The Anubis Gates

The Anubis Gates

Cover of first edition (paperback)
Author Tim Powers
Country United States
Language English
Genre Time travel, fantasy
Publisher Ace Books
Publication date
 1983
Media type Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages 387 pp
ISBN 0-441-02380-0
OCLC 10259963
LC Class CPB Box no. 2876 vol. 9

The Anubis Gates is a 1983 time travel fantasy novel by American writer Tim Powers. It won the 1983 Philip K. Dick Award[1] and 1984 Science Fiction Chronicle Award.

Plot summary

In 1801 the British have risen to power in Egypt and suppress the worship of the old Egyptian gods. A cabal of magicians plan to drive the British out of Egypt by bringing the gods forward in time from an age when they were still powerful and unleashing them on London, thereby destroying the British Empire. In 1802, a failed attempt by the magicians to summon Anubis opens magical gates in a predictable pattern across time and space.

In 1983, ailing millionaire J. Cochran Darrow has discovered the gates and found that they make time travel possible. Darrow organizes a trip to the past for fellow millionaires to attend a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1810. He hires Professor Brendan Doyle to attend and give expert commentary. One of the magicians, Doctor Romany, happens to spy the time travelers and kidnaps Doyle before he can return. Doyle manages to escape torture and flees back to London, now trapped in the 19th century.

Doyle joins a beggars' guild and meets a beggar named Jacky. He plans to meet and befriend William Ashbless, a wealthy poet that Doyle has studied profusely, in order to gain a benefactor. Doctor Romany scours the city for Doyle with his legion of murderous beggars, led by the clown-magician Horrabin. At the same time, Doyle discovers that Darrow has remained in the 19th century to search for Dog-Face Joe, a body-swapping werewolf, in hopes of bribing Joe into granting him a healthy new body. Doyle himself becomes targeted by Joe, receiving the poisoned body of Darrow's former bodyguard, but manages to cure himself of the poison.

In his new body, Doyle realizes that he himself is the historical Ashbless. He copies down Ashbless's poetry from memory and deduces his own future from his study of Ashbless's life. Using this knowledge, he continues to thwart the magicians' plans. After Romany discovers a gate to 1684, Doyle follows him through and stops his attempt to change the past. Meanwhile, Darrow successfully contacts Dog-Face Joe and organizes a deal in which Joe will provide Darrow with healthy bodies and allow him to live forever.

Doyle eventually returns to 1810, but is kidnapped and taken to Muhammad Ali's Egypt, where the magicians' Master tempts him with resurrecting his dead wife if he will tell them the secrets of the time-gates. Doyle resists and kills the Master. Meanwhile, Jacky discovers Darrow's secret and kills him along with Dog-Face Joe. Doyle returns to London, where the last magician, Romanelli, kidnaps him, Jacky, and Coleridge. In a drugged stupor, Coleridge frees Horrabin's twisted menagerie of monsters, allowing him and Jacky to escape. Romanelli escapes with Doyle to the underworld, but is eaten by Apep while Doyle is rejuvenated on board the sunboat of the god Ra. Doyle meets back up with Jacky and discovers that not only is Jacky secretly a woman, she is his future wife.

Decades later, after living out Ashbless's entire life and becoming a widower, Doyle goes out to meet his historic date with death. Doyle discovers that his intended murderer is a duplicate of himself that the Master had made in Egypt decades before. Doyle kills the duplicate, thereby supplying the corpse for his death, and boats away into an unknown future.

