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Declare, by Tim Powers.

Way back when, when the Moon was yet unsullied, when the map of the world was still touched in places with the dominant red of Britain's Empire, when everyone knew their place and television had only two channels that closed down each night with the National Anthem, not that long ago, let's face it, education was founded on unshakeable and unchangeable certainties. There were the fixed stars of the literary canon; the inelecutable truths of science pointing towards a boundlessly optimistic future of endless innovation; and history's great stories of Kings and Queens and Great Men, simple and clear and written not in water but in stone.

We know better now, of course. We know that literature is far more than a few mountain peaks carved into the likenesses of dead white males; that science is in constant flux, evolving by fits and starts; and that history is a story written by the winners, a simplified scrim over a restless mass of folk memory, the intricate web of commerce and popular culture, personal letters, suppressed or lost documents, and the plain unknowable. We know now that events played out right before our eyes can quickly sink into a morass of contradictory conspiracies, that even simple questions -- one gunman or two? -- can never be answered; not because there is no answer, but because there are so many. We know how delicately balanced history is, and how easily it can be changed -- there's a whole literature of alternate histories devoted to playing with the consequences of lost nails and shoeless horses.

Tim Powers's fantasy novels are very much of the many worlds theory of history: their gorgeous riffs, deeply permeated by the supernatural, play on the tangled conspiracies of secret histories underlying and interpenetrating quotidian certainty. Declare (Morrow, $25.00) is his best to date, big, knotty and densely imagined, presenting a fantastical alternate exegesis of the Cold War through the smoke and mirrors of espionage.

It's the story of Andrew Hale, a British academic drawn back into the secret service to complete a mission that ended in catastrophe fifteen years ago. Shaped as an agent since childhood, Hale learned his craft while infiltrating a Soviet spy ring in Nazi-occupied Paris, where he fell in love with the Communist agent Elena Ceniza-Bendiga, and afterwards first met the man whose fate is mysteriously linked to his, double- agent and traitor Kim Philby. In 1948, Philby and Hale were involved in operation Declare, an assault on strange forces that inhabit Mount Ararat. Now Hale must revive the aborted operation and break the supernatural alliance the Soviets have made, and so determine the outcome of the Cold War.

Like all of Powers's heroes, Hale is an unwitting instrument of higher powers, a corrupted innocent who sets upon his preordained task with resignation, and who must riddle the secret of his past to survive his ordeal and redeem himself. The first part of Declare, telling of Hale's entry into the Great Game, the first spark of his redemptive love for Elena, and of his reluctant reentry into operation Declare, are a superb sustained and overt homage to the Cold War novels of John le Carré; it is not until page 184 of this long novel that the first overt manifestation of the supernatural motor behind the mundane plot finally erupts. For operation Declare is nothing less than a war against a clutch of fallen angels, or Djinn, that inhabit the upper reaches of Mount Ararat; the secret protector of the Soviets is a captured Djinn bound by ritual to the boundaries of the Communist empire. And while Hale has been shaped as the weapon to destroy the Djinn, Philby, his nemesis, plots to become a rafiq, a human emissary embodying their powers.

This supernatural secret history recalls that of one of Powers's earlier novels, The Stress of Her Regard, in which the Romantic poets were involved in a covert war against the lamia, silicon creatures with malevolent intent towards humanity. Like the hero of The Stress of Her Regard, Hale is wedded in spirit to forces only he can destroy, and is a reluctant recruit to a struggle played out in the interstices of documented history. But Declare differs from Power's earlier novels in that the supernatural element is never allowed to dominate the narrative. The detailed and atmospheric invocation of the shadowy tradecraft, shifting loyalties and dreary uncertainties of Cold War espionage, and the very fine portrait of the desperate irresolution and bitter self-knowledge of the traitorous Kim Philby, are very finely realised, solid anchors for the intricately detailed fantastic elements. Within the framework of the known history of the doomed romantics of the Cold War, Powers deploys a plethora of inventively revitalised pulp tropes, from lost scrolls discovered by Lawrence of Arabia, to the grail of immortality; postulates contextually plausible alternate explanations for the very real mysteries surrounding Philby's life; and weaves historical and transcendental events into a single gorgeous tapestry. It's a significant achievement by a major author of modern fantasy, and highly recommended.

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