Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Subterranean (2008), Hardcover, 500 pages
Description
A young woman possessed by a ghost has slain the Fisher King of the West, Scott Crane. Now, temporarily freed from that malevolent spirit, she seeks to restore the King to life. But Crane's body has been taken to the magically protected home of Pete and Angelica Sullivan, and their adopted son, Koot Hoomie. Kootie is destined to be the next Fisher king, but he is only thirteen years old--too young, his mother thinks, to perform the rituals to assume the Kingship. But not too young, perhaps, to assist in reuniting Scott Crane's body and spirit, and restoring him to life.
User reviews
LibraryThing member RandyStafford
My reactions to reading this novel in 1992. Spoilers for it and the Fisher King trilogy follow.
The conclusion of Powers' Fisher King trilogy, and it exhibits many of the same traits as the first two books -- Last Call and Expiration Date. Like those books, it features Powers' characteristic
All of the surviving characters of Last Call and Expiration Date show up here, however briefly. Scott Crane, the protagonist of Last Call, seems different, more regal and distant but, then, he only shows up as a talking character at novel's end since the whole plot of the novel involves resurrecting him after Plumtree kills him. (And, thus, Powers gives a slight hint as to how being a Fisher King has changed Crane.) So do some magic items. The spear that Plumtree kills Crane with is the same one that he accidentally put through his foot. The .45 derringer that psychologist Armentrout has is the same one that George Leon was shot with in Last Call and that Sukie Sullivan used to kill herself in Expiration Date.
Again, Powers gives us exploitive parents. George Leon trying to posses his son Scott's body in Last Call; deLarava uses her stepchildren the Sullivans to trap the ghost of the husband she killed; Omar Salvoy, one of the many personalities in the Plumtree body, tries to use the fragmented personalities of his daughter (He leaped his intact personality into her body at the moment of his death; therefore, he's more than a ghost).
Variations of incest again show up. Last Call ended with the marriage of adopted children Scott and Diane Crane to each other; Sukie Sullivan has incestous longings for brother Peter which drive him away in Expiration Date; Omar Salvoy wants another body to impregnate his psychically dead daughter. Fragmented families show up: (Scott must escape father George in Last Call and his playing in the card game at Lake Mead estranges him from his adopted father and sister; Peter Sullivan constantly thinks about the death of his father and sister in Expiration Date, and Kootie has his parents killed; Plumtree is a fragmented family in one body with a reconstruction of her mother's personality, her various selves, and being possessed by her father's ghost.)
Families come together. The Cranes marry in Last Call; Peter and Angelica decide to marry and adopt orphan Kootie in Expiration Date; Cochran and Plumtree marry at the end of this novel.
Powers has said that this trilogy represents the season of the year. Last Call takes place in the spring. Expiration Date takes place in the fall around Halloween. This novel takes place in January. Summer works its way in at the end of this novel when Plumtree and Cochran marry during midsummer.
But it is the themes of guilt, shame, sacrifice, and loyalty which are strongest throughout this trilogy, particularly in this, the last part, not the least because my favorite character, Archimedes Mavranos, dies heroically (in the deepest sense of the word -- with fear filled deliberation) by giving his body so that its flesh could be used in Scott Crane's resurrection. (And Fred the dog, from Expiration Date inexplicably comes back with him -- the only thing I can think of is Sherman Oaks aka Long Beach in this novel becoming the Fool before his death, and the Fool usually has a dog with him in Tarot decks.) Mavranos is the archetype of the loyal family retainer, the squire (the crew of the Sullivans and Cranes and Plumtree and Cochran is more than once referred to as the Fisher King's army and family), but he was not always perfect. He almost deserted Crane in Last Call, but he realized that his wife and daughters love him for his integrity and loyalty, and, ultimately, he will not sacrifice that to save himself when resurrecting Crane with his flesh becomes necessary.
