Three Days To Never – Tim Powers (Review Part 2)

There has to be a part 2 to this review, if only to allow my initial excitement about a new Tim Powers novel settle down. Part 1 is here. When you think about it, it’s a bit depressing: you wait five years, and then you read it in three days. And then what? The question is, can you re-read this book as many times, with as much satisfaction, as other works by Powers?

The great pleasure of his previous novel Declare, I’ve found, is that picking it up for the second time was just as rewarding. Because of its mix of actual historical figures and fiction, of recent history with fantasy, Declare gave you much to chew on. In fact, I found that further reading was required. I became so fascinated with the Cambridge spy ring that I went off on an espionage jag. I read a biography of Anthony Blunt; a fictionalised account of his life; several John Le Carrés; and many others. None of it, though, gets you even close to the brilliant weirdness of Powers.

Three Days to Never, whilst fascinating, is in many ways a little bit (whisper) formulaic. For example, one of the main protagonists is a kid on the cusp of puberty who is in considerable peril (a theme familiar from Expiration Date). Another is an ordinary man whose life is disrupted when he is caught up in extraordinary events (a classic narrative device that is present in almost every Powers novel). Then you have your opposing teams who are pursuing power (or “The Grail”) by supernatural means: your expert, government-sanctioned professionals, and your amateur disreputable Secret Society types. There’s even a familiar character in the slightly dishevelled, alcoholic, wounded older man. This wounded figure, of course, is straight out of Powers’ favourite trope: the Fisher King myth, which crops up again and again in his fiction. This is from The Wikipedia article on The Fisher King:

“Confusingly, many works have two wounded Grail Kings who live in the same castle, a father (or grandfather) and son. The more seriously wounded father stays in the castle, sustained by the Grail alone, while the more active son can meet with guests and go fishing.”

It’s worth bearing that little snippet in mind when reading this novel. Powers isn’t as explicit with his myths in this episode, but it’s fair to say that some familiarity with the Fisher King myth – with its holy grails, open wounds that never heal, spears of destiny, and severed heads that keep talking – will enhance your enjoyment of many of Powers’ novels, including this one. The joy of Powers is that he puts all this kind of stuff into recognisable historical and geographical settings. Three Days to Never is set in the Los Angeles of 1987, for example.

All these figures are familiar from other Powers works, then, and yet… there’s something else going on here, which is a bit of button-pushing and gentle ribbing aimed at some other, shall we say, more successful (in monetary terms) works of fiction. Because Powers does secret societies which are pursuing some grail-like object through history, he just throws in the odd reference to Carcassone and Mediaeval Pontiffs, the Grail itself, and alternate histories – because he can. Just a little dig at the Dan Brown crowd. But if you want precedent, Powers’ interest in the Grail and Fisher King myths go right back to one of his earliest novels, The Drawing of the Dark, and continues in more recent works like Last Call.

Then there’s the current celeb fashion for the Kabbalah: hence the presence in Three Days to Never of the Mossad, who are seeking a “little machine” discovered by Einstein and who carry amulets inscribed with hebrew characters.

All the stuff of fantasy fiction, or at least Powers’ take on fantasy, but the other thing about Three Days to Never is that you could make an argument for it being a Science Fiction book, just because of its interest in Einstein and his Special Theory. The central premise here is that Einstein discovered something (along with Relativity) that he found so frightening that he chose to cover it up. Since his death in 1955, various groups have been trying to piece together the fragments of his work to discover what it was. The “fantasy” conceit here is that Einstein’s work served to confirm some apparently bizarre statements in ancient Kabbalist texts.

The simple fact is, once you get really deeply into the post-Newtonian physical universe, and let your imagination run wild, what emerges could be science, or it could be fantasy.

It’s a toss up, then, whether this is SF proper, or “merely” fantasy. Like most Powers novels, it does send you scurrying to look up facts. For example, I’d forgotten that Charlie Chaplin’s body was stolen after his death. But Powers hadn’t, and it’s one of the many passing strange events that he uses to weave his fiction around. And then, if you think about it, the fact that Einstein turned up at the premiere of Chaplin’s City Lights could be seen as kinda weird.

The deeper you go, the stranger it gets.

As a narrative, Three Days to Never doesn’t work as well for me as Declare simply because of the old saw about showing and not telling. In Declare events take place over many years, and our protagonist finds himself caught up in them over and over again. Three Days to Never takes place over three days and the historical information (about Chaplin, Einstein, the Six Day War etc.) is narrated in the past tense. This has the effect of making the past events seem distant and less immediate than they are in Declare.

