Tim Powers' MEDUSA'S WEB

My love for Tim Powers knows no bounds, as my readers probably know very well. From my very first reading of his basically perfect The Anubis Gates when I was a teenager to my most recent umpteenth re-read of his definitely perfect Last Call, I'm pretty close to saying the man can write no wrong.*

With his latest novel-length work, Medusa's Web, I'm even closer to saying that. Because holy crap, this is his best work since Last Call, and I really, really, really love Last Call, y'all.

There are enough superficial similarities between this work and LC that a reader might at first start suspecting that the wells to which Powers likes best to go are finally starting to run dry -- the hero's name is even Scott, you guys (but the reader discovers midway that it's Scott for a very punny-but-plot-relevant reason) -- but quickly it becomes apparent that said similarities are superficial indeed. Powers is not done coming up with weird new ways to mix science and magic and human creativity, and this is one of his weirdest yet.

Medusa's Web, which also in its setting and cast of closely related characters has even more of the flavor of a gothic novel than Powers' stuff usually does, begins with an uncomfortable reunion of cousins, gathered back to the sprawling Holywood estate where they were all raised by a legendary actress/model/bodice-ripping novelist named Amity. Who recently died. By committing suicide. By going to the roof of her monstrous house and blowing herself up with a grenade. And oh, by the way, because her monstrous house and its grounds are sort-of-haunted in a very timey-wimey way, that particular explosion keeps repeating itself at odd intervals throughout the subsequent story as her son and three of his cousins try to sort out what to do now that the old girl is gone.

And that's not all. Because this is Tim Powers. So, no, there is no Time Machine whisking people to and fro, nor is the repetition of Amity's spectacular suicide just a ghost story. There is a really weird sort of magic at work here, magic triggered by very simple but weirdly potent line drawings that suck observers right out of their bodies, into an identity-less, sort-of-dimensionless space and then dump them into vignettes from the lives of other people who have looked at those drawings. And there are lots of those, generally, because this trip is pretty addictive. But that's not all, either.

Let's just say you're not just a passive observer of the vignettes you might witness. And that there's maybe some reciprocity. Which makes a kind of time travel possible. Kind of.

And there's yet more. Because this book takes place in Hollywood. Yes, the bulk of it in 2015, and yes, in kind of a romantic ruin of the past, but also in Old Hollywood. As in the silent movie era. And the great Rudolph Valentino is a character (kind of the way Bugsy Siegel was in LC, but he gets to do more). And there's a whole thread woven in about a classic silent pic, Salome**, which I'd not heard of before but now totally want to see.

And but so, GLAMOUR.

I think this is going to warrant a repeat read very soon, because, too, in some ways this reminded me a bit of a Gene Wolfe novel. Once you know its secrets, the meaning of some baffling early bits might just turn from baffling to brilliant.

Don't forget your bullseye specs, kids!

*I say "pretty close" only because I am not a huge fan of his sequel-that-tied-two-previously-unrelated-books-together-to-make-an-after-the-fact-trilogy, Earthquake Weather. It's not terrible, but it's not up to his usual mark, either, and reeks of something cooked up by his agent or publisher. Meh. But otherwise, yeah, he can write no wrong.

**Which is a silent adaptation of the great Oscar Wilde's famous play about Salome and John the Baptist and Herod. Yeah, that Salome. But it's also, because Powers is a genius, warped into being a key to the mystery of these weirdo spider drawings. Because Powers is a genius.

Gene Wolfe's PEACE

On the surface, Peace seems the most quotidian Gene Wolfe novel I've yet read, but the surface is never to be trusted with this guy. Oh, no. This is very likely the most elusive, occlusive and deceptive writer ever.

And this is -- and I say this as a passionate fan of all 12 books of Wolfe's maddening Solar Cycle but especially of the Book of the New Sun -- one of his most remarkably elusive, occlusive and deceptive books. And also, and this is probably because of its quotidian elements, the most tantalizing, because grounded in ordinary reality, mostly, and thus promises a certain possible relative ease of interpretation.

Not that it delivers on same. Or at least, not very much. Ahh, Gene Wolfe.

So on the surface this is just the regretfully nostalgic meanderings of an old man who lived an idyllic and improbable (to the modern reader -- c.f. how I felt reading Philip K. Dick's In Milton Lumky Territory) early 20th century small town in the American midwest, with all the Normal Rockwellian pastoral pleasures and soda shop scenes that implies. Albeit with a slightly sinister flavor, in that there's an awful lot of death and talk of death. And of course there's the way the narrative skips around in time, which may just be a dotty old man free associating but may also be a bit of a Billy Pilgrim-unstuck-in-time thing. And you can totally just stop there and read Peace as Gene Wolfe's Slaughterhouse-Five. But...

But then you notice all these recurring themes. How every single story that our man Alden Dennis Weer (usually called Den, one of the many onomastic clues that led good old Robert "Solar Labyrinth" Borski to spin out a whole involved theory about how Peace is Wolfe's version-cum-inversion of Goethe's Faust, with Den as Mephistopholes) tells or is told has certain repetitive elements that fractally echo other parts of the story that all relate back to Den's childhood sin of pushing a little boy down some very dangerous stairs.

And then there's that ending. Not since I first read Infinite Jest have I felt so compelled to go back to the beginning of a novel and read the beginning again because only now did I finally have the clue I needed to understand what was going on there. Except Peace is not over 1000 pages long. It's not even 300. You can read that in a night.

And Bog help me, I did. Yep. For the first time ever in my life, I read a novel twice in a row, with not so much as a short story, poem or internet article in between. And when I got to the end, even after hours and hours of figurative light bulbs popping and exploding over my head, I was still somewhat tempted to start again from the beginning*. But, as you'll see shortly, I have other reading and blogging obligations in the offing, and none of them allow for re-reading a novel almost as old as I am.

There. I almost read a book three times in a row. If that's not a ringing endorsement, nay, command, to drop everything and go read Peace at your earliest opportunity, what is?

*Neil Gaiman has famously observed that he only realized that Peace is a horror story on his second reading. And while elements of horror and ghost stories were noticeable the first time around -- I was especially seized by the theme of humans slowly turning to stone while they were still alive (there's even a mention of the Cardiff Man hoax! Hooray!) and the whole creepy carnival theme that springs up in the novel's second half -- I still don't read it so much as a horror story in the sense that term is usually used. The horror is that of guilt realized, of atonement rendered as impossible as redemption. Peace is simultaneously the most ironic and most perfect of titles for this book.