Tim Powers

I don't usually go for "urban fantasy" books but Powers takes a decidedly outrageous plot involving time travel, spy rings, and multi-dimensional terrorists, wraps it up in a bunch of woo-woo science with a touch of the supernatural and then throws in Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin for good measure. The result is a highly entertaining, if somewhat confusing, melange of thriller and temporal paradox which kept me up way past my bedtime.

Tales that are always oblique to the reality we experience but which have much to say to the ghosts we carry and to our inability to live in the now. Powers characters may interact with literal ghosts or experience non-sequential time more directly than we do, but there is something dead accurate that they tell us.

My reactions to reading this in 2002. Spoilers follow.

This is the first in a trilogy consisting of Last Call, Expiration Date, and Earthquake Weather. There are few obvious links between the first two novels. Neal Obstadt shows up in both books as sort of an occult underworld figure. In Expiration Date, he is a dealer and user of ghosts to inhale. Here he is one of those hunting for protagonist Scott Crane. The issue of ghosts does show up here with the creepy ghost of Susan Crane, Scott show more Crane's dead wife who is not only a creepy ghost hanging around his house and later haunting him but also a representative of Death who tries to lure Scott into giving up and dying rather than struggling to reclaim his soul. Both books exhibit what seems to be Powers' characteristic blend of history, science, literary allusion, and myth, all in the service of a secret history plot wedged into the interstices of historical fact.

Here Powers' blends the history and present of Las Vegas, chaos physics, Arthurian lore, the legend of the Fisher King, pagan myth, gambling, and Tarot lore to produce a compelling plot. On one level, the plot is similar to Expiration Date: a bunch of people engage in violent machinations to attain power or persons who represents great power. That pursued person or person has to take steps to save their life and extricate themselves from danger. The specifics: protagonist Scott Crane is pursued by the soul of his father so his father can possess Crane's soul, which he won in a game of Assumption (a peculiar card game played with a Tarot deck where hands are "married" and "conceived") and others seek to kill him because they suspect he will try to replace the current Fisher King, his father. Here Scott's adopted sister, Diana, is also pursued.

Last Call, though, is a grimmer book; it's characters more desperate, its plot more violent. Scott's adopted father, Ozzie, dies. Indeed, death and onstage violence is more integral to this plot than that of Expiration Date. The book opens with Scott's biological father trying to prepare his body as a repository for his consciousness (as his brother has already been used) and relates how he's wounded "in the thigh" by his wife and how he's killed the old Fisher King, Bugsy Siegel, founder of Las Vegas. (Here a Perilous Castle in a wasteland and a nexus for the gods of randomness and chance.) Human sacrifice is even an integral part of the heroes as well as the villains. (The gods, it seems, are probably not satisfied with the fake sacrifices of mannequins in Doom Town, the atomic bomb testing site outside of town). Each must kill, or facilitate, the death of someone to achieve their ends. (And Powers does a nice job showing how reluctant Scott, Mavranos, and Ozzie are to shed blood.)

Each book has relatively short sections of dialogue (though some of the short exchanges in Last Call, where various people suggest to Scott that he'd just be better off killing himself before father Georges Leon assumes his body, are pretty creepy and memorable). In both cases, the dialogue is sometimes built around literary works -- Lewis Carroll's Alice books in Expiration Date and T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", Tennyson's "Idyls of the King", and Ben Jonson's Volpone, amongst others (as well as several popular songs from the Andrew Sisters to the Eagles) in Last Call. As to desperation, Scott Crane is out to save his soul and body (bodyswitching, a prime thematic preoccupation of Powers); Diana Crane must save her children; Mavranos (one of my very favorite characters -- I was very glad he was cured of his cancer) seeks a cure for his illness. It is that increased level of violence and desperation and the presentation of the literal Vegas and its mythic underpinnings (including the giant statues outside of the casinos representing archetypes come to life and threatening Diana Crane and Bernardette Dinh) which make this book more resonant and effective than the still good Expiration Date.

