With apologies to Mr. Clapton, Tim Powers is God.

(Scratch that. Too fannish, entering stalker territory.)

Tim Powers works magic with the blending of fact and fiction, reality and unreality, realism and surrealism. Here's my case: The Anubis Gates, On Stranger Tides, The Stress Of Her Regard, The Drawing Of The Dark, World Fantasy Award-winner Last Call, Expiration Date, Earthquake Weather.

With Declare, Powers again creates a masterpiece of unusual speculative fiction based on documented fact. It's a fact that "Kim" Philby was a British intelligence operative who eventually defected to the Soviet Union and died there years later. It's a fact that he was involved in one of several British Cold War spy scandals, that he worked for both sides at one time or another, and that he spent much time in the Middle East as did his father, a noted Arabic scholar and also something of a scoundrel. As always, Powers excels at connecting the dots his own way - he places Philby precisely where he was at any given time (according to my cursory research double-check), but ingeniously gives him completely different reasons and "motivation" for being there, a Powers trademark.

With the protagonist, Andrew Hale - an agent of sorts since his birth to an ex-nun - Powers gives Philby a nemesis whose connection to the stuttering spy is unknown until the climax, part of which occurs on the frozen peak of Mount Ararat. It's a second attempt for Hale to use powers he himself barely understands, and a chance for him to atone for his failure a decade and a half before, a failure which either killed or drove to insanity the men under his command.

Flashbacks to Hale's youth as a British/Soviet double agent in Nazi-occupied Paris begin to fill in the gaps in this novel full of duality - two analogous time periods, two sides of the same personality, two sons of different mothers, two attempts on the fabled final resting place of Noah's Ark, and two sides played against each other.

Powers has also built in an improbable but amazingly bittersweet love story as well. In Occupied Paris, Hale works with a beautiful and ardent Soviet agent with whom he will first experience the supernatural hiding just beneath the Great Game. What an incredible invention is Powers's interjection of the supernatural as it relates to the operation of the spy's wireless. In postwar Berlin, among the tensions of east-west separations and maneuvers, Hale will come face to face with the reason he has been cultivated as an agent - and it's not giving too much away to say that it involves the Arabian Nights, theology, and the true nature of the ankh ("anchor").

It's another homerun for the incredible Tim Powers. Read this superb work whether or not you enjoy the spy novels of John Le Carrè - I was weaned on those of Alistair MacLean, myself - and revel in what Fantasy can be when viewed from outside the Tolkien-inspired universe. Highest possible recommendation.