''Declare'' (

2000 2000 was designated as the International Year for the Culture of Peace and the World Mathematics, Mathematical Year. Popular culture holds the year 2000 as the first year of the 21st century and the 3rd millennium, because of a tende ...

) is a

supernatural Supernatural phenomena or entities are those beyond the Scientific law, laws of nature. The term is derived from Medieval Latin , from Latin 'above, beyond, outside of' + 'nature'. Although the corollary term "nature" has had multiple meanin ...

spy novel by American author

Tim Powers Timothy Thomas Powers (born February 29, 1952) is an American science fiction and fantasy fiction, fantasy author. His first major novel was ''The Drawing of the Dark'' (1979), but the novel that earned him wide praise was ''The Anubis Gates'' ...

. The novel presents a secret history of the

Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

, and earned several major fantasy fiction awards.

Plot summary

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 secret

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. * British national identity, the characteristics of British people and culture ...

spy organization. Early in

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

, Hale is recruited as part of Operation Declare, an investigation of the true nature of several mysterious beings living on

Mount Ararat Mount Ararat, also known as Masis or Mount Ağrı, is a snow-capped and dormant compound volcano in Eastern Turkey, easternmost Turkey. It consists of two major volcanic cones: Greater Ararat and Little Ararat. Greater Ararat is the highest p ...

, and how the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

has attempted to harness their vast supernatural powers. In this effort he is opposed by real-life

communist Communism () is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, di ...

traitor

Kim Philby Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (1 January 191211 May 1988) was a British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union. In 1963, he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring that had divulged British secr ...

, a supporting character in the novel, who did travel extensively in the region. The novel proposes that the Great Game, the prolonged geopolitical conflict between the

and Russian empires in the 19th century over domination of Central Asia, was actually part of Operation Declare. The

Okhrana The Department for the Protection of Public Safety and Order (), usually called the Guard Department () and commonly abbreviated in modern English sources as the Okhrana ( rus , Охрана, p=ɐˈxranə, a=Ru-охрана.ogg, t= The Guard) w ...

, 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 devoted

Comintern The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern and also known as the Third International, was a political international which existed from 1919 to 1943 and advocated world communism. Emerging from the collapse of the Second Internatio ...

agent and lapsed Catholic when she first meets Hale, Ceniza-Bendiga eventually rejects communism. While imprisoned in Moscow's notorious Lubyanka prison, she returns to her faith upon discovering the horrible motivation behind the deliberate mass starvation and violent 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 demanded

human sacrifice Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more humans as part of a ritual, which is usually intended to please or appease deity, gods, a human ruler, public or jurisdictional demands for justice by capital punishment, an authoritative/prie ...

in exchange for protecting the nation from foreign invasion.

Writing

In a brief afterword, Powers discusses some of his sources and writing methods. Philby's father, St. John Philby, was a noted

Arabist An Arabist is someone, often but not always from outside the Arab world, who specialises in the study of the Arabic language and Arab culture, culture (usually including Arabic literature). Origins Arabists began in Al Andalus, medieval Muslim ...

whose book ''The Empty Quarter'' (on the desert region ''

Rub' al Khali The Rub' al KhaliOther standardized transliterations include: /. The ' is the assimilated Arabic definite article, ', which can also be transliterated as '. (; , ) or Empty Quarter is a desert encompassing most of the southern third of the Arabi ...

'') was extensively used as source material for the novel.

Rudyard Kipling Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( ; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)''The Times'', (London) 18 January 1936, p. 12. was an English journalist, novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was born in British Raj, British India, which inspired much ...

's 1901 novel '' Kim'', 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 officer T. E. Lawrence by playwright

George Bernard Shaw George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 188 ...

is interpreted as proof of Lawrence's involvement in Operation Declare.)

Reception

In 2001 ''Declare'' won both the

World Fantasy Award The World Fantasy Awards are a set of awards given each year for the best fantasy fiction published during the previous calendar year. Organized and overseen by the World Fantasy Convention, the awards are given each year at the eponymous ann ...

for Best Novel and the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel, and was nominated for a Locus Award. It also appeared on the final ballot for the

Nebula Award The Nebula Awards annually recognize the best works of science fiction or fantasy published in the United States. The awards are organized and awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), a nonprofit association of pr ...

, however it was later determined to be ineligible because of the limited edition that appeared the year prior to the trade edition. It was published in the UK for the first time in 2010 and subsequently shortlisted for the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel.

References

External links

* *Power
comments
on the genesis of the book in an interview in the March 1998 issue of '' Locus''. *H
comments
on its relationship to actual history and

Roman Catholicism The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...

in an interview in the February 2002 ''Locus''. {{World Fantasy Award Best Novel 2000-2009 2000 American novels 2000s fantasy novels Novels set in the 1940s Novels set in the 1960s American fantasy novels Novels by Tim Powers Cold War spy novels Novels about the Great Game Secret histories Jinn in popular culture World Fantasy Award for Best Novel–winning works Nonlinear narrative novels Mount Ararat