A Catholic novelist The New Yorker Likes

Two of our book reviewers (one Evangelical, one Orthodox) have just put me on to a Catholic writer you may want to know about, if you don't already: Tim Powers, whose latest novel is called Three Days to Never.

His books are praised by writers like William Gibson and Dean Koontz and (judging by the blurbs on the back of the copy I got at the library) by magazines like The New Yorker, the Village Voice Literary Supplement, and the Washington Post Book World. And he's a believer.

You can read about him at The Works of Tim Powers. The site includes a long interview with him.

Here is an interview about his writing and latest novel from the website of the Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin. Among the interesting he says are his comments are portraying evil in what the interviewer calls his "fairly clean" books:

Well, while I show people doing bad things -- even show the atractiveness of doing bad things! -- I like to think I show too that they work out badly, and that the characters would have been way better off not having done those things. Often a character wants to do the difficult right thing but keep a couple of pet sins too -- just little ones, they don't eat a lot or make much noise!

And I hope I show that there's bad consequences of that. I always remember Lewis's statement in The Great Divorce, something like, "If we choose Heaven we will not be able to keep even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell."

This is really more craft than morality -- given, I suppose, my own beliefs. Sex-scenes, for example, I think are generally just bad craft. They usually feel to me like clumsy gear-changes, jolting the reader abruptly from one sort of fiction into another. Not smooth carpentry!

Comments

[Daniel C]

I put up a post about Powers at my small attempt at blogging (http://icarus.townhall.com/g/26e58857-33a9-4cc0-b264-0a6ed24fe132). A commentor turned me on to James P. Blaylock, who currently teaches creative writing at Chapman University (http://www.chapman.edu/wcls/english/faculty/blaylock.asp). Tim Powers and James Blaylock are good friends and have worked together on the creation of William Ashbless, an often quoted character in Power's works.

[David Mills]

Rob Grano reminded me that in November we published a Book Notice of his of Powers' latest novel:

THREE DAYS TO NEVER
by Tim Powers
William Morrow, 2006
(432 pp, $25.95,hardcover)

Tim Powers has been writing science fiction and fantasy novels since the 1970’s. Several have won genre awards, and his previous novel, Declare, won the World Fantasy Award.
In his latest novel, Frank Garrity and his twelve year old daughter Daphne find themselves unwittingly involved in a plot to discover a lost secret of Albert Einstein’s, a discovery that the great scientist believed was too dangerous to be let loose in the world. Powers brings into play a super-secret branch of the Israeli intelligence service, a lost Charlie Chaplin film, the Kabala, and a psychic assassin to propel what amounts to a supernatural spy story — Charles Williams meets Graham Greene.
But as usual with Powers’ fiction, the human element remains central amidst all the imaginative goings-on, and it is his characters’ spiritual progressions — the undoing of past mistakes, the submitting to the power of forgiveness, the withstanding of grueling challenges because of self-sacrificial love — that ultimately make his fiction rewarding.
That being said, Powers, despite being a conservative Roman Catholic, doesn’t write from an expressly Catholic point-of-view and doesn’t always include specifically “religious” ideas or characters. (Most of the characters in Three Days to Never are Jews of a rather secular type.) But the underlying themes of love, forgiveness, and unselfishness come through naturally in his fiction, and do not feel forced or artificial. This perhaps is the most evident way that his fiction reflects his Christian foundation.

— Robert Grano

[Rob Grano]

Powers' most recent release appears to be "A Soul in A Bottle," a novella published this past November. You can get it on Amazon and on Buy.com. The paperback release of THREE DAYS... isn't due until December 2007.

As Daniel C says above, James Blaylock, Powers' friend and sometime collaborator, is also well worth reading.

[Labrialumn]

He is a superb writer. I am a little concerned about his novels, and his writing them, due to Tolkien's point that it is "not wise to study the arts of the Enemy too closely"

[Carol Franko]

Tim Powers is indeed a superb writer and it's a special pleasure to see him discussed on Mere Comments. Powers has often remarked (for example on the Tim Powers yahoo group/ listserv) on the importance of C.S. Lewis' writings to him--Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man are two of his favorite nonfiction titles (Powers is also a huge Chesterton fan). Lewis' third novel in the space trilogy - That Hideous Strength - is another title Powers often mentions as important to him; the villains in Three Days to Never definitely recall Lewis' villains in THS while also having the Powers weirdness. Concerning Powers depiction of the Enemy: I think he portrays what I think is a classic Christian view of evil as a parody of good. Sometimes his villains are scary and very comic at the same time. Of interest to Christian readers could be the way his fiction suggests the spaciousness of reality beyond the orthodox naturalism of most modern fiction.