The Stress of Her Regard

I last read Tim Powers's The Stress of Her Regard some 20 years ago.  I'm re-reading it, fortuitously it turns out, since the sequel just came out last week.

With 20 years under the bridge, it's a bit easier to see this book within the spectrum of Powers's ouevre. For good and for bad, it seems to take many of his usual themes and turn them up to 11.  We have a secret history involving more than 10 real historical figures in major and minor roles (more typically Powers works with only a few, and rarely in major roles).  Both hero and heroine suffer horrendous bodily damage, and more than once.  Powers combines a bunch of disparate mythological references, here as far as apart as vampires, the graiae, the sphinx, and so on.

In all, I think he over-eggs the pudding a bit.  In the excellent Last Call, every new revelation feels somehow inevitable, a feeling of "Aha! I should have guessed that it worked that way."  Here, it sometimes feels forced -- OK, I get that vampires are disrupted by wooden stakes and silver bullets because the one is a non-conductor and the other is too good a conductor.  But why the garlic?

Having said that, this book, while not up to the standards of Last Call, is very good.  A number of the set pieces are as good as anything he's ever written (the whole Alp section, the ending, and the beginning in particular).  His Byron is manages to be alternately sympathetic and horrible while remaining clearly one consistent character.  Even knowing the end, I found the book to be consistently suspenseful, not an easy thing to pull off.

All in all, I'm eagerly looking forward to the new book.