The cracks and thunders made syllables in the depleted air, but they didn’t seem to be in Arabic. Hale guessed that they were of a language much older, the uncompromised speech of mountain conversing with mountain and lightning and cloud, seeming random only to creatures like himself whose withered verbs and nouns had grown apart from the things they described.

Wow.

To what shall I compare Tim Powers’s novel, Declare? Think of John LeCarre. And cross it with C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, or… pardon my blushes… my own historical fantasy novels.

But really, it’s unlike anything you’ve ever read.

Andrew Hale is an English spy. He was born in Palestine and baptized in the Jordan River. He doesn’t know who his father was, though it’s rumored he was a fallen priest. He does know his mother was a failed nun. As a young boy he was introduced to a tall man named Jimmie Theodora, who swore him into a kind of secret organization – he didn’t understand what it was about. But eventually it led him to recruitment in British intelligence. And he began to glimpse a secret known to few and denied by all – that above the business of fighting the Germans and the Russians, there is a metaphysical war going on. Good vs. evil, principalities and powers of darkness in high places.

In occupied Paris in World War II, Andrew meets and falls in love with a Spanish Communist agent, Elena Ceneza-Bendiga, But their work will keep them apart, as Andrew carries out various assignments taking him to the deserts of Kuwait, to Turkey, Berlin and Moscow. And again and again he will come up against a man whose fate seems entwined with his – the charming, stuttering, utterly treacherous and amoral Kim Philby. The two men’s shared birthright will bring them together in epic confrontations on Mount Ararat and, finally, in Moscow.

This novel, as I mentioned last week, is very, very long. Be prepared to invest time in it. But it’s packed full of historical detail – Powers says in his afterword that all the dates and events (except for the invented supernatural activity) are scrupulously faithful to the documented record. It’s also packed with fascinating fantasy speculation.

The final impact of it all is hard to describe. Almost perception-altering. I highly recommend Declare.