considers defecting or trying to get out of the job or anything like that; he just keeps telling himself "these are the King's men: they deserve our loyalty". I thought that was sort of an odd aspect about his character, but it's actually dealt with pretty well by the end of the novel. And, of course, because this is a Powers novel, Hale has some mysterious connection to the magical aspect of the world that he doesn't understand, and that's dealt with pretty nicely as well.
Kim Philby is the antagonist (obviously, since this is a spy novel and he's a famous traitor). I thought the characterization was a bit weak here: Philby's just a really nasty guy. We're introduced to him as he's interrogating Hale. Philby figures out that Hale is working for Theodora, and since Philby and Theodora work in rival secret service agencies, he of course takes an immediate dislike to Hale and spends much of the rest of the book trying to humiliate and insult him. But then: Philby was a real person, so maybe he was a just a vindictive bastard and Powers is portraying him accurately. We get a lot of stuff later on about his relationship with his father, and his dedication to family life: he's not a completely one-dimensional character, but I still would've liked to hear more about why he defected to the Soviets, which isn't really touched on at all.
Elena has a bit more development than the rest of the characters, but it's still a little flat. When we first encounter her she's a very passionate communist, but she has a terrible experience in Moscow (which we find out about near then end), has a religious experience and defects. Hale falls in love with her (as tends to happen to Powers' protagonists), and they have—shall we say—a bit of an up and down relationship. She never feels like she's just there to provide Hale with some motivation, but the love-interest plot does feel just a little artificial at times.
In this book, magic comes from djinn, which are sort of elemental spirits. We meet one made out of water, one made out of wind, djinn that live in the air are mentioned: that sort of thing. Djinn are really unpleasant to be around: we hear about them killing people in all sorts of horrible ways, and some of them require human sacrifice in order to get them to do what you want. It's never quite clear what their powers are, exactly, but they're apparently interesting to the various governments involved in the Cold War. There are also some people who can use the magic personally in limited ways (Hale is one). To do this you have to tap into a sort of rhythm that the djinn use to communicate, which Hale does to make himself immune to people's attention and to do Morse-code transmission under difficult circumstances. I think the idea is taken from H. P. Lovecraft's short story "The Music of Erich Zann". I always like reading about the magic in Powers' books: you always get the feeling that it follows rules and there's never any question about why the characters don't just use magic to solve all their problems. They don't because magic is horrible and bears terrible costs. There's a really great bit where Hale is being inducted in the secret service, and he has to swear loyalty to his country. Theodora asks him a bunch of questions like "Would you kill an apparently innocent person if we ordered you to? Would you live out the rest of your life in disgrace for the good of your country?", and finally, "Would you use magic against magic if we asked you to?"
I'd heard Lovecraft's name mentioned in connection with these books a couple of times, but I don't think the themes are really the same. In all of Lovecraft's work there's this idea of cosmic horror: the protagonists discover that the universe doesn't work the way they think it does, doesn't care about humans, and is full of all sorts of horrible stuff; and they usually go mad or something. Declare doesn't cover that territory so much: the djinn are treated as just another part of the universe. A really powerful and unpleasant part, to be sure, but not really more important than humans the way they would be in a Lovecraft story. If H. P. Lovecraft had written this book, the entire universe would be pretty much there for the djinn.
There's a lot of discussion about loyalty as well. I thought it went over some of the same territory as [b:The Drawing of the Dark|5094|The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower, #2)|Stephen King|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1309281704s/5094.jpg|2113248]. Hale is working against the Soviet Union pretty much just because he's from the West and they're on the other side. It's not that the Soviets are evil because they're using magic, because the good guys use magic too (although the Soviet Union does do some pretty horrible things through the course of the book). Powers' puts us in the big conflict between the West and the Soviets and Hale fights for the West because that's where his loyalty is, and for no other reason. He never talks about fighting for democracy or anything to that effect—and he even joins the local branch of the communist party while he's at university—he just has this loyalty to England and the West and that's enough for him. I'm not sure if we're meant to think that this is good or bad, but it's quite a strong theme through the book.
The writing style is excellent, of course. Powers descriptions are really strong, as I mentioned, and he's very funny when he wants to be. He'd been writing for twenty-odd years when this was published, so he's very experienced and capable of really solid prose.
I thought this was a very enjoyable book: the plot and the writing were solid and it was great fun reading about the magic and the spy-craft intrigues. Some of the characterizations were just a little weak and I could have done with some deeper exploration of the themes, but still a great read.
fredkiesche's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
davidscrimshaw's review against another edition
4.0
I like John LeCarré spy novels and I like fantasy stories about djinis.
So I liked this novel.
And I particularly liked that Powers made his story fit the known facts about Kim Philby and other actual people he put in the story.
So I liked this novel.
And I particularly liked that Powers made his story fit the known facts about Kim Philby and other actual people he put in the story.
jercox's review against another edition
4.0
Interesting style of writing, heavy on moving back and forwards in time (flashbacks, but not written as such). Ties together spies and Arab / Russian folklore to create a compelling story.
aleanil's review against another edition
5.0
Long, occasionally meandering, but utterly intoxicating look at Kim Philby and an alternate world of djinn and elder powers.