I’ve spent the last couple of weeks reading Tim Powers’s novel DECLARE. I’ve read a bunch of Powers’s books over the last 20 years, including THE ANUBIS GATES, and find myself thinking that Powers is as much a fan of the literature of espionage as anyone could be — everything he writes about this stuff feels true on multiple levels.

I like Powers’s depictions of the djinn (genies), who are also fallen angels. It has also been said of God (theologically speaking) that, in Him, Will and Act are one. The same is true of the djinn. I also like the idea that the double-consciousness required of someone who’s a spy may help one deal with/survive the djinn. It’s why the novel’s hero, Andrew Hale, the Communist spy Elena, and famous British traitor Kim Philby survive the 1948 mission

I had known a bit about Philby, Burgess, Maclean, and so on from reading THE FOURTH MAN, but hadn’t known that Philby’s father was an Arabist who converted to Islam.

Other things I kept remarking: Powers’s detailed, almost loving descriptions of the different guns people use. Speaking as someone who has never fired a gun in anger (or, you know, at all), I found these descriptions fascinating.

The sheer amount of research that went into this book is incredible. Even if you subtract the fantastic elements, you end up knowing a whole lot more about (e.g.) Kim Philby than you might ever have expected.

Or Mount Ararat.

Or what it might have been like to be walking around Moscow in 1964.

Nice tribute in the closing scene to Milton’s closing scene in “Paradise Lost”.