I was expecting far more from this. I was surprised by the Anubis Gates and shocked by Last Call, so surely Declare, a story that mixes magic with spycraft, would be a perfect match of horror and intrigue.

But it isn't what you think. It's about the Cold War, but It's about Andrew Hale, a spy for the SOE who loves a woman called Elena... who is a spy for the Russians.

Only... it's not about that. It's really about Kim Philby and the British SOE, mixed in with the existence of powerful yet abstract creatures called Djinn.

Only... it's not about that. It's about 500 pages of description of boxes, countryside, prep school antagonism and sentences that cover half the page. I don't know how I didn't notice it before, but Powers can't write staccato to save his life. Here's a sentence cracked open from a random page:

"To these wizened babushkas the NKVD was still the Cheka or even the pre-revolution Okhrana, and they took a particularly intense interest in Hale's researches, often pausing to cross themselves as they translated some musty old report of a Russian expedition to Turkey in 1883 or a description of burned grass around little coin-sized eruption holes in the grave plots of Russian cemeteries."

Which would be fine, in isolation. But essentially half the book is needless detail that is irrelevant to the plot. You would never in a million years catch Iain Banks or Charlie Stross going off track in this way, and by the end of the book I would scan each page for relevant words to see if it was actually worth reading.

Charlie Stross mentioned this as an analogue to his Laundry books. I think that's incorrect; the Laundry deals directly with inimical threats to humanity, whereas the Djinn are not opposed to humanity and most of the book is taken up with inter-agency wrangling. And Philby.

There needs to be a special section for Philby, because the man is clearly the center of the book -- and he's a slimeball in every sense of the word. Clearly Powers read up on the real Philby and mentions details from Philby's life, but that hardly makes him more sympathetic. He loathes and is loathed by every character in the novel, and his preening sense of entitlement, fated destiny and "special nature" only make him more intolerable. He's like Harry Potter crossed with Christopher Monckton.

So... yes. Hated it, hated it, hated it.