Alternate Routes

Alternate Routes (Vickery and Castine 1) by Tim Powers

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This book is archetypal Tim Powers' fare. The book sets a fantasy within an urban, hyper-modern setting. In this case, the setting is the freeways of Los Angeles. You probably did not know that when a being possessed of a will goes past another being with a will, a force is generated much like electricity is generated when a magnet is spun around a wire or vice versa. The force permits some short-term vision into the past or future. This effect is normally not large, so you need locations where there are a lot of moving “beings with wills” going past stationary “beings with wills.”

Like freeways, for example,

You also were probably unaware that the ramifications of this field is to expand possibilities such that at the margins of these fields, or, say, close to freeways, it is easy to reach out into other possibilities to talk with beings who think they are the same people as people who have died in this world.

Likewise, you probably didn't know that there was an obscure government agency, known as the Transportation Utility Agency (the “TUA”) whose job is to interview ghosts - or “deleted persons” - in order to get intelligence on otherwise unknown things for the government.

All this is true in Tim Powers' world.

Sebastian Vickery was a Secret Service agent who stumbled onto these truths while on the job. When the TUA tried to kill him, he shot first and is now an outlaw surving on the margins among those who have turned the “current” into profit. His existence is up-ended when a TUA agent from his past - Ingrid Castine - warns him that the TUA have a lock on him through the ghost of his dead wife and are about to terminate him with extreme prejudice.

From that point on, we have slambang action on the highways of Los Angeles and intrigue among both the marginal grifters who work with the “current” and the TUA bureaucracy. The action is fun and exciting, but, for me, the real charm was in seeing the marginal world that Powers creates and the rules he imagines for those trafficking in ghosts.

But, of course, being Tim Powers, the story could not be told without extra helpings of obscure mythology. This time we get Daedulus, the Labyrinth, and the Minotaur. Interestingly, Powers, who is a Catholic, put a number of gratuitous Catholic references in the story. Thus Vickery goes to Latin Mass. There was an abacus that became a rosary. I am not sure what that was all about, except it probably was another layer of symbolism for literary critics to unravel.

Honestly, I enjoyed the portions of the story set in our world. I live imagining that there is a deeper world just behind our own. When the story shifted to the other world, it lost me. The other reality was not very interesting. Likewise, the ending set in the fantasy world of myth was hackneyed and silly compared to the real-world struggle. I certainly understand that Powers is fascinated by Jungian archetypes, but the shift from freeways to minotaurs interrupted my willing suspension of disbelief as a reader.

That said, I am going to read the next volume in the series because I did enjoy this one.