Declare

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Summary: Another Wonderful story by Powers
Review: This book is so good that I literally made myself sick reading so fast. . . I have read all of Powers's books and always believe that he cannot top his previous books, and then he does. I thought "The Stress of Her Regard" and "Anubis Gates" were incredibly original and imaginative, but his newest book, "Declare," was even better. Mr. Powers combines cold war espionage, ancient lore, real incidents (the Kim Philby story)to form a truly gripping story. What is most amazing is that it all holds together and seems plausible! Read this book!

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Summary: The Darkly Awesome Tim Powers!
Review: I eagerly awaited the publication of "Declare", and was not displeased. It was a prime example of what we have come to expect from Mr. Powers. The mixture of the mundane, the supernatural, and the macabre make for an exiting read, that was over too soon!!

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Summary: prepare to be blown away
Review: It's complex and not for the faint of brain. But if you're willing to pay a bit of attention, then get ready for one of the most amazing books you'll ever read. Like in his other books, Power's ability to mix fiction with factual events will leave you POSITIVE that this story is 100% factual.

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Summary: Excellent supernatural thriller
Review: It was probably ordained form the day Andrew Hale was born, an event shrouded in mystery, that he would ultimately join His Majesty's Secret Service in the war against Hitler. As a child, his mother introduced Andrew to his "Godfather," who was in the business. Andrew took to the world of espionage as few ever have. He even fooled the Soviets into recruiting him. If the perfect spy had an weakness it had to be Elena, a dedicated Communist who worked with Andrew during the Vichy control of France. His only failure was the men who died on Mt. Ararat when the Soviets sought the Ark.

After the war, Andrew returned to England as a university professor, believing his days as a spy were over. However, in 1963, he receives a coded phone call that reactivates him sending him to the Middle East where the Soviets are trying to obtain the Ark. Andrew speaks with Legion and passes a weird test of sorts. Now all he must do is fight the forces of darkness on Ararat with the stakes being the freedom of the world.

DECLARE is an interesting combination of a classic espionage thriller crossed with the X-Files to create an intriguing ecclesiastical spy tale. The riveting story line employs flashbacks to World War II so that the reader can grasp what happened that led to the 1963 events. Fans will declare that Tim Powers' power is to make the mundane exciting and the supernatural believable as he does with this thriller.

Harriet Klausner

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Summary: Absolutely Incredible!
Review: I've been reading Tim Powers' work for several years now, and have been constantly amazed by the new ground he breaks. But Declare is truly his master work. Nominally a spy story reaching back to before World War II, the book traverses decades up to the present. This is not, however, just your basic "shoot-em-up" spy story. The plot intertwines with the supernatural, combining historical details such as Lawrence of Arabia and the occupation of Berlin with tales from the Arabian Nights.

Definitely a must-read, but don't expect to read it just once.

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Summary: A novel I won't soon forget
Review: This is my favorite Tim Powers book, and Powers is one of my favorite authors. Other than an aborted attempt to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I had never read a "fantasy" novel until Last Call. Despite reading nearly all of Powers' novels, I still have not read any novels (other than his) in this genre. My hunch is that Declare will resonate with fans like me, who are not necessarily fans of fantasy, but simply fans of good fiction. Declare is, in my view, a wonderful cross-over work that cannot be fit easily into any ready-made category.

Most impressive to me is the sheer ambitiousness of Declare. Powers attempts many things in this novel, and he pulls them all off. In electing to write a spy novel, Powers aimed for the very top, plainly channeling John LeCarre at all critical junctures. I've always suspected that Powers has been a LeCarre fan for some time. They share a similar story-telling style, winding the story out slowly and requiring readers to keep near the tip of their minds images, encounters, and fragments of conversations, until the story catches up. That can be a frustrating style for the reader, but it is also much more interactive than passive story-telling styles and in the end more rewarding, at least in my view. Declare follows along in this tradition, but more fundamentally all of the traditional LeCarre aspects are there. From the wonderful little details about the mundane aspects of "tradecraft," to the exact descriptions of the sometimes banal lives and thoughts of those charged with (literally) saving the world, to the unwavering adherence to ensuring each character faces the consequences of his or her conduct, the homage to LeCarre is nearly perfect. That any aspiring spy novelist could pull this off is impressive; that Powers could do it in a novel that must walk a tightrope to do many other things is what makes this book special, to me.

