f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] Declare [Author] Tim Powers [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2002 [Read] 2013/02/14 [Review] 
I enjoyed this greatly: Declare is a hybrid of a Le Carré espionage novel (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold in particular) and Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (in the meticulous pattern-seeking and warping of historical events and literature), with a bouncing action plot which appositely quotes from Fitzgerald-Khayyam, Spenser, Shakespeare and Swinburne especially to grant it greater depth than it might seem to merit. Even when you think it’s done on Mt Ararat (and Powers has in a final flourish explained Philby dying shortly before the Berlin Wall), the plot isn’t entirely over and there are multiple more deceptions and operations to go. And to top it all off, Powers takes an afterword to “show his work” and reveal how Cold War history was “freakier than fiction” (in TvTropes terms), but it’s hard to blame him for not being really pleased with some of the genuine incidents he works in. (The exploding car with Philby wearing a fox cape and escaping with a minor injury while everyone else died? Real. I was shocked.)
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