by Lavie Tidhar

The novella by Lavie Tidhar piqued my interest precisely because it invoked two names that mean a lot to me, and clearly mean a lot to the author. I was hooked, and upon reading the short book, I'm happy to report Mr. Tidhar has a new fan.

Without going into great detail on my 23-plus years of Tim Powers fixation, let's just state that his most recent novel Declare was an intense, dense, phantasmagorical novel about the Cold War and brilliantly connected John LeCarrè-style spy doings with the Arabian Nights (go read it, if you haven't). Growing up, Alistair MacLean, Len Deighton, and Adam Hall were three authors whose spy stuff most grabbed my attention, but Adam Hall's Quiller novels almost completely dominated my perception of the spy world. Besides portraying the Game in depressingly grim greyscale, Hall (who was Elleston Trevor's alter ago) employed a style all his own, maintaining an effectively rapid pace through control of breathless, conjunction-rich complex sentences. Action scenes left you panting as if you'd participated.

I loved it. I imitated it (and a creative writing teacher scolded me for it!). And I still react to it. So does Lavie Tidhar. An Occupation of Angels is dedicated to Adam Hall and his creation, Quiller.

The novella's main conceit is an alternate Cold War in which the dealings of man have intersected those of Archangels, who appeared on battlefields and Holocaust sites at the end of World War 2 (apparently drawn by mass death) and changed the world forever, aligning with different world powers for unknown reasons and with diverse effects. Killarney, a rare female protagonist in the spy genre, is a British operative who, fifty years after The Coming, has been assigned to find out who is assassinating Archangels in different countries, and why. As you might imagine, they don't kill easy. She begins by tracking a Bureau cryptographer who has disappeared in Paris. Hopping from there to Eastern Europe and eventually landing on the Trans-Siberian Express, Killarney may not fit the traditional pattern as a character, but she surely performs the expected near-noir exploits without batting an eyelash, whether she is herself terminating an enemy agent, an angel, or being tortured in the KGB's infamous Lubyanka Prison. Chased by killers who wear swastika-with-angel-wings tattoos, Killarney winds up in a secret research facility in the middle of the Siberian ice fields, where a grotesque find awaits her, and an incredible confrontation will either save humanity or call down nuclear war.

Despite some jarring transitions which double back on themselves, Quiller-style, and a few distracting spelling conventions, An Occupation of Angels utilizes well the Hall-esque pacing, tone, and syntax in conjunction with the Powers-inspired ideas, and the result acts as both an effective homage and intriguing expansion. Tying together British Intelligence, the KGB, the Nazis, ODESSA, and a Cold War affected by the supernatural allows Tidhar to speculate on the nature of divinity, and just what sort of technology Nazi scientists may have taken to the East, the West, and elsewhere after the war. This grey world could easily take a full novel to explore, though part of its charm is the clipped nature of the scenes. Using perhaps the most references to cold and ice ever assembled in one relatively short piece of fiction, Lavie Tidhar leaves you desperately needing a warm blanket. And that is the best homage to Hall and Powers one could possibly want.