I do Declare

[avram]

I’ve just finished the Arabian Nights (Signet Classic edition, not one of the big multi-volume ones, though I did look through Lisa’s copies of the Burton and Payne editions at one point in an unsuccessful effort to track down an unexplained detail in the story of “The Fisherman and the Jinee”), and done a little research into the life of Kim Philby, and I read Kipling’s Kim a few months ago, so I now consider myself ready to start on Tim Powers’s latest novel, Declare.

I’ve been amusing myself trying to anticipate what elements in the various sources I’ve been reading Powers will have made use of. I already know (from how Lisa reacted when I asked her about it) that the question “Are you keeping your covenant?” (the unexplained detail in “The Fisherman and the Jinee”) shows up. I suspect that the magic items in “The Tale of Judar and His Brothers” will turn up in some way, or at least the ritual Judar has to follow to get the items. And now I’ve just found a website that claims that after Philby’s death it was found that he’d written a message about his then wife: “If Rufina Ivanovna has killed me, I testify that she had good and sufficient reason to do so. KP.” That just has to turn up somewhere, just like the inscription of Keats’s grave (“Here lies one whose name was writ in water”) was given another level of meaning in The Stress of Her Regard.