Which is not to say that Three Days to Never isn’t worth reading. It absolutely is. But if you were to read just one Tim Powers novel, it wouldn’t be this one. Still, start with one, and you’ll most likely be hooked into reading the rest.

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Note:

Some of the Powers novels kind of work in sequence, so (for example), Last Call, Expiration Date, and Earthquake Weather should be read in that order. And you should probably read The Drawing of the Dark before any of them.

Three Days to Never – Tim Powers (review Part 1)

With his previous novel Declare Tim Powers discovered a rich vein of weirdness in the strange (and apposite) affinity between espionage tradecraft and the supernatural.

Our received wisdom about the casting of spells, the avoidance of the Evil Eye, the scrying of omens (which might involve, for example, the carrying of a talisman, walking in a particular direction, oriented a particular way, the uttering of code phrases), has too much in common with, say, the avoidance of a tail, the awareness of surveillance, the exchange of secret documents, microfilm and other information: dead drops, meetings in the open air.

Both the practice of magicks and the trade of the spy involve a lot of smoke and mirrors. And we’ve all seen those TV documentaries about the crazy things the KGB and the CIA got up to: the use of so-called “remote viewers”: people with psychic powers who spied on the other side by clairvoyant means.

I was walking in London recently through the Whitehall area, and I noticed how damn noisy the place is, and how bloody hard it would be to point a microphone at two people having a conversation in the open air, at the bottom of the steps to some ministry or other. Inevitably, the information is going to come through garbled, half-finished phrases, the odd word here and there, and you’re going to have to divine the meaning in much the same way as a witch doctor would by casting the bones.

It’s obvious, when you think about it, which is all part of the pull of Powers’ work. He notices things, small pockets of strangeness in everyday life, and he weaves around them a narrative that is so compelling that you find yourself torn between the need to read for the plot and the wish that it would never end.

Three Days to Never is Powers’ latest foray into espionage and the supernatural. Instead of the Cambridge spies and the European Theatre of the Cold War, we find ourselves drawn into the milieu of the Mossad, and secret branches within secret branches of Israeli intelligence.

It’s been said that Tim Powers is incapable of writing a bad novel, and I have to confess that I buy into that wholeheartedly. I’ve read them all, and from his earliest knocked-off 50,000 worders to his most recent explorations of post-war history and espionage, he hasn’t ever put a foot wrong.

The attention to detail, the assured exploration of those tiny spots of every-day weirdness, is brilliant; moving from this:

She used to think Azusa was an interesting name for a city, but recently she had heard that it meant “A-to-Z USA,” and now she classed it with other ridiculous words, like brouhaha and patty melt.
She also disapproved of a city called Claremont being right next to one named Montclair. She thought there should be a third one, Mairn-Clot.”

To this:

“Okay,” her father went on at last. “Grammar–what, had no respect for time. You know the way she carried on sometimes, as if she was still a teenager, like going to Woodstock; and she’d plant primroses in midsummer, and they’d thrive; food got cold real quick sometimes even though she just took it out of the pan, and other times it stayed hot for hours; well, a long time. It never surprised her. Maybe she was just pulling tricks on us, but time didn’t seem to work right, around her.”

Three Days To Never opens with a widowed father and his daughter exploring in the back garden of the man’s grandmother (“Grammar”), unknowingly observed by one of Mossad’s own remote viewers (a psychic spy). The girl, Daphne (who’s a little psychic herself), pulls a videotape of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure from a VCR in the garden shed and later starts to watch it at home. But instead of Pee Wee Herman, she sees a very odd, and disturbing, old silent movie. The piano soundtrack is also strange, with lots of “missing” or implied notes, and Daphne realises that the implied notes form another, secret melody…

I’ve always felt that a Powers novel carried the same thrilling power of a mid-60s Dylan song. Instead of “Einstein disguised as Robin Hood,” we get (in one book) the ghost of Thomas Edison and the hands of Harry Houdini. In Three Days To Never, we get Israeli spies, Charlie Chaplin, Einstein, and Pee Wee Herman. It’s a richly textured and fascinating journey.

As with everything else written by Powers: Highly Recommended. Part 2 of this review is here.

Snare – by Katharine Kerr

For the sake of completeness, thought I’d post a review of Snare, which I just read for the second time. Unfortunately, there are spoilers in what follows.

