Ex Libris: Tim Power's Declare

Well, looks like we have a winner here, folks.

For my Best Book for 2004 (that I've read anyway), I'm going to tag Tim Powers' Declare. And what a book it is.

In Declare, Powers has written a book that wilfully crosses genre from espionage, geopolitics, religion to fantasy. Like something out of a John le Carre or a Robert Ludlum novel, the book details the life of one of the players-- or pawns-- in the 'Great Game' of the Cold War, a British secret double-agent named Andrew Hale.

However, as part of his trademark, Powers makes his fantastical mark on the spy thriller genre by uncovering an even secret war that government intelligence agencies had no knowledge of. Combining actual history with speculative fiction, Powers has drawn an almost-Lovecraftian tale involving supernatural djinns, failed sorcerers, and metaphysical mathematics.

Likewise, as this book is a thriller, Powers doesn't stint on the action, ranging from tense covert work in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War 2 to assassination attempts in Lebanon in the 1960s. From London to Cairo, from Paris to Berlin, from Beiruit to Mount Ararat and Moscow, Declare weaves around the world and jumps backwards and forwards in time with breath-taking rapidity.

For example, in one scenery, Hale and her partner, the fiery and beautiful Communist agent Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga, are trying to escape the attention of the Nazi Gestapo after being betrayed by their Russian handlers.

Unfortunately, the two have been using unknowingly dabbling in the supernatural and the supernatural is looking kindly on the couple at the moment. This, of course, has mixed results...

Hale nodded, and didn't speak. Since abandoning the religious faith of his youth he had had no such sun to fix the orbits of his whirling philosophies, but loyalty to England was secure in the central orbit. "I-- follow you," he said miserably.

He saw the profile of her head turn to look up and down the embankment, and then again, more quickly; and she sighed deeply. "You follow me, " she said in a new voice, flat and controlled, "I wonder what we both followed. We are in the Square du Vert-Galant, at the far end of the Ile de la Cite. Look! This is where the old men fish, that is the Louvre across the river, we" -- he voice was shaking-- "must have walked right past the Palais de Justice, with you carrying an illegal radio! Past
the police station!"

Powers also infuses Declare with sympathetic characters by making Declare a love story about Hale and Elena. Likewise, Powers gives a thoughtful look at family ties, especially the relationship between Hale and infamous double-agent of the Cold War, Kim Philby.

It is in Powers' creation of a secret history of Philby, the infamous British 'fourth man', that the author does his most masterful work. To be exact, the devil is really in the details.

Powers admitted in the afterword that he initially wrote Declare in order to put all the out-of-synch and incongruous minor facts about Philby's life into something recognizable. Like Umberto Eco had done in Foucault's Pendulum, Powers connected the weirdness in Philby's past to make something grander and more mystical than whatever we can imagine.

As he says in an author's note:

In a way, I arrived at the plot for this book by the same method that astronomers use in looking for a new planet-- the look for "perturbations", wobbles, in the orbits of the planets they're aware of, and they calculate the mass and position of an unseen planet whose grativational field could have caused the observed perturbation-- and then they their telescopes on that part of the sky and search for a gleam. I looked at all the seemingly irrelevant "wobbles" in the lives of thse people-- Kim Philby, his father, T.E. Lawrence, Guy Burgess -- and I made an ironclad rule that I could not change or disregard any of the recorded facts, nor rearrange any of the days of the
calendar-- and then I tried to figure what momentuous but unrecorded fact could explain them all.

Ironically, it is this facet of Declare that makes this book a great read as compared to his other works of his that I've read (like The Anubis Gate and On Stranger Tides). After all, what is the stuff we're reading in speculative fiction nothing more but secret histories (or secret futures) of our own lives?