The Anubis Gates

This is an exciting and intricate tale involving time travel, magic, and body-swapping. Although the hero and a few other characters are 20th-century Americans, it's mostly set in London, England, of the 17th and 19th centuries, with excursions to Egypt and (briefly) Greece.

I found the story fluent and entertaining. Its magical aspects are well enough presented; its non-magical aspects strike me as having a slight touch of fantasy about them. However, it could be argued that a world in which magic works might differ subtly from ours in other ways.

One aspect of it I found unconvincing was the idea of a girl-dressed-as-boy living for months in the early 19th century with a gang of all-male beggars and outlaws, some of them highly dangerous, without being found out by anyone. It's not only implausible that she succeeded; it's implausible that she'd voluntarily put herself into that situation. Couldn't she find any lower-risk way to pursue her quest for revenge?

I generally prefer sf to fantasy, and this is clearly fantasy, but it's a relatively restrained kind of fantasy, using magic only occasionally and for fairly limited purposes.

It's a pity that there are few likeable characters in it. I suppose Jacky is the best of them; the hero Brendan is inoffensive but only mildly likeable.

I'm reviewing the book after reading it once. I may have more to add after I get around to rereading it.

Really more like 2.5 stars.

This book had a lot of interesting ideas, such as magic undergoing some sort of reversal around the birth of Christ, but most of the interesting ideas either weren't explored enough in favor of the swashbuckling adventures of the time-traveling protagonist, who I never really took a shining to.
Brendan Doyle always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and somehow survive by the skin of his teeth. He's not really that likeable, has some tragic backstory about his wife that is set up to be super-traumatic but barely plays into his character, and becomes annoyingly fatalistic in the second half of the book. I think it says something that I often found myself rooting for the antagonists, who always (from their perspective) got the short end of the stick from this annoyingly persistent and should-be-harmless protagonist, and most of whom have the sympathetic goal of rewriting history so that Egypt maintains its independence from British rule.

Reading the other reviews, apparently this is often described as a steampunk book, but it is really not in the slightest, so if that's what you're in it for, look elsewhere. All in all, it was a decently interesting book that kept me reading more from a passing “let's see what happens” as opposed to an attachment to any particular character or plot-thread.

After spending 6 months in my “currently reading” list, Anubis gates makes an whimpy exit. Primarily because inspite of numerous restarts it just never got going. Oh it starts out well enough but suddenly moves to time travel for a professor of history etc etc. The blurb on this book kept it in my list and now I am happy its out:-)

400 pages of manic fast-paced genius

The Anubis Gate is Tim Powers' award winning fourth novel, published in 1983 it really is an amazing book, the like of which I've never read before. The Anubis Gate doesn't have many ulterior motives or deep meanings, apart from trying to constantly entertain the reader. I'm not going to cover the plot in this review (its too involved) but all I'll say is that it cunningly merges together the following elements:

- Time travel
- Body swapping
- Ancient Egyptian sorcery
- Werewolves
- Literary scholars
- Deformed wicked clowns
- Evil gypsies
- Dens of beggars
- Assassins
- Mad scientists
- Horrific stilt walking clowns
- Archaic Gods
- Romantic poets
- Doppelgangers
- An underground criminal society
- Tiny “spoonsize” boys
- Fire and wind elementals
- The Beatles, and so on.

The bizarre thing it that (almost) all makes sense!

As you can imagine combining all of the above makes for a fairly zany plot which at times becomes difficult to follow but as the action is so relentless I was happy to just keep on going and ignore any confusing parts, along with the minor historical and linguistic errors. Powers also manages to skilfully build up a sense of mystery throughout the novel making the reader want to turn the 400 pages to find out what happens next.

I'd be fascinated to see how Powers constructs a storyline, you almost get the impression that he takes several interesting unrelated obscure facts then tries to somehow link them together in a logical, enjoyable and compelling way.

While this is classified as a Fantasy Masterworks (and it is definitely a Masterwork) I believe that constraining it to just the Fantasy genre is too limiting, after all it covers horror, science fiction, poetry and historical fiction too.

So, in summary a highly imaginative novel which blurs fiction with reality with a few laughs thrown in for good measure. The story rushes past you at a frightening pace and it would be worthy of a couple of reads just to try to make sense of the parts which I never fully grasped the first time round! I can't wait to check out more of Tim Powers clever books; highly recommended.