Last Call — Tim Powers

Rating:  5/5

I’m probably taking my blog’s life in my hands posting a review of another Tim Powers novel.  The earlier one, about The Anubis Gates, continues to attract an inordinate amount of spam — probably five times as much as all other posts on the blog combined.  If it’s the Tim Powers name that’s attracting them, I guess it’s time to roll out the red carpet again…

Last Call is a great book, and ranks right up with The Anubis Gates as my favorite Tim Powers works.  Like The Anubis Gates, it features a protagonist who is fundamentally a good, well-meaning guy, who gets thrust into a situation a bit over his head.  All right, way over his head — he’s used as a pawn in an ongoing battle about which he at first understands nothing.  Eventually, over the course of the novel, he learns about what’s going on and the role he can play in the action, and finally is able to stand on his own and fight for himself.

The novel starts with a quick and brutal scene as a financier / Poker player / sorcerer named Georges Leon attempts to destroy the soul of his five-year-old son, Scott, by means of a game played with Tarot cards.  Scott escapes with his mother.  She dies shortly thereafter, but not before she manages to get Scott to safety.  We then quickly flash forward about thirty-five years or so as that son, now called Scott Crane, is about to be kicked out of his house for failure to pay his mortgage.

Scott’s wife is recently dead, although he can’t quite bear to let her go, and he’s starting to see ghosts and visions that somehow seem to be related to a game of Poker he played with a deck of Tarot cards on a houseboat in Lake Mead twenty-one years ago.  Scott’s first job is to get some quick cash, and then try to figure out what the heck is going on, which will involve finding Ozzie, the adoptive father he hasn’t seen in twenty years, and then convincing him not to kill himself.

From there, things get really odd.  Several factions of hired guns are after Scott, who is learning that he has strengths as well as weaknesses in the high-stakes game that’s being played.  By enlisting the help of his adoptive sister Diana and some other reluctant participants, he’s able to work toward claiming his role as a Jack — an aspirant to the throne of the King.  But to win it, he’ll have to not only defeat the other Jacks, but unseat the reigning King — his body-swapping biological father — before his father can finish what he started so long ago:  disposing of Scott’s soul and claiming Scott’s body for his own.

The novel is a great ride, with the usual Powers-style secret history in full effect.  Ever wonder what is the cosmic significance of the exact dates Bugsy Seigel chose for opening, closing, and reopening the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas?  You’ll find out in full detail.  The characters are well-defined, the plot is tight, and the worldbuilding, as always in a Tim Powers novel, is first-rate.

I’ve now read this book through three different times, and I continue to get more out of it each time.  There’s such a density of detail that it’s very hard to pick it all up at once.  The symbology of the cards — both Tarot and traditional playing cards — is central to the novel, so the more knowledge you have about the subject the easier it is to figure out what he’s talking about.

As usual, the bad guys have a good dollop of the grotesque about them, from the over-friendly hit man to the omniphagous “Mandelbrot Man”.  If the novel wavers at all it’s in these extreme characterizations.  Powers does a good job of pulling them off, but I found my suspension of disbelief wavering at some of the outrageous behavior some of these guys displayed, in ways that even the starkly supernatural aspects of the novel didn’t trigger.

Last Call won the World Fantasy Award, and it’s easy to see why.  It’s a great novel for fans of the secret history or urban fantasy genres, and probably has appeal outside those categories as well.  I highly recommend it.

Tags: Book Review, Spam