Interviews
A Conversation with Tim Powers
Barnes & Noble.com: One of the major characters in Declare is Kim Philby, the legendary double agent and Soviet mole. What led you to make fictional use of Philby? Have you had a longstanding interest in his career, or in the overall history of Cold War espionage?
Tim Powers: No, but I've always been a fan of John le Carré's; and so I bought a book on Philby just because Le Carré had written an introduction to it -- and it was a great introduction! -- full of atmosphere and hints and speculations. So I went ahead and read the whole book and discovered that Philby's life was full of the sort of ambiguities and secret conflicts and striking locales that I like to write about. I mean -- Mount Ararat, Bedouins, Berlin, Moscow, Beirut! Great stuff. I had a lot of fun putting my secret supernatural sort of framework into the Cold War history. Lovecraft meets tradecraft.
B&N.com: In Declare, Philby's chief antagonist -- and secret sharer -- is a young British agent named Andrew Hale. Does Hale have any real-life antecedents, or is he a wholly invented character?
TP: Hale was purely invented -- for a while in the outline, before I decided on a name for him, I was referring to him as "Guillam," the name of a Le Carré character. I think I generally let the protagonist be defined by the dictates of the research -- that is, what sort of character could be most conveniently and effectively propelled though this maze?
I did get a foundation for him him when I read that Philby and his strange father spent part of the summer of 1923 investigating any supernatural powers that might reside in baptismal water from the Jordan River -- it seemed to me obvious that they were anxious about an infant that had been baptized there not long before. This gave me a number of directions pointing to our hero: origin in the Middle East, baptism, a connection with Philby père et fils, inherited feuds, and so forth.
B&N.com: A few of John le Carré's novels -- notably Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy -- were loosely inspired by Philby's career. What are your thoughts on Le Carré's work? Was the eponymous "Operation Declare" intended as a tip of the hat to "Operation Testify," which figured so prominently in Tinker, Tailor?
TP: Well, I think Tinker, Tailor is a masterpiece -- I bet I've read it a dozen times. For years it was my "airplane book" -- thick enough to bring along on long flights, and reliably riveting. I finally had to retire it because I was beginning to know it by heart.
I imagine "Operation Declare" derived from "Operation Testify" in that they were both big, off-the-record, almighty secret operations; they weren't the same kind of operations, but I think I did try to get the same ominous mood Le Carré got.
B&N.com: Your novels, especially over the last decade, seem to be growing longer, more ambitious, more complex. Is this a sign of your increasing ambition? How do you yourself compare these later books -- say, from Last Call forward -- with your earlier work?
TP: They've gotten longer, it's true. And I think that is a result of me wanting to develop the characters and the locales more. For instance, Last Call was the first book for which I was able to actually go look at the scenes I was writing about, which was a great help -- my wife and I drove all over Las Vegas, and then all over L.A. and San Francisco, with a videocamera -- though with Declare I wasn't able to do that. I mean, that Beirut and that Moscow don't even exist anymore!
And I suppose as I get older I have my characters faced with more complex problems. Not only "Here come the werewolves," but "Here come the werewolves and I think I'm losing my mind." Maturity, you see. That's what it is, trust me.
B&N.com: Another difference in your recent novels is the fact that they've moved into the 20th century and incorporated such modern icons as Philby, Thomas Edison, and Bugsy Siegel. Is there a particular reason for this change? Do you have any plans to revisit earlier historical eras in future novels?
TP: I do want to do more historicals, yes -- for one thing, I've been accumulating so many great research books over the years! I mean, medieval stuff is just bowing my bookshelves, for instance.
But of course the 20th century has a wonderful immediacy. It's fun to work freeways and .45s and Wild Turkey and electrical engineering into supernatural plots! And, especially with the Last Call trilogy, I'm sure the fact of my being an actual citizen of the culture I was writing about gave the books some degree of extra assurance!
And there are a lot of writers whose tricks I just can't do in historical novels -- Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, A. Alvarez, Thomas Pynchon. I don't want to miss the fun of playing on their jungle gyms.
B&N.com: I'd like to talk for a minute about your working methods. What sort of preliminary research do you typically do? To what extent do you outline before actually beginning to write?
TP: I do tons of preliminary research -- like a year of just reading and making notes -- before I have even a clue about what my eventual plot will be. The plot is indicated by whatever fascinating stuff and patterns of stuff I find in the research.
And I outline like a madman. My outlines cover just about every event that will occur in the book, and even include bits of dialogue and description. (My goal, I sometimes think, is to one day outline a book so thoroughly that the outline will gradually become the book.) It's like designing a big roller coaster, putting together blueprints of everything from the foundations up -- you want to provide lots of surprises for the passengers, but ideally there won't be any surprises for the designer.
B&N.com: Although you haven't written a great many short stories, you recently brought out a collection entitled Night Moves and Other Stories through the specialty publisher Subterranean Press. Do you enjoy working within the constraints of the short story form, or are you at heart a novelist?
TP: I'm definitely a novelist! Reflexively, I try to cram too much into a short story, I think -- or else go the other way and leave too much out. I've only had six of my short stories published -- these, I like to think, are the ones where I didn't cram too much in or leave too much out!
You can live in a novel you're writing for a couple of years, get to know the area pretty well. A short story is like a weekend at a hotel -- busy and interesting, but you're home again before the grass needs watering.
B&N.com: To the best of my knowledge, you've collaborated on only one story, "The Better Boy," which you wrote in tandem with James Blaylock. Are there any other collaborative works lurking in your past? Are you comfortable with the process of collaboration? Would you ever consider collaborating on a longer work?
TP: I can't imagine collaborating with anybody but Blaylock -- he and I have known each other since '72, in college, and we've inevitably got a lot of overlapping tastes and attitudes and mental reflexes. He and I have collaborated on two published short stories, by the way -- the other was "We Traverse Afar" in David Hartwell's Christmas Forever anthology -- and yes, we've collaborated on lots of this-and-that things in the past; for one thing, we've cowritten a cookbook.
Collaborating with Blaylock is very smooth -- I write six pages, say, and give them to him, and he chops them down to three or four pages and adds six of his own, which I in turn treat the same way. Somehow, we never disagree.
I don't know whether or not we could collaborate on a whole novel or not! In any case, it would require that an editor pay enough to sustain two writers for the time involved in writing it, and that's not likely to happen.
B&N.com: Do you have either the time or the inclination to read the works of your contemporaries? Are there any writers out there whose work you particularly admire?
Oddly, I don't really read much science fiction or fantasy anymore -- I did read everything up to about 1975, but it's been very sporadic since. I admire Blaylock's work, and Karen Joy Fowler's and Lisa Goldstein's and William Gibson's and John Shirley's, but their stuff was in my path because they're all friends of mine.
Even in mainstream I'm hardly up-to-the-minute -- my favorite writers would include John D. MacDonald, Kingsley Amis, Raymond Chandler, and Tom Wolfe.
B&N.com: Now that Declare is behind you, have you started working on a new novel? Would you mind giving us a brief preview of what we can expect from you down the road?
TP: Gee, I'm still in the reading and making notes stage! -- but it will be another 20th-century thing, involving some European cities and Los Angeles, it looks like. And some supernatural business that turns out to have been going on behind the scenes for a long time. A typical Powers book, basically.
--Bill Sheehan
Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. His book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, At the Foot of the Story Tree, has been published by Subterranean Press (www.subterraneanpress.com).
