My first Tim Powers book was the great Declare. I like European history and spy thrillers and Fantasy, so for me Declare was like Alan Furst’s Dark Star, impregnated by The Dark is Rising. Alas, everything else of his I’ve read has been interesting & well-written, but unengaging – at least for me.

Last Call is one of the unengaging reads, for me. As far as I could tell, it’s about a guy who lost his soul in a poker game, to his father, who blinded him with a Tarot card when he was a small boy, and now he’s in Las Vegas with a Greek neighbour who has a huge moustache, and his sister, who is also Isis, trying to do something to play poker with his father again, and win this time. It’s occasionally difficult to follow, as the father figure has several identities so I often thought “who is this, again?” and also I found it a big of a slog so read it in pieces over several weeks, forgetting parts of the plot en route.

It is however well-reviewed elsewhere, and not a bad book by any means. I like this kind of magic realism, where instead of an outright Fantasy world of dragons & whatnot, you have the modern world in all its mundane grime & absurdity, overlaid with strange magics. In this, it resembles Twin Peaks, the last season of which was also partly set in Las Vegas. Powers is good at this, e.g. the edifices of gambling:

Leon had suspected for years that the mannequins in the built-to-be-bombed houses out at Yucca Flats in the 1950s had been, unknown even to the technicians who had set them up, sacrifices to the gods of chaos that were about to be invoked by the detonation of the atomic bomb, and it had seemed to him, too, that the multitude of statues around Las Vegas, from the stone Arabs in front of the Sahara on the Strip to the towering figure of Vegas Vic over the Pioneer Club on Fremont Street, exposed constantly to the sun and the rain, were offerings to the random patterns of the weather, another manifestation of the chaos gods. Chaos and randomness, after all, in the form of gambling, were the patron saints of the city, and had to be appeased.

I found the characters utterly uninteresting, flat, American and kind of pointless, but I suspect that’s just a personal reaction. As I get older my tastes become narrower & more violent. I’ll probably try at least one other Powers novel, in case it captures some of Declare’s, well, power.