 First edition | |
| Author | Tim Powers |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | J. K. Potter |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fantasy,Spy novel |
| Publisher | Subterranean Press |
Publication date | June 2000 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback,Hardcover) |
| Pages | 544 |
| ISBN | 1-892284-79-0 |
| OCLC | 50031363 |
Declare (2000) is asupernatural spy novel by American authorTim Powers. The novel presents a secret history of theCold War, and earned several major fantasy fiction awards.
The non-linear plot, shifting back and forth in time from the 1940s to the 1960s, mainly concerns Andrew Hale, a scholar and occasional operative for a secretBritish spy organization. Early inWorld War II, Hale is recruited as part of Operation Declare, an investigation of the true nature of several mysterious beings living onMount Ararat, and how theSoviet Union has attempted to harness their vast supernatural powers. In this effort he is opposed by real-lifecommunist traitorKim Philby, a supporting character in the novel, who did travel extensively in the region. The novel proposes thatthe Great Game, the prolonged geopolitical conflict between theBritish andRussian empires in the 19th century over domination of Central Asia, was actually part of Operation Declare. TheOkhrana, or Tsarist secret police, are cast as the Russian counterpart to Operation Declare.
A sub-plot concerns Hale's on-off romance with Spaniard Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga. A devotedComintern agent andlapsed Catholic when she first meets Hale, Ceniza-Bendiga eventually rejects communism. While imprisoned in Moscow's notoriousLubyanka prison, she returns to her faith upon discovering the horrible motivation behind thedeliberate mass starvation andviolent political purges of Stalinist Russia: the placation of an entity called Zat al-Dawahi ("Mistress of Misfortunes") or Machikha Nash ("our stepmother"), a demonic being who demandedhuman sacrifice in exchange for protecting the nation from foreign invasion.
In a brief afterword, Powers discusses some of his sources and writing methods. Philby's father,St. John Philby, was a notedArabist whose bookThe Empty Quarter (on the desert regionRub' al Khali) was extensively used as source material for the novel.Rudyard Kipling's 1901 novelKim, about the Great Game, also supplied inspiration and epigraphs. Powers's self-imposed rules prohibited him from disregarding established historical facts and timelines, instead finding alternate explanations for events (e.g., a real-life 1883 earthquake near Mount Ararat is part of the novel's backstory; and a peripheral comment attributed to British Army officerT. E. Lawrence by playwrightGeorge Bernard Shaw is interpreted as proof of Lawrence's involvement in Operation Declare.)
In 2001Declare won both theWorld Fantasy Award forBest Novel[1] and theInternational Horror Guild Award for Best Novel, and was nominated for a Locus Award.[1] It also appeared on the final ballot for theNebula Award,[1] however it was later determined to be ineligible because of the limited edition that appeared the year prior to the trade edition.[2] It was published in the UK for the first time in 2010 and subsequently shortlisted for the 2011Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel.