Powers fans will recognize a lot in this book -- as others have commented, the meticulous effort to explain true historical events through a fantastic prism. Or, as in Last Call, pinning some greater redemption on a two-decade quest for one protagonists' personal redemption. But what really puts the book over the top, and the reason I think it is a great cross-over novel, is the backstory; a love story. Stripped of the other-world and fantasy elements, it really is just an archtypal love story, with all the usual elements of a story arc that everyone of us has seen a hundred times. But it works, and is richer for the fantasy and the other stuff.

It's a great novel. My guess is that most Tim Powers fans have already read it, but for those who are not necessarily Powers or fantasy fans and wonder what this 500 pager has to offer them, if you're not bothered by a little suspension of disbelief, you may just find this a rewarding read.

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Summary: Fantastic
Review: I had a small idea of what i was in for after reading the reviews for this book. I had no idea how well researched Tim Powers was on everything. I highly recommend reading the notes about the book afterward, it is incredible how he uses so much real history and just how little he fills in the gaps with absurd fiction. And even the fantasy part is based on legends of Saudi Arabia, I'm talking about the Djjin, which are demon creatures.
The demons in this story are not your horrorific demons with red horns and fangs. These demons are seen more of as forgotten and lost angels, very complicated as a race, and very real. Throughout the story, we visit the lost city of Wabar (might also be called Sodom and Ghomorrah) Mt. Ararat, and many other places.
This book is stimulating on many levels, and you really get the idea that Powers was trying to make this novel a lot more than just a novel that gets one point across. The story is about secret governemnt cover ups and ancient histories linked to today, but what I thought when i read this book, interestingly enough, is that all of that fantasy aspect was really just a scenerio to run along a love story. Underneath all of the adventure and complication, in the end, this story ends up a simple story about a boy and a girl. It's an adolescent fantasy that takes our main character, Andrew Hale, as a spy at the age of 18, falling in love with another young spy named Elena, who he must partner with. After they are separated for twenty years is when the story of Ararat, and the Djjin really picks up, and by the end of the book, you get the vibe that that was all introductory to what happens at the end.
The climax of the story surrounding the Djjin on Mt. Ararat I thought was a little abrubt, but again, I don't think that was supposed to be the main and most important aspect of the book. The ending AFTER that is brilliant and is one of the most satisfactory endings I've read in a long time, in a long stream of quickly ended books. I had to re-read the very last paragraph of the book several times because it was so brilliant.
I highly recommend this book if you like stuff that's very historical, or if you like stuff that's very whacky, or if you just want a simple story about a spy and his long lost love. I stress that you can't be easily offended if you want to read this book. They toy with a lot of things in religion, like The Bible and The Koran. I am a christian, and i liked this book. I'm just saying that they present some ideas about the origin of The Ark (the one we think we know of, anyway) and Solomon's splitting of the baby proposal, that are very bizzare, just to name a few. But I highly recommend it.

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Summary: A fascinating hypothesis
Review: "Declare" is a daring blend of spy and fantastorical genres. Tim Powers takes his familiar brand of historical mysticism and inserts it into Cold War European politics. In his afterward to the novel, Powers outlines the genesis of "Declare". He studied the biographies of Russian spy Kim Philby and the British agent commonly known as Lawrence of Arabia. Powers found unexplained time periods and unusual occurences. He filled in the gaps with pieces of his fictional story, all of which resulted in a fascinating and very well-written story.