Major characters

Brendan Doyle
An English professor at Cal State Fullerton, Doyle is still haunted by the motorcycle accident that killed his wife Rebecca. He is a short and non-athletic man who is having difficulty getting published. He is fascinated by the enigmatic poet William Ashbless.
J. Cochran Darrow
A famous tycoon who is suffering from terminal cancer. His enterprises have discovered the time gates.
The Master
The oldest and most powerful magician in the world, now somewhat feeble-minded, the Master plots to rejuvenate magic and restore Egypt by crushing Britain. His unnatural powers make contact with the earth painful for him and his magician followers.
Amenophis Fikee
A powerful magician, Fikee is the Master's agent in Britain. He leads a clan of gypsies and wears clogs to avoid contact with the ground. After a magical ritual misfires, his mind snaps and he becomes Dog-Face Joe. Bodies that he inhabits grow fur, but he uses a body-swapping spell to flee the curse, poisoning his old bodies to prevent discovery.
Doctor Romanelli
A powerful magician, Romanelli is the Master's agent in Turkey and leads a clan of gypsies to do his bidding.
Doctor Romany
A "ka", or magical duplicate, of Romanelli created to help Fikee in London, Romany takes up Fikee's duties in his absence. He wears spring shoes to avoid contact with the earth.
Jacky
Apparently a moustachioed young beggar, Jacky is actually a woman from a noble family who has taken a new identity to search for Dog-Face Joe, who switched bodies with her fiancé and caused her to kill him.
Horrabin
An evil clown who leads a pack of murderous beggars, Horrabin magically maims some of his minions to be more profitable. His "mistakes" become monsters that he locks away in the catacombs beneath his lair. He wears stilts to avoid contact with the ground. The "mistakes" eventually manage to kill Horrabin by using thrown mud to weaken him. Then they knock him to the ground and kill him.

Allusions/references to real people and events

As in Powers's later novel, The Stress of Her Regard, The Anubis Gates features a number of the Romantic Poets as characters. In addition to Coleridge, there is Byron (alongside the fictional 19th-century poet William Ashbless created by Powers and James Blaylock). Other real people characterized in the novel are the famous publisher John Murray and Dr. Romanelli, the physician who treated Byron for a fever while he traveled in Greece.

The novel intertwines a number of real events into the story such as the massacre of the Mamluk beys by Muhammad Ali in 1811 and the failed rebellion by James, Duke of Monmouth against James II in the 1680s.

Powers was apparently heavily influenced in style, descriptions and character types by Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, and also by the works of Charles Dickens to a lesser degree.[2]

The ship, Blaylock, that Doyle claims he came to England on is named after Powers's friend James P. Blaylock.

A minor factual glitch has characters in the story using gold sovereigns (£1 gold coins) in 1810, six years before the coin was authorized by the Coinage Act 1816, and seven years before being struck for circulation. The gold coin in use before the sovereign of 20 shillings was the guinea of 21 shillings. Regency/detective novelist Georgette Heyer used the change that came in with the "New Coinage" as a plot twist in her 1954 novel The Toll-Gate.

Reception

The Anubis Gates was chosen for Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks (appearing as #47).[3] Cheryl Morgan lists the novel among "12 Classic Steampunk Books."[4]

Chris Henderson reviews the book favorably in the December 1983 issue of Dragon Magazine. He calls it "one of the best books to appear on the shelves this year". Noting it is "one of those rare books - a solid mainstream fantasy novel", Henderson recommends it...".[5]

Algis Budrys declared that Powers "supplies the one thing the reader has to have -- and never more needfully than in a time-travel story. He supplies room for the reader to participate; to delve into each clearly delineated wonder, to turn it over in his or her own mind with full confidence that the author has honestly drawn the lineaments of the whole scene being presented. He invites the reader to interplay."[6]

A 2006 review at SFReviews.net gives the novel 4.5 out of 5 stars and says, "Tim Powers' masterpiece remains, over 20 years after its first publication, one of modern fantasy's most dazzling acts of the imagination. There have been other novels in the genre about time travel, but none with The Anubis Gates' unique slant on the material, nor its bottomless well of inventiveness. It's literally in a class by itself, a model for others to follow... Powers draws from everywhere: speculative quantum physics, ancient Egyptian mythology, Romany lore, history and classical literature. Then he mixes it all together with the carefree exuberance of a kid with his first chemistry set. The result, of course, blows up the room — but in the best possible way."[7] A guardian.co.uk reviewer called it "a torrential adventure which ranged from 19th-century poets to the gods of ancient Egypt... a thrilling, riproaring, wonderfully inventive adventure."[8] Reviewer Steven Wu rated it 8 out of 10, saying that the book "falls just short of being a truly great science-fiction novel." He wrote, "The main virtue of the book is its unique and imaginative setting, a 19th-century London filled with deformed clowns, organized beggar societies, insane homunculi, and magic," but found the plot "difficult to understand... especially in the completely baffling climactic sequence."[9]

