Musings: The Drawing of the Dark

I have had The Drawing of the Dark on my shelf for some years now.  I am not sure who first told me that I should read Tim Powers, but whoever it was probably knows my reading tastes pretty well.  Powers specializes in historical fantasy.  He takes real-world events and then puts a twist on them to explain what "really" happened.
In this book, he puts his spin on Suleiman's attempt to take Vienna in 1529.  That whole situation wasn't just about economics and empire-building.  Oh, no!  It was all about beer.

Well, beer and the infinite battle between East and West.

But let me start at the beginning.  Brian Duffy is an Irish mercenary living in Venice when he meets a strange old man named Aurelianus.  Aurelianus hires him to be the bouncer at his brewery in Vienna and Brian sets off immediately to take on his duties.  But strange things happen along the way.  Weird animals and monsters follow him and protect him.  Other things try to kill him.  He has strange dreams about a sword and a lake.  And all the while, Suleiman's army is advancing...

This story sounds exactly the sort that I would enjoy.  Unfortunately, it didn't work for me.  The story moved very slowly.  One of the most painful things (in my opinion) as a reader is to know something before the main character does and then have to sit around waiting for him to catch up with you for many more pages than is ideal.  In this book, at least a few things were very obvious to me while I read the book, but Brian Duffy just did not catch on.  There were also a lot of battle scenes that I think would appeal to a different type of reader but did not appeal to me.

Additionally, there are really only two characters that are fleshed out at all in this book- Brian and Aurelianus.  Everyone else is completely one-dimensional and flat.  For example, Brian has a semi-love interest for most of this book- she has hardly any useful dialogue, though, and spends a lot of time crying.  And Brian seems to lose interest in her very quickly- she becomes quite vague and fades into the background.

My main problem with the book, though, was that the premise was never properly explained.  Why are the East and West at war?  That is never explained.  It is just taken as a given.  Aurelianus says that if the East takes Vienna, it could wipe out Western civilization and they would all go back to living in caves and drawing with rocks on walls.  But why is this the case?  Wouldn't it just be that they were all absorbed into Eastern culture?  Aurelianus also blithely ignores the many occasions in which the West went forward against the East in attempts to conquer and would have apparently left the East in much the same state.  I just didn't understand why the two sides were fighting, and how the "teams" were formed except by geography.  And how does the New World figure into all of it?  Are they on a totally different "team"?  There was just a lot left unexplained.

What I did like was the mish-mash of all sorts of mythologies and folk tales, even if I didn't quite understand how they fit together.  We have King Arthur and Merlin, the Fisher King and Norse gods.  In a way, this book reminded me of American Gods, but only because of the god-elements in it.  It also reminded me of Silverlock in that I'm sure I didn't get all the literary and mythological elements at all!  The book also had some great humor in it.

Overall, though, it was a sad book.  Brian Duffy is nearly always drunk or hungover.  He reflects on the life he could have had and is sad by the way his life actually turned out.  Most people in the book seem to feel that way, really.  There was a lot of regret and "If only we had another chance"-ness.  And the way the book is set up, with East fighting West, you know at the end that it isn't really the end.  That there will be more battles.  It wasn't so much that the East was considered evil here, but that they were considered the "Other."  And there must always be an element of conflict between one side and the "Other."  It was an interesting way to describe conflict, but ultimately did away with all the complexities and intricacies of the conflict in a way that left me unsatisfied.

I hope the other Power books I have - On Stranger Tides- is one that I'll enjoy more.  (How could it not be, as it's about pirates?!)  I have also heard great things about The Stress of Her Regard.  Have you read any Tim Powers?  What do you think of him?