Review of The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Tim Powers's classic time travel tale is a must-read for all time travel or magical realism lovers. The time travel is based on Ancient Egyptian magic and not science. It's got an eclectic cast of interesting characters, and includes clones, mind transference, potions, spells, clown magicians and things created by time loops. It takes place in 20th century, 19th century, and 17th century England and incorporates a lot of what I see in my fiction, that, unfortunately, I thought was kind of original before I read this book.

At least I've found a decent comp, albeit and old one (the novel is 35 years old).

The knock I have on it is that at times it's confusing, hard to distinguish characters (mainly because there are so many of them, and either the gaps of narrative where you don't see some characters at all is quite long, or characters are one and done), and most sentences are probably too long, though that grew on me, as you can tell from this sentence. However, these things are easily overlooked when looking at the big picture of the novel, but be warned: if you don't like confusion and complexity, then this novel is not for you. If can tolerate things that are hard to follow, and you like either time travel or magical realism, then you'll love this novel.



View all my reviews