Title: The Anubis Gates
Author: Tim Powers
Date of First Publication: 1983
Place of Publication: Ace
Type: Novel
Characters: No Character
Themes: ANDROID; BYRONIC HERO; MAD SCIENTIST/MONSTER; RETRO SF
Critical Summary: Powers uses historical people and real events in a fast-paced fantasy blend of time travel, magic, and science set in nineteenth-century London. In 1802, a consortium of magic-users attempts to summon the Egyptian god, Anubis, through time to overthrow British imperialism in Egypt. They fail. But, they inadvertently open calculable portals in time, making time travel possible.
In 1983, Romanticism professor Brendan Doyle, Romanticism Professor at California State University, Fullerton, accepts a job opportunity as a period expert for a group of millionaires intending to travel back in time and witness a famous lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1810. Doyle’s employer, terminally ill millionaire J. Cochran Darrow, has deciphered the pattern of the time portals and is using time travel as a business venture catering to wealthy contemporaries. The magic-user, Dr. Romany, witnesses the group’s arrival just outside of London and follows them into town. Dr. Romany kidnaps Doyle just after the lecture and interrogates him for information of how to use the gates. But before Dr. Romany can learn anything, Doyle manages to escape, though now trapped in nineteenth-century London.
Dr. Romany enlists the evil clown Horrabin and his crime syndicate of beggars to scour the city and recapture Doyle. Meanwhile, Doyle must integrate himself into London society without any resources. He decides to seek out and solicit the wealthy poet William Ashbless, whom he studied intently in his own time. Doyle also learns that Darrow’s 1983-time travel business is a cover for a nefarious motive. Darrow repeatedly returns to nineteenth-century century London looking for a body-swapping werewolf named Dog-faced Joe, hoping Joe can cure his illness by trading his sick body for healthy ones. In the interim, Doyle is targeted by Joe and his body is swapped for one of Darrow’s henchmen. In his new body, Doyle realizes that he himself is William Ashbless and uses this knowledge to manifest recorded history, including “writing” Ashbless’ poetry from memory.
Doyle ruins the consortium’s plans to change the timeline. Living out his life as Ashbless and knowing the poet’s circumstances of death, he prepares to meet this fate decades later. But Doyle discovers that his murderer is none other than a copy of himself, magically created when Doyle was held captive. Doyle kills his manufactured copy, supplying a dead Ashbless for the historical record, while he himself lives on.
Frankenstein themes of monsters and transformed bodies run rampant through the entire novel. Notably, Horrabin uses the clown facade to hide his physical deformities given by his torturous father. Horrabin can either remain hideously deformed and be considered a pathetic monster, or transform yet again into an evil clown and become the fearsome inhuman crime lord. For Dog-faced Joe to stay alive, he must repeatedly transfer his consciousness into a new body which then begins to transform into a monstrous werewolf. Both characters can earn sympathy as victims, and both can never be viewed as anything but unhuman yet, they are alive, albeit with their humanity buried deep within.
Both Dr. Romany and J. Cochran Darrow represent the Byronic hero. Lord Byron himself appears in the story in cameo. Darrow exemplifies the willful superior aristocrat doing whatever is needed to ensure his self-preservation. Though Darrow is terminally ill, he tries to cheat death in his deal with Dog-faced Joe. If Joe can give him an endless supply of healthy bodies, Darrow can effectively become immortal. Dr. Romany is the brooding willful narcissistic antihero. His battle against British imperialism is his only end game and he will accomplish this by any means. They, much like Victor Frankenstein, seek to subvert nature for personal gain—even at the risk of temporal paradox.
Administrative Notes: David Marshel, CSUF; Amanda Howard, CSUF (editing)