Books: Declare By Tim Powers (2001)

As a young double agent infiltrating the Soviet spy network in Nazi-occupied Paris, Andrew Hale finds himself caught up in a secret, even more ruthless war. Two decades later, in 1963, he will be forced to confront again the nightmare that has haunted his adult life: a lethal unfinished operation code-named Declare. From the corridors of Whitehall to the Arabian desert, from postwar Berlin to the streets of Cold War Moscow, Hale's desperate quest draws him into international politics and gritty espionage tradecraft—and inexorably drives Hale, the fiery and beautiful Communist agent Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga, and Kim Philby, mysterious traitor to the British cause, to a deadly confrontation on the high glaciers of Mount Ararat, in the very shadow of the fabulous and perilous Ark.

 I do have a problem with Powers style from time to time because he does use real life facts and places within his story and fits a supernatural one around it. This works a lot of the time, but here the book is caught in three speeds, slow, super slow, and then lightning fast. Regrettably, the book is overburden with so much minute detail of spying during WWII that I grew bored with it. In some ways, like John le Carré, that Powers insists on emulating, the history of spy’s and the final months of a world war are drawn with such detail, I felt I was reading a non-fiction book about spies. His cadence also seems old style, as he seemly is trying to emulate the way writers of the 1940s and early 1960s wrote. It gets distracting as well.

Huge portions of the text are given over to scenes of Andrew Hale involved in trying to keep his cover story clear, dealing with questionable people, with uncertain allegiances -which would look great on film or TV series, but it drags terribly in prose. It's slow, sometimes torturous and far too dense for its own good. A great deal of action happens, but the whole thing feels top-heavy: most of the good stuff is at the end, so you have to wade through a lot of extraneous material to get there. The underlying idea is fantastic, but by the time Powers got to the payoff, I had stopped caring.

As Tim Power says, ‘In a way, I arrived at the plot for this book by the same method that astronomers use in looking for a new planet—they look for “perturbations,” wobbles, in the orbits of planets they’re aware of, and they calculate mass and position of an unseen planet whose gravitational field could have caused the observed perturbations—and then they turn 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 these people—Kim Philby, his father, T.E. Lawrence, Guy Burgess—and I made it an ironclad rule that I could not change or disregard any of the recorded facts, nor rearrange any days of the calendar—and then I tried to figure out what momentous but unrecorded fact could explain them all.’