The story tracks a fictional Englishman, born with the gift for bizarre dreams. British secret service drafts him as a child and not many years later places him into service as a secret agent. What follows is a powerful tale that jumps over various time periods and locales, filled with Russian spies, Nazi plots and all-powerful djinn.

As a devotee of both fantastic fiction and spy thrillesr I was treated to a masterpiece of bothe genres. The political plotting kept me on the edge of my chair. The demonic djinn left me enthralled. I particularly enjoyed the scenes of the assault on the djinn's habitat on Mount Ararat. Very compelling reading.

A word of warning however. I've spoken with several diehard Tim Powers fans who feel that is not one of his stronger works. I disagree with their opinions on early Powers novels as well as this one. If you're a big fan of his "On Stranger Tides" and "The Stress of Her Regard" you may be disappointed by "Declare". But as those same Powers aficionados said, even lesser Powers is great reading. I highly recommend "Declare".

Rating:
Summary: A good read
Review: After I finished the book, I immediately wanted to read it again to go back and catch all the dropped hints that I missed the first time through. This is both a good and bad thing. On the good side, the premise and writing are quite good. On the bad side, the book jumps timelines a bit too frequently and IMHO takes a bit too long to reveal its secrets. So long that for large parts of the book some of the characters' actions are simply confusing. Ultimately, the wait is worth it and when the secrets are laid bare, I was not disappointed (which is a lot more than I can say about a so called bestseller ... cough, Da Vinci Code, cough).

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic
Review: I started reading "Declare" with a great deal of scepticism. I had previously read "Stranger Tides" and "Anubis Gate," and was very leery of what looked like it was going to be a standard spy story. OY! What a surprise! I plowed through the entire book in only three days!

Powers doesn't get around to putting a firm identification of the What behind the mysterious goings-on of Operation Declare until page 160, but by then he has laid a firm groundwork of interesting characters and events of which the reader wants to learn more. Once we learn something in "Declare," however, Powers builds on it, and builds beautifully.

Although "Declare" deals with Andrew Hale and Elena for hundreds of pages, it's actually inspired by (seemingly minor character) Kim Philby, and, in his afterward, Powers states that his intent was to write a novel about Philby which explored his life and work without changing any of the well-known facts of Philby's life. Its the interpretation which Powers puts on the events of Philby's life which make "Declare" mind-bogglingly good. Who, after all, REALLY knows what goes on in the deepest, darkest recesses of the world of espionage? Maybe some of the weirdness of the Looking Glass World really is due to a supernatural element, and if that supernatural element happened to be extremely ancient....

The title "Declare," which hardly compels at first, DOES make sense. Don't miss the reference to Job near the beginning of the book ("Declare, if thous hast understanding...."), and note the reactions of various characters to the word's use, and you won't be surprised yourself when the word turns up with greater frequency in various dialogues. One of the habits of Powers as a writer is his dropping of clues willy-nilly in plain sight, clues which only become significant when they've been seen again and again from different angles. In some books this has been an annoyance; in "Declare" it is a virtue and an art. (Consider the recurring phrase, "O Fish ..." -- at first it is gibberish in a dream, then begins to make sense, and then takes on a meaning so terrible that merely hearing the words can kill.)

From the Cotswolds to Cairo to the Rub al-Khali; from Paris to Berlin to al-Kuwait; from Beiruit to Mount Ararat to Moscow, "Declare" weaves around the world of The Great Game in Europe and the Middle East, and jumps backwards and forwards in time with breath-taking rapidity, but Powers has learned his craft well, and "Declare" never disappoints. The number of "slow" pages numbers less than a dozen among 600+ pages.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has any interest in thrillers, spy novels, histories, or the supernatural. It straddles all of those genres with ease. Although it makes no reference to the "Cthulhu Mythos," it would fit snugly into any "Cthulhu Now" framework, and Powers is a far better writer than most of the Mythos writers, including H. P. Lovecraft himself.