It’s always a bit of a departure for Katharine Kerr to write anything other than one of her series of fantasy novels, but at first glance this would appear to be more of the same. The cover design shows a man dressed in clothes that would fit any (non-technological) era, carrying some kind of staff, with some kind of mythical flying creature in the background. He could indeed be a Deverry man, with his riding brigga and battle spear.

But this impression is somewhat mitigated by the US cover art, which (though much lower quality) seems to show a blonde woman, dressed in Native American (Plains Indian) gear, but shadowed by a huge, dinosaur like creature who is echoing her gestures. Have to say, though: why to American readers have to put up with such shitty covers?

So. Fantasy or not?

Actually, [spoiler alert] Snare is the name of a planet, and the humans who live there (sharing the single continent with the indigenous species) have travelled there at some time in their distant past, in space ships.

Science Fiction, then, but this is not some deep-future space opera about impossibly sophisticated and advanced cultures. Instead, it’s about several different cultures, experiencing an uneasy coexistence amidst myths, forgotten technology, garbled history, and twisted religions. In fact, as I’ve said before, it’s an ideal (and gentle!) introduction to Science Fiction for the Fantasy fan. Or vice-versa, I suppose

There’s a hint of controversy here, because one of the three disparate human groups on the planet are the so-called Kazraks, descendents of fundamentalist muslims who sought to colonise their own planet, away from the corrupting influence of other societies and religions. Their culture, however, has degenerated over hundreds of years into a rigid military society, ruled with fear and terror and controlled by a secret arm of the military called The Chosen. Some Kazraks, however, are planning a revolution, having heard rumours that on of the Great Khan’s brothers, thought murdered, is still alive.

But – if alive – he’s living in exile at some distance, in the middle of the third group of settlers in an area known as the Cantons. In between the Kazraks and the Cantons is the second group of settlers, the Plains People, who lead a nomadic existence and trade horses with both sides.

This bizarre set of human circumstances is complicated by the presence of the natives of the planet, known as the Cha Meech.

The plot of the novel concerns the journey of a group of Kazraks, led by a “sorcerer” from the Cantons, across the plains to meet up with the exiled Jezro Khan. They’re pursued, in a fashion, by one of The Chosen (Zayn Hassan), who joins up with a company of Plains riders (called a Comnee) and allies himself with a Spirit Rider called Ammadin. The Comnees have their horse-based society, but they also have preternaturally good health, great strength, strong family resemblances, and a set of rules (or Banes) that they live by. Spirit Riders, in particular, are revered for their ability to heal, advise, and scout ahead, using their treasured Spirit Crystals.

But what seems to be a society based on that of the Plains Indians of North America turns out, of course, to be something quite different. Initially sceptical of the spirits and magic utilised by Ammadin, Zayn comes to see their real power, and begins to doubt his own beliefs. Ammadin herself, too intelligent not to be questioning the basis of her beliefs, leads Zayn into the Cantons, where they both discover the truth about their existence.

How did three such disparate cultures end up sharing the same small amount of land on a strange planet far from home? What is the origin of the technology behind the Spirit Crystals? Why are the Plains People so strong and long-lived? What is the origin of the long list of Banes that these people live by? Who created the strange document known as The Sybilline Prophecies? Why has everybody forgotten where they came from and why?

Like a lot of SF, then, this is at heart a mystery story. You read not just for the plot but to find answers to the questions that occur to you early on in the book. Over 600 pages, the questions are answered. It’s mostly satisfying in that respect. While you get multiple points of view, you inevitably end up sympathising with some characters more than others, and you wish that the narrative point of view would stay with them.

This is a good, chunky read (600 pages), that could easily be twice as long and remain as satisfying. In fact, one negative criticism is that everything is too neatly explained and tied up by the end, whereas you might wish for some mysteries to remain unanswered so that there could be a sequel or two. Both times I’ve read this, I’ve found myself thinking of how this would be as a long-running TV series, like Firefly might have been. Apart from the difficulty is creating a convincing alien landscape (orange and purple vegetation, away from the two permanent human settlements) and convincing Cha Meech and other alien species, this is in the end about strong characters and plot, which makes it ideal for an adaptation. In the end it’s too good, though, too far from home, to ever get so far.

