Last Call - Tim Powers

There is a certain kind of writing that just gets me and when it’s wed to a lost, lonely American urban landscape, I feel a homesickness that as an Englishman I am at a loss to explain. Tim Powers writes a seductive magic-seeping-into-the-everyday vein that I find terrifically persuasive and personal.
 
His America is as real as it gets. The poverty and seediness are sticky, smellable and more believable than any shiny prosperity; there are diesel fumes and chain link fences, and beer cans leave marks on the floor. But we all see—or think that we see—strange things, right? Especially in disturbing or emotionally charged times. What if those strange things are real?
 
I sided with the bereaved Crane from the outset and couldn’t wait to see how he got on. When you’re down on your luck, superstition can seem to offer a last hope, but you don’t seriously expect it to describe power play in the real world: until it does. Stephen Crane is the unwilling knave, or one-eyed Jack, in games of chance that invite spirits of chaos to operate in the material world. More so, when the pack of cards is the Tarot.
 
I picked up Last Call, my first Tim Powers book, on travels through Guatemala and was immediately captivated by his style and by having found a contemporary writer who did what I was interested in myself: the emergence into our familiar world of a hidden dimension—and the serious fun you can have with that.
 
For me, the most interesting and refreshing factor in this kind of fiction, and its particular attractiveness, is that characters are motivated by something other than material gain or selfish desire. That’s a huge message. The main players are not presidents, tycoons, the rich and the beautiful, but poor, shabby individuals whose lives would otherwise be unredeemed by significance, and the most important vehicle on the road is just as likely to be a clapped-out old van as an expensive limo. It’s exactly the same world as the one we live in, only different—and much more.