A Tour of Tim Powers: The Anubis Gates

This week I continue my tour of Tim Powers with his first big hit, The Anubis Gates.

I first read The Anubis Gates either in college or shortly after. A friend of mine kept telling me about this awesome novel he’d read, and telling me to read it; but his descriptions of it were rather unclear, and the cover didn’t help: two Anubis statues on plinths, with a glowing entry way between them, and the blurb, “Backward in time to solve an ancient mystery…and create some new ones.” Oh, and I think there was something about English poets on the back cover. Huh? As I’ve noted before, I seem to lack the poetry appreciation gene. English poets? Boring. So I kept putting it off.

But my need to read always kept pace with my budget in those days, and the publishers generally didn’t, and eventually I picked up the book more or less by default. Nothing else looked interesting that day, and it had been recommended, and maybe it would be good.

It’s hard, now, after so many re-readings, to quite remember what that first reading was like. I recall being lost at times, and not seeing the connections between events that now seem perfectly plain; but though I was a constant reader in those days, I usually read for the main plot thread, and at top speed, and missed important things. But despite being confused (my own fault) and impatient to get on with it (also my own fault), still I was dizzied and delighted by the setting (the seamy, frequently occult underside of Regency London) and enjoyed it very much. And that copy of the book, having been re-read many times, has been following me around now for almost three decades and sits on my shelf to this day. If it isn’t my absolute favorite of Power’s books (and it might be) it’s only because it’s tied for first place with Last Call.

As the book begins, we find an Anglo-Egyptian wizard, one Amenophis Fikee, on the moors with his gypsy minions. The year is 1810, and Fikee is trying complete a desperate ritual that will balk the spread of the British Empire and renew the powers of his wizardly Master in Egypt. But magic has become increasingly unreliable with the spread of British engineering and cold iron, and the ritual goes awry. The backlash inflicts a fearful curse on Fikee, and also tears open holes in time, holes distributed around London in both time and space. The holes aren’t visible to the unaided human eye, but, we discover, the initiated can make use of them to move about the time stream.

In 1983, a Coleridge scholar named Brendan Doyle is given the chance of a lifetime. A millionaire, J. Cochrane Darrow, is arranging a trip for a small group of wealthy and interested parties to 1810 England to hear Samuel Taylor Coleridge give a lecture. It’s all very hush hush, and the members of the tour are all paying vast sums of money to attend, but Darrow needs someone to play docent, to give the tourists the context beforehand and answer questions after. Doyle is skeptical; but his hero and current scholarly interest, the poet William Ashbless, is known to have been at the lecture, and the pay is exceptional. The lecture comes off well, but on the way back to the moor to return to England Doyle is captured by Fikee’s erstwhile colleague, the somewhat inhuman Dr. Romany. He escapes, but is forced to remain in 1810 with only the clothes that he wears. Battered, dirty, and destitute, he must try to survive among the beggars (and worse) in the darkest parts of London…and the story is only getting started. Dr. Romany is still after him, as is Darrow, cursed Fikee is roaming about, and the underside of London turns out to be a strange and peculiar place.

I noted in my review of The Drawing of the Dark that bits of it were a little too goofy; but Powers has his vivid imagination firmly in control here. Not that it’s any less inventive, mind you. Horrabin the beggar king has a permanent clown’s face and walks about on stilts, but you won’t find him funny. Dr. Romany has spring-heeled shoes, but he isn’t given to cutting capers. And there’s a reason why Dog-Faced Joe leaves a trail of oddly hairy bodies behind him, and why Jackie the beggar boy is pursuing him. And there’s a reason why Doyle is unable to find Ashbless at the lecture or at other places he knows the poet must have been….

Convoluted, imaginative, and eerie, sometimes by turns and sometimes all at once, this is the book of Powers to start with. Read it slowly, and enjoy.