Declare - Tim Powers

A little while back I posted about a book called Declare. Since then, I've finished it.

IT was pretty damn good. A slow start but once it gained momentum it got me hooked and dragging me with it to the end. What I never realised - not being familiar with World War 2 espionage history - was that the character I'd grown to love to hate was a real person.

I won't go on at length about the book itself other than to recommend it to anyone interested in modern day occult stories as it does a fantastic job of tying the mythology of the djinn into the secret war found behind the scenes during the early 40s as World War 2 drew to a close and also into the Cold War espionage of the early 60s. And it does so with Power's usual flair for twists and turns in the story as it goes.

What I did want to talk about was the author's afterword - where Tim Powers talks about how he became fascinated by the gaps in Kim Philby's history, and wondered what might have happened in those periods not recorded by history. In his own words, he "kept being nagged by a feeling that the central element of the story had been omitted."

He compares the process to how astronomers find new planets - detecting the wobbles in the orbits of planets they're aware of, or disturbances in light from distant suns and infer what is missing by it's affect on what they can see. By studying what was known of Philby, his father, Guy Burgess and the nigh legendary Lawrence of Arabia and looking for what might fit in the spaces between these fact, and sticking by an ironclad rule not to change any recorded facts or dates Powers put together the story that ties them all together.

And what comes out of it all is a neat little piece of occult fiction that's all the more compelling because in a world where the mystical powers from this book could exist, it would so neatly explain so much of what went on in the lives of these people. What were no doubt either ordinary intrigues of the spy's life or just random happen stance of everyday life could so easily have been a battle to control the power of a colony of djinn. By blurring the lines between fact and fiction, Powers drew me into a genre I would not normally be all that keen on (espionage, that is - not modern occult. I have no problem with that).

So I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who'd like a cold war occult story or just wants to read an example of how a fascinating fictional story can be weaved into recorded history.