I think I know by now what evil really is

[sovay]

I am evidently not the target audience for Tim Powers' Hide Me Among the Graves (2012), which rushthatspeaks has been reading and describing to me; I think that if one of your central characters is vampire John Polidori, people should always be asking him if he got it from Lord Byron and he should be so tired of having to tell them ("Byron wasn't even a vampire, damn it!") no.

Comments

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I was mainly impressed with his use of Kim Philby, his ability to write a Cold War Le Carre spy novel in which the spies are almost all magicians, and the tricksy mythology he's got that conflates angels with djinni, from which I stole/paraphrased the "where were you when I laid the foundations of Heaven and Earth?" part of the Terrible Seven's origin story. Stalin's successes at warding off invasion, for example, are credited to an intelligence that lives underneath the Kremlin and is being fed purged dissidents in return for her services, alternately called Zat al-Dawahi ("Mistress of Misfortunes") or Machikha Nash ("our stepmother").

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Steve really likes how Andrew and Elena, the main protags, between them dramatize the way their two political viewpoints were tearing the world apart at the time--Elena is passionately and sincerely committed to Soviet Communism, even in its worst excesses; she's the scariest kind of genuine idealist, sympathetic yet chilling in her ability to forgive Stalin's crimes as "necessary" to bring about a better world. And Andrew on the other hand is torn by doubt, more emotionally moved by Elena than his own cause, but his fear of the Great Game and the deceptions and pretenses you have to go through in order to keep up...the very horrors it requires convince him there's no way people would go through it unless they absolutely had to.

(Andrew's also a Catholic, so I guess he's more willing to accept evil but less willing to commit it, because the Heaven he believes in doesn't have to happen on earth for him to be happy with it. He's flexible in a way she's not, so he doesn't get quite as broken.)

Then again, there's also the sheer scope and weirdness of the djinni-angels. Powers is really good at making it clear that something is going on, invisible and terrifying, without ever having to directly depict it. He's the king of turning domestic details inside out.

[sovay]

Stalin's successes at warding off invasion, for example, are credited to an intelligence that lives underneath the Kremlin and is being fed purged dissidents in return for her services, alternately called Zat al-Dawahi ("Mistress of Misfortunes") or Machikha Nash ("our stepmother").

This sounds like a direct literary ancestor of Ian Tregillis' Milkweed trilogy.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, no, it TOTALLY is. That's one of the other reasons I like it so much.;)

I also very much admired the one with the body-hopping card game, set in Las Vegas, not least because Bugsy Siegel is a character...Last Call. I have a copy of Medusa's Web that I intend to read soon, too.