Tutor to the Dragon Emperor by Raymond Lamont-Brown

Review by Simon Holy Hose

Spontaneity is a serious thing, and not without its guilty pleasures. It being the school holidays we took our kids to the local library so they might furnish themselves with reading material in order to avoid boredom. While there I spotted this book and couldn’t resist.

I first got interested in China and its later history after seeing Bernardo Bertolluci’s film The Last Emperor back in the late 80s. Since then I’ve read a number of related books. Tutor to the dragon emperor: The Life of Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston at the Court of the Last Emperor by Raymond Lamont-Brown caught my eye therefore so I borrowed it.

As you may or may not know, Reginald Johnston ended up via a series of extraordinary circumstances teaching the last emperor of China in the early part of the 20th century. Very shortly after Johnson’s appointment the emperor essentially became a prisoner in his own palace with no real power as various political factions struggled for control. Johnston went on to be a much trusted friend of the emperor and was therefore in a unique place to witness the court in its final moments.

The story of Pu Yi, the last emperor, is indeed rather poignant and is covered in several other books. None-the-less it forms a substantial part of the narrative of this book. I suppose that this is unavoidable really even though the book is a biography of Johnston.

It’s a short book. It took me two days to read it. And if you bear in mind that most of the book recounts what Pu Yi was doing, as well as a potted history of Great Britain’s interactions with China, it really does underline how little we actually know about Johnston.

I found this disappointing really, but maybe the lack of facts says a lot about Johnston. Like many people he went a long way to creating a myth about himself, and I suppose that would necessitate covering his own tracks to some extent.

So what do we know?

He came from a prospective middle-class Edinburgh family. He went to Oxford before entering the diplomatic service’s far east division to undertake what promised to be an inauspicious career.

After his father’s death, his mother came to be without income. Johnston was unsympathetic, claiming that she’d spent the money on drink.

While he was in China the struggling empire’s big cheeses decided that the emperor needed to understand Western ways and began to scout for a suitable tutor. Through diplomacy and Johnston’s great ability to learn oriental languages it came to pass that he got the gig.

He had about three serious relationships with women in his life, none of which materialised in marriage, although they all seem to have come close.

He seems to have been very close to the emperor, although Pu Yi would later deny this, probably for political reasons.

Johnston was much resented by the imperial court for his position. Indeed he was promoted to the highest rank in the Chinese court. Johnston seems to have been very proud of this fact.

When the politics of China finally changed in the second world war and the Japanese took control of Pu Yi’s destiny in order to further their own territorial interests, Johnston went back to England.

He seems to have been bitter that he was never made Governor of Hong Kong, and certainly by then the British government seems to have regarded him as very much a loose canon and not always reliable in acting foremost in Britain’s interests.

Back in Britain he taught oriental studies at the University of London for a short while, in which role he seems not to have excelled, and it is thought that his fame and contacts landed him the post over more suitable and better qualified candidates (who incidentally got the post after Johnston left).

Towards the end of his life Johnston bought a remote Scottish island and lived there with a female companion whom Johnston referred to as “wife in all but name”. On the island he flew the yellow flag of the puppet nation Manchuquo.

There! Now you know it all too. A short and relatively enjoyable read, but telling in what it doesn’t say rather than what it does. Probably only worthwhile if you’ve seen the film but read little else about the subject.

Katharine Kerr – The Gold Falcon

So a trilogy is a series of three books, right? What’s a word for a series of twelve?

One of my daughters is currently completely obsessed with the Lemony Snicket books. She’s read 11 of the 12 (so far) in the Series of Unfortunate Events. You may be thinking that she only has the 12th episode to read, but you’d be wrong. No, the one she hasn’t read is #5. She has, in fact, read them in a completely random order. And if she finishes one and doesn’t have a new one to read, she just re-reads one. What’s a word for a thirteen-ogy? The 13th is due out in October, I think.

My other daughter is similarly obsessed with the Daisy Meadows Rainbow Magic Fairy books. Now, this series is a real racket. The books are all slim (Horrid Henry thickness) and have more or less identical plots, and there are fucking forty of them. I’m pretty much convinced that there is no such entity as “Daisy Meadows”, and she is in fact just a computer programme run at the publishing house. I hate these books with a passion, but my 5-year-old loves them. Well, I suppose it’s not really very much different than me buying the Beano and Wizzer and Chips and Cor! every week. Or Macworld, MacUser, and MacFormat every month when I was older.

