Declare

(Update: this review was originally titled “Cosmic Horrer in Tim Powers’ Declare“. Unfortunately I was playing clever-dicky with my then brand-spanking-new blog, and hard-coded the requirement that titles of reviews are the book title, and nothing else. Eventually I’ll get around to changing this (really really stupid) system, but until then, the review gets a more boring name.)

I started badly with Tim Powers, but he’s completely redeemed himself with Declare. Just so you know, this essay will mainly be concerned with why you should read it. The short version is, he does successfully what H.P. Lovecraft tried so longwindedly to do, and never quite achieved: he gives the reader a genuine sense of the frailty and insignificance of human life in the Universe.

Then he goes and spoils it all by getting religious, but this lapse is surprisingly forgivable, in context.

Declare is a mixture of genuine “high” fantasy and ultra-traditional spy story. In an afterword, Powers discusses his inspiration for the novel, which (it turns out) is based largely on fact. At least, he has taken a cast of largely historical espionage agents and woven his story into the gaps and inconsistencies in what is known about their lives. Since this story is strongly supernatural, there’s a fair amount of poetic license involved, but he claims to have stuck to the rule not to “change or disregard any of the recorded facts, nor rearrange any of the days of the calendar”.

The result, then, is not one of these ‘superhero spy stories’, in which the protagonist is recruited into espionage because of his extraordinary mental powers. Instead, the supernatural intrudes as an acknowledged part of the functioning of every intelligence agency involved in the Cold War; as in fact the hidden agenda behind that standoff. This is typical Powers style — his novels are not set in alternative universes, but assume that we are simply unaware of the psychic and magical activity going on this one, under the control of a small number of adepts.

The same basic idea underlies his ghost-eater world (Expiration Date) and the world of Last Call, in which adepts vie for the title of “King of the West”, in the old Arthurian sense in which the King is deeply and spiritually connected with the land he rules. Unfortunately my first encounter with Tim Powers was the cacophanic Earthquake Weather, which attempted to merge these two magical frames, and succeeded only in diminishing them both. My later discovery of the two distinct backgrounds was a great relief, but Declare is even more distinct. It is devoutly to be hoped that Powers manages to resist the tempatation to merge this world with the other two.

I can’t say much about the espionage element in Declare, as I don’t usually read spy stories. It seemed well handled to me, although the ethical elements were a little too clear-cut for my liking (probably for religious reasons, which I’ll get to later). Where this novel really shines, however, is in its successful evocation of the “cosmic horrer” that H.P. Lovecraft strove for and consistently failed to achieve.

The works of Lovecraft get far more attention than in my opinion they deserve, as far as writing is concerned. However his vision of humanity as an infinitesimal flyspeck in a cosmos at once vastly greater than we can comprehend and wholly uncaring is indeed compelling. The problem is that this vision is only awkwardly conveyed in Lovecraft’s fiction (although eloquently expressed in his essay Supernatural Horrer in Literature), through overblown prose and a formulaic treatment which is far more entertaining to read in parody than in the original (for a brilliant example, see Neil Gaiman’s Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar). In Declare, Tim Powers comes far closer to achieving Lovecraft’s aim than Lovecraft ever did.

The supernatural elements in Declare are Djinn, or genies, but far removed from the Disney figure that swirls obediently from a lamp to grant three wishes. These are elemental figures whose mere attention is sufficient to drive a man insane, whose passing thoughts are expressed in the transformation of physical matter. So far these are almost precisely the sorts of beings Lovecraft was so fond of, but it is in the human response to them that Powers has hit precisely the right tone.

Rather than constantly reminding the reader (as Lovecraft did) of the vastness and unknowability of these beings, Powers shows the human response to their overwhelming presence. And the subtlest way this is demonstrated, the single aspect (if one had to be chosen) of this novel which won me over, is the shame and self-disgust that the characters feel after every encounter with a Djinn. As if merely acknowledging the presence of the supernatural in the world is a deep spiritual failing. I use the word “spiritual” advisedly, since this is ultimately the explanation that Powers, disappointingly, provides: the Djinn are fallen angels, and the various ethical conundrums involved in high-level espionage and the Cold War are thematically linked to Roman Catholicism, the temptation of Eve, and a similarly clear-cut theology adjusted for the immediate presence of at least one higher order of spiritual beings.

Normally I would find this escape unbearable, but Powers just manages to pull it off, with a little help from my own doublethink abilities. The theological aspects do not really dominate the tale until quite late in the piece, and all descriptions of the Djinn themselves are sufficiently far removed from traditional depictions of angels or devils that I found myself altering my conceptions of Christian theology rather than applying it to the story.

I have however a secret weapon in this endeavour, drawn from a very different novel that also placed a pseudo-Biblical fantastical element within our ordinary world: Weaveworld, by Clive Barker. I was not particularly impressed with Weaveworld, but some individual elements were so striking that I have taken them into my personal mythology (at least, I believe they came from Weaveworld — I had similar ideas about the figure of Death in the Salmon Mousse scene of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life which, on reviewing the film after some ten years or so, turned out to be wholly invented).

Weaveworld also contains an angel, and it is similarly represented as Lovecraft should have written: on a scale beyond human comprehension but (as I remember it) without too much overblown prose trying to convey this idea to the reader. The particularly lovely element of Barker’s work is that the “angel” is in fact much closer to Lovecraft’s ideas than the Djinn in Declare; it doesn’t really belong in Christian mythology at all. It has watched and learned from humanity in the aeons of its existence, and taken on the attributes of the angel Uriel, who guarded Eden with a flaming sword after the expulsion of Adam and Eve; by human standards it is completely insane, but of course it is meaningless to apply human standards to an angel or to a preternaturally powerful elemental being composed of pure energy.

In Weaveworld this produces a uniquely terrifying figure, with the same compelling quality that we see in human insanity when it surfaces in daily behaviour. The woman who sets fire to her neighbour because “The devil was in her” is chilling enough, but the being who can do this with a thought, and for the same reasons, is far worse.

And it is with this mythos that I doublethought my way through the final stages of Declare. The characters ultimately analyse everything in Catholic terms, and it is clear that Powers himself intends such an analysis. To my delight, however, the entire story can be reinterpreted in a neo-Lovecraftian sense, in which the simplistic ethical and spiritual systems are only a (slighty pathetic) attempt by humanity to apply inappropriate values to beings beyond our comprehension.

And the fact that this ambiguity exists, although explicitly repudiated by the author, to my mind makes Declare even more compelling. Lovecraft would have hammered the point home, Barker at least written it directly into the script. Powers doesn’t want to say it, and yet in the end he can’t avoid leaving the question open. For that, I’m willing to put up with a little failed proselytising.