The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I have often expressed the wish to be able to read more novels of the kind written by Charles Williams and various people have been recommending books by Tim Powers, telling me that they are a similar genre. After searching in vain in bookshops and libraries for years, I was given some money and got the ebook version of this one. and yes, I can say it is in the genre of Williams's novels, which means that in writing about this one, I'm inevitably comparing it with Williams. Another book one could say is in a similar genre is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I tried to read and didn't finish.
In The Drawing of the Dark Brian Duffy, an Irish mercenary soldier of the 16th century, is down-and-out in a port town somewhere in southern Europe (I've forgotten the name of the town, and Kindle won't let me page back to look it up, perhaps it was Trieste or Venice) when he is recruited by a strange character as a bouncer for his pub in Vienna. Duffy travels to Vienna to take up his employment, with several strange adventures on the way.
On arriving in Vienna, he is not welcomed by the manager of the pub, but is pleased to meet an old girlfriend. Epiphany, who had married someone else, but her first husband had died, giving him something to hope for. When his employer eventually arrives in Vienna, Brian Duffy discovers that being a bouncer is only the start of his duties. The year is 1529 and Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople is preparing to send his army to capture Vienna. His object however, seems to be not so much the city itself as a certain barrel of beer, which it is said, will revive the Fisher King of Arthurian legend and give magical powers to those who drink it. The army of the Sultan approaches, the city is besieged, but behind the conventional battle to attack the city walls, there is a magical battle for control of the beer, with rival magicians on each side seeking to control armies of supernatural creatures.
There are physical battles with swords and cannons and mines and sorties, so there is plenty of action in the story. There are also the magical battles between the rival magicians and characters channelling Merlin and King Arthur. But though the elements are there, Charles Williams it isn't. The appearance of the supernatural creatures is described, but they don't seem to mean anything. In Williams's story the supernatural creatures are significant in themselves, but in The Drawing of the Dark they are simply tools in the hands of the rival magicians. And the ending was disappointing -- the title suggested it would end with the drawing of the dark beer, but that happens offstage, as it were, if it happened at all. The dark is never actually drawn.
In Charles Williams's novels, "magicians" of the kind portrayed here are usually evil, with evil intentions, the prime example being Sir Giles Tumulty. I don't know about Tim Powers, but Charles Williams seems to have moved in circles of magicians or would-be magicians, and his portrait of them in his novels is not flattering. The world of Tim Powers seems to be driven by Renaissance magic, and so this book, at least, seems to resemble Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell more than anything Williams wrote. Merlin and Ibrahim are magicians or witches rather than wizards.
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