So I understand how from the outside something can seem strange, obsessive, and a little bit silly. That Lord of the Rings film sequence, I thought, revealed the utter tripe lying at the heart of that book, which I have read many, many times. Being immersed in the book: great. Watching it on film? Embarrassing.

Katharine Kerr’s sequence of novels set in the fantasy milieu of Deverry and the Westlands started 12 novels and 20 years ago. She’s been ill lately, so fans have been starved of new material for some time (imagine if she’d died before finishing it, and you’ve been following the sequence for 20 years!). The Gold Falcon was – or so I thought – going to be the last, but it seems that she had too much material, so there appear to be two more in the offing.

In a way, that’s shame, because a trilogy of quadrologies has a certain neatness to it. Still, I’m happy to keep reading them if she’s happy to keep knocking them out.

So what do you get? At around 400-pages per book, 12 books, you’ve got a fantasy saga on a truly epic scale. Makes some other fantasy sagas look like small potatoes. The deep premise is that people die and are reincarnated, and that their fate/character flaws etc. continue to affect their lives even in future incarnations. So the series covers (so far) 500 years of history, and multiple generations of reincarnated characters. Preposterous! I know! But you can’t help being sucked in by it all.

The whole thing started when a young man had an inappropriate relationship with his sister. He fucked up her life, his life, and the life of the guy she was supposed to marry. It’s all a horrible tangled mess, and one of the triangle makes a rash vow not to rest until he’s put things right. Well, it takes him 500 years, doesn’t it? This character, Prince Galrion, becomes a powerful sage/magician (dweomermaster) called Nevyn, who keeps meeting up with his betrothed and her brother (and others) in all their incarnations, until he finally gets it – in EastEnders style – sorted out.

Kerr tells this story over the first 8 volumes or so, but it’s not a straight chronology, oh no. Instead, she darts back and forth in time, showing (again and again) how the past affects the present, and how people struggle to get out from under or accept their destiny/fate (or wyrd).

All the fantasy elements are here. Swords, sorcery, men and women, elves, hybrids, shape-changers, even dragons (in the later books, she builds up to it). It’s all very silly, but it’s great fun. You become immersed in the story, the language – people talk in a sing-song style, truly, saying somewhat instead of something and it gladdens my heart instead of I’m happy (well, it all helps the word count, no doubt).

If you loathe and despise the fantasy genre (as I loathe and despise those Fairy books), you’ll hate this. But if you’ve ever entertained the notion… For example, if you’ve enjoyed Lord of the Rings but wouldn’t know what else to pick up – well you just might find a life-long friend in Katharine Kerr. You can be sure that by the time you’ve reached the last in the series (if there ever is a last), you can – like my oldest – go back and re-read from the beginning.

Kerr’s a good writer, I think, and so much better than the likes of David Eddings that she’s in a different league. There’s quite a lot of scholarship under the surface – Celtic mythology, for example – and she always stays true to the rules of her fantasy world. She keeps all the balls of the plot in the air, and she makes it all seem deceptively easy. There are some great characters, and it can become unputdownable. Big problem I had with The Gold Falcon, there are no chapters: so you just keep reading on and on, with no natural break. I was up till gone one in the morning as I was finishing it up.

Highly recommended, if you like that kind of thing, but you’ll want to start at the beginning. One thing to watch out for are alternative titles! Don’t buy some from the USA and others from the UK, for example, or you might end up with the same one twice. The good news for those starting fresh is that the early episodes are available from Amazon Marketplace resellers for as little as one new pence!

Correct order:

Daggerspell
Darkspell
Dawnspell
Dragonspell

A Time of Exile
A Time of Omens
A Time of War
A Time of Justice

The Red Wyvern
The Black Raven
The Fire Dragon
The Gold Falcon

Forthcoming:
The Spirit Stone
The Shadow Isle

If you visit Amazon UK, you will see listed a book in the series called The Black Stone. This book does not, and will not, ever exist. Kerr states on her web site that her publishers issued the title on a list of forthcoming publications (when she was ill, I think), and for some reason Amazon seem unable to take it down. The next book will be The Spirit Stone, with at least one more to come.

If you want an introduction to Kerr as a writer, she has written three science fiction novels, Polar City Blues, Freezeframes, and Snare. I love Snare, which kind of straddles Sf and Fantasy. It’s one of those fantasy-like novels which turns out to be concerned with old/forgotten technology. It’s a good read, and a good place to start with Kerr’s writing. Again, available quite cheaply from Amazon Marketplace.