Reviewer Jonathan McCalmont praised the book's tone: "Despite a cast of grotesque supporting characters and more pulpy fantastical elements than you can shake a vorpal sword at, Powers manages to keep the tone of The Anubis Gates darkly atmospheric... The more colourful aspects of the book are anchored in the real and serve only to make the setting more engaging and bizarre... Powers' Regency London never seems camp or farcical, it simply seems utterly alien and forbidding, even to a Londoner such as myself. Every page of this book drips with delicious weirdness. Despite being over 20 years old, it feels as fresh and as powerful as any contemporary fantasy novel you're likely to find. It is Powers' talent for the strange that keeps you turning the pages — which is fortunate as the plotting is far from simple."[10]

Reviewer Shaun Farrell wrote, "With exotic characters and settings, including England of the late 1600s and sunny Egypt, The Anubis Gates is a time travel story that stacks up with the best of them and is sure to [stand] the test of time. It is pure imagination and fun, full of character driven action and humor. A novel that transcends genre limitations, this book will please lovers of all fiction alike."[11]

Recognition

Stage adaptation

The novel was adapted for the stage and directed by Ruth Pe Palileo, and the stage-play premiered on August 16, 2014 at the ExCel Exhibition Center in London, England.

The original cast featured Johnny Miles as Brendan Doyle, Ariana Helaine as Jacky Snapp, Timothy Cummings as J. Cochrane Darrow and Dr. Romany, Jake Taylor as Amenophis Fikee, Horrabin the Clown, and Lord Byron, and Geo Nikols as Steerforth Benner.[14][15]

It has been conjectured that the character Horrabin might have provided inspiration for Stephen King's clown, Pennywise, which also inhabited sewers, in the novel It.[16]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 "1983 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved 2009-07-21.
  2. ↑ Smith, Silver (2012). A Comprehensive Dual Bibliography of James P. Blaylock & Tim Powers. Argent Leaf Press. p. 93. ISBN 978-0-9767486-0-1.
  3. ↑ "Publication Series Millennium / Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks - Bibliography". Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Retrieved March 28, 2013.
  4. ↑ Morgan, Cheryl. "12 Classic Steampunk Books". Flashlight Worthy. Retrieved March 28, 2013.
  5. ↑ Henderson, Chris (December 1983). "Off the shelf". Dragon. TSR (80): 66. ISSN 0279-6848.
  6. ↑ "Books," F&SF, April 1984, p. 32
  7. ↑ Wagner, Thomas M. (2006). "The Anubis Gates". sfreviews.net. Retrieved March 28, 2013.
  8. ↑ Flood, Alison (25 January 2010). "World of Fantasy: The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers". guardian.co.uk. Retrieved March 28, 2013.
  9. ↑ Wu, Steven (November 28, 2002). "Anubis Gates by Tim Powers". Steven Wu's Book Reviews. Retrieved March 28, 2013.
  10. ↑ McCalmont, Jonathan (December 1, 2005). "The Anubis Gates". Revolution SF. Retrieved March 28, 2013.
  11. ↑ Farrell, Shaun (May 2006). "The Anubis Gates". Far Sector magazine. Retrieved March 28, 2013.
  12. ↑ "1984 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved 2009-07-21.
  13. ↑ "1985 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved 2009-07-21.
  14. ↑ "Theatre at Loncon 3". Retrieved 15 May 2015.
  15. ↑ http://www.loncon3.org/events-theatre-anubis-gates.php
  16. ↑ Smith, Silver (2012). A Comprehensive Dual Bibliography of James P. Blaylock & Tim Powers. Argent Leaf Press. p. 94. ISBN 978-0-9767486-0-1.
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