A Son of the Rock

Orbit, 1998. 565 p

Tim Powers has written several books I have enjoyed, most notably The Anubis Gates and The Drawing Of The Dark. His On Stranger Tides was also a good read as I recall. His work is usually a blend of fantasy and horror. Like most of his œuvre Earthquake Weather leans more to fantasy. I picked it up in a bookshop sometime during the past year. I didn’t realise it was part of a series including Last Call and Expiration Date – which I have read but which didn’t leave so much of an impression on me – until I looked here. I must have missed it at the time.

Fantasies in a modern setting are relatively unusual – a lot tend to inhabit cod mediæval worlds – so Powers is to be commended on eschewing that default.

In Earthquake Weather, the Fisher King of the whole American West, Steven Crane, is dead but his body is not decomposing. His putative successor, recognisable by a wound that bleeds continuously, is a young boy named Koot Hoomie Parganas who occasionally likes to say, “Call me Fishmeal.”

Sid Cochran, a psychiatric patient, along with a woman named Janis Plumtree who hosts multiple personalities (including among others Cody, Flibbertigibet, Valorie, Tiffany, Omar Salvoy, changes between whom are accompanied by electromagnetic disturbances – lights flickering and such) – escape hospital and seek out Parganas and his companions, with whose help they attempt to kindle Crane’s ghost personality back into his body. Plumtree’s Omar Salvoy incarnation was the person who killed Crane (with a spear point.) It is partly guilt because of this, but also to protect Koot, that the other personalities wish to resurrect Crane. However, when Salvoy is in possession of the mutual body, he collaborates with the novel’s bad guys.

It sounds daft, doesn’t it? And it is. This is a universe where ghosts hang about ‘phone booths, can speak to the living on the telephone or jump into people’s heads at moments of trauma and where trucks can start themselves (and even drive themselves) but the action is set in a USA recognisable as our own in the late twentieth century. Yet Powers’s matter of fact prose and descriptive (ahem) powers render the scenario entirely reasonable when reading it. For good measure, as a centuries old wine is a key plot device, there’s a short ongoing history of viticulture injected into the story every so often. Plus the wine god Dionysus gets frequent mention as a background presence. Also crucial to the plot is a palindromic poem. In Latin.

Amid all this – a symptom of Earthquake Weather‘s complexity – the datum that the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison once inhabited Koot’s personality is a mere throwaway. Other writers would have milked this dry.

The book is not short of incident, then. The climactic scenes, though, as well as containing a flurry of split infinitives, show a drop in the overall quality of the writing, perhaps a sign that Powers was rushing to his finish.

One other thing. I’ve noticed that blood – spilling it, using it for spells, even drinking it – seems to be very important to the writers of fantasies such as this. An unhealthy obsession, methinks.

I did spot a flourescent – it’s fluo, people; flew-oh, not flew – and a paremedics*. Inevitable, I suppose, in a book so long.

To those unfamiliar with Powers’s work I’d recommend The Anubis Gates as a better starting point than Earthquake Weather, whose peculiar title seems to derive from Dionysus’s involvement with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

*I like the idea of paremedic as a word. I can imagine such people existing in uninformed medical times. They would obviously either flense or flay their patients to effect their cures. It’s only a small step beyond bleeding after all. Let’s see them in your mediæval fantasies, boys and girls.