Three Days To Never
Started reading this yesterday and pretty much couldn't put it down, which is pretty much why I finished it today. For a Tim Powers novel, that's pretty noteworthy; his novels tend be somewhat dense, and as much as I like his stuff, I generally haven't plowed through his work the same way I do with one of Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novels. Like his previous novel, Declare, Three Days To Never is about the interesection of spies, covert agencies, and magic. But whereas Declare was a vast, sweeping, and sometimes slow story, Three Days To Never is brisk, compact, and lighter. I don't mean that it doesn't have depth, or that it's more simplistic or happy-go-lucky or anything like that. Rather, it just seems to move along at a quicker pace, and although it's full of history and detail, it never gets bogged down.
Set in 1987 during the time of the harmonic convergence, the story begins with widower Frank Marrity and his 12-year old daughter Daphne visiting the home of Frank's grandmother after recieving a cryptic phone call from her. While there, Daphne takes a video labeled Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, only to discover that the tape contains a strange black and white film which provokes a powerful, and unexpected, pyschic response from Daphne, and draws the attention of both the Mossad and a secret group of European Occultists. Soon, Frank and Daphne are caught up in a secret war between these two factions involving ghosts, psychics, astral projection, and the lost secrets of Albert Einstein.
As usual, the most fun part of Powers' novels is seeing how he manages to create supernatural explanations for real, historical events, and how he does it by weaving a variety of disparate elements together in a believable way. In this case, he combines Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, the harmonic convergence in 87, the holy grail, the Albigenses, time travel, Jewish mysticism, and Shakespeare's The Tempest. For instance, in the story it turns out that the aforementioned silent film is a lost Charlie Chaplin film called A Woman Of The Sea that Chaplin produced to enact a sort of psychic ritual, but which he destroyed after the effects it produced in a test screening turned out to be too potent. I got curious, so I did a search and discovered that, yes, Chaplin had produced a film with the name A Woman Of The Sea, which was never released to the public, and that he later destroyed all copies of it. Had Powers simply made up the film entirely, few people would ever know the difference. Instead, he took real historical events, gave them a supernatural underpinning, and made them a part of the story without having to change any of the factual details.
Set in 1987 during the time of the harmonic convergence, the story begins with widower Frank Marrity and his 12-year old daughter Daphne visiting the home of Frank's grandmother after recieving a cryptic phone call from her. While there, Daphne takes a video labeled Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, only to discover that the tape contains a strange black and white film which provokes a powerful, and unexpected, pyschic response from Daphne, and draws the attention of both the Mossad and a secret group of European Occultists. Soon, Frank and Daphne are caught up in a secret war between these two factions involving ghosts, psychics, astral projection, and the lost secrets of Albert Einstein.
As usual, the most fun part of Powers' novels is seeing how he manages to create supernatural explanations for real, historical events, and how he does it by weaving a variety of disparate elements together in a believable way. In this case, he combines Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, the harmonic convergence in 87, the holy grail, the Albigenses, time travel, Jewish mysticism, and Shakespeare's The Tempest. For instance, in the story it turns out that the aforementioned silent film is a lost Charlie Chaplin film called A Woman Of The Sea that Chaplin produced to enact a sort of psychic ritual, but which he destroyed after the effects it produced in a test screening turned out to be too potent. I got curious, so I did a search and discovered that, yes, Chaplin had produced a film with the name A Woman Of The Sea, which was never released to the public, and that he later destroyed all copies of it. Had Powers simply made up the film entirely, few people would ever know the difference. Instead, he took real historical events, gave them a supernatural underpinning, and made them a part of the story without having to change any of the factual details.