However, I think the presence of poker and the Tarota is what really makes this book more memorable. English, particularly American English, is full of idioms derived from poker. Tarot cards are fascinating, even to a non-mystic like me, for their relation to regular playing cards and their fascinating, often macabre pictures standing in for various elements of the human experience, their combination a colorful, allegedly prophetic version of solitaire. I suspect most of the details Powers relates about it are correct. He does a good job with his factual research. (His gun stuff is good though his guns, at least for his characters, seem to pack a bit too much recoil.) He mentions, in passing, the myth the Studies and Operations Group used against the Viet Cong: the liberator Le Loi and his legendary struggles against Chinese invaders. I also liked his details about the life of a professional poker player like Ozzie and Scott.

Both Expiration Date and Last Call are full of plot coincidences and narrow misses and portentous chance meetings, but that's how is should be in plots dealing with magic and fate. There are some interesting juxtapositions of plot. I find it very interesting that both books end with the assembly of families -- and also heavily feature the destruction of families. At the conclusion of Last Call, Diana and Scott marry and will adopt her children and, symbolically, Dinh. (Interestingly, both novels touch on incest. Diana notes that her marriage to Scott, which, as a child she always assumed would happen before Ozzie cut off contact with Scott after the latter lost his soul in a game of Assumption with Leon, is not really incestuous since they are Ozzie's adopted children with different parents. Also, their marriage is somewhat fated when Scott becomes the Fisher King; indeed, for him to reign wisely (and what he will do with his power is covered vaguely though it seems that it will be restrained and good) he must be married. In Expiration Date, Sukie is incestuously attracted to brother Pete.)

Both books bring in scientific jargon to bolster their magic. In Expiration Date, it's electromagnetism. Here, it's chaos theory. Both novels feature a whole world of magic and myth operating underneath contemporary reality. Last Call, except for the ultimate question of how the Cranes will use their power, ties up more loose ends as a self-contained novel. I did wonder whether Oliver was haunted by an archetype of a boy without a child or a ghost. The archetype option seemed to be the correct one. I was also unclear as to exactly how Bugsy Siegel survived to do in Leon at novel's end. I did like the Fat Man playing into the Green Knight myth, and, as a character, feeling the compulsion to avoid the physical dissolution following death. (He wants to be buried in an airtight, concrete vault so his atoms won't mingle with the soil and being absorbed by organisms. He fears the Thin Man, death.)

A very impressive novel both in its linking of so many disparate elements but also its narrative power and memorable characters and dialogue. show less

Oh yes, Tim Powers pulled it off

Does the premise sound ridiculous to you? Rewriting the lives of the Brontës to include dark magic? Tim Powers is the only writer I know of that I would trust to tackle this, and he does it brilliantly.

”Sometimes the wind that shook the parsonage windows seemed to carry the strains of a wild, remote music – repetitive and atonal, as if older than humanity’s ordered keys and scales…”

This book is written with so much love for the Brontës and their show more universe. It is dark, gothic, and alive. The characters and the setting are almost leaping off the pages. While reading, I believed in everything, I accepted everything, without the need to suspend disbelief. That’s quite an achievement, this alone deserves all the stars. The atmosphere of Brontës’ novels is wonderfully done, with an allusion here, another there.

One day Emily Brontë is walking on the moors with her dog, Keeper (such a good dog). She finds a wounded man, a stranger. He will accept no help. Thus a story of mystery, supernatural evil, and human weakness just as evil, begins. It will be scary. There will be little sunshine. If I were to describe the details, it will seem outrageous. To me, it was seamless. I couldn’t put the book down, I inhaled it.

I strongly suspect that the author is Team Emily Brontë all the way, and this book exists so that we can watch Emily being very much alive, brave, awesome, see her fly.

”I’m not frail.”

”I’ve got to be the judge of my capabilities, and they’re more than you suppose. He can’t get far in the time it will take me to load my pistol.”

I enjoyed this immensely. show less