Many of the other characters are called upon to sacrifice here. All face physical dangers. Plumtree and Kootie face more possession too. Sacrifice and duty and duty run throughout this trilogy. Ozzie gives his life in Last Call to save adopted son Scott. Angelica overcomes here fear to try to set things right in Expiration Date, and Peter also feels a duty to his dead father's ghost in that novel. All the novels deal with characters trying to right wrongs they have committed. This is not so true in Last Call but still there when Scott must save himself from inadvertently selling his body and soul at Lake Mead and also endangering Diane and her family. In Expiration Date, Angelica goes back to Los Angeles to deal with the consequences of her lethal seance, and Peter Sullivan goes back to try to keep his father's ghost from deLarava. In this novel, Plumtree realizes, even though it was the Omar Salvoy personality that used her body (he tried to become the Fisher King in the same card game that Scott lost his soul in) to commit the murder, she must atone for killing Crane. (As Mavranos almost succumbs to the temptation to abandon Crane in Last Call, Cochran almost succumbs to the temptation to implant his wife's ghost in Plumtree.)
There is a strong moral point to this novel, negatively exemplified in the character of Dr. Armentrout, a murderous doctor trying to escape, through supernatural means, the ghost of the mother he murdered (and, later, the ghost of a colleague he also murdered). He views shame and guilt as things to being sucked away, the psychic consequences of sin to be born by someone else (like Kooties braindead body). All his magic is bent towards avoiding those consequences. In Expiration Date, Angelica, also a psychologist, thinks that people should feel shame and guilt for what they have done -- and it is shame and guilt which draw ghost to people.
I did have a few quibbles here. Powers doesn't outline a precise nature of the afterlife, the afterlife that ghosts pass on to, and he doesn't provide much of an explanation why the Fisher King Scott Crane gets in trouble for not embracing one archetype of the Tarot deck in his being -- death here also known as Dionysus. We don't get a lot more sense of the magical logic other than that fertility cults often have a death and sacrifice side, a mythic acknowledgement that life must die to fertilize new life. (I did like the gift of forgetfullness that Dionysus offers and that Cochran, in relation to dead wife Nina -- who just married him because he was marked by the god, her family being part of a Dionysus worshipping cult in France, takes it.) I also liked the Lever Blank peddling toy kids set based on the Tarot archetypes and how the representation of the Fool was inducing random madness in a whole generation. A nice throwaway bit.
Powers is a very skilled writer to mingle character, myth, the Tarot, literature, and secret history altogether in a fairly coherent trilogy with memorable characters and a strong moral point.
The conclusion of Powers' Fisher King trilogy, and it exhibits many of the same traits as the first two books -- Last Call and Expiration Date. Like those books, it features Powers' characteristic
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mélange of myth and secret history (though less compelling and resonant than the gambling of Last Call and the eccentric mixture of electricity and Thomas Edison and Harry Houdini that is Expiration Date): the bloodthirsty fertility cult of Dionysus, secret cults of vintners, San Francisco history (including the Winchester house and a local voodoo doctor), a secret Zinfandel (and Powers uses a variant of the Holy Blood and Holy Grail theory by having the Merovingians and Dagobert be part of a long line of Dionysus worshippers), and the occult meanings of some of Shakespeare's plays, particularly Troilus and Cressida. (Though here Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities gets quoted a lot and, in a Phil Dickian moment (Powers was a friend of Philip K. Dick), protagonist Scant Cochran remembers reading a different version of the novel.) All of the surviving characters of Last Call and Expiration Date show up here, however briefly. Scott Crane, the protagonist of Last Call, seems different, more regal and distant but, then, he only shows up as a talking character at novel's end since the whole plot of the novel involves resurrecting him after Plumtree kills him. (And, thus, Powers gives a slight hint as to how being a Fisher King has changed Crane.) So do some magic items. The spear that Plumtree kills Crane with is the same one that he accidentally put through his foot. The .45 derringer that psychologist Armentrout has is the same one that George Leon was shot with in Last Call and that Sukie Sullivan used to kill herself in Expiration Date.
Again, Powers gives us exploitive parents. George Leon trying to posses his son Scott's body in Last Call; deLarava uses her stepchildren the Sullivans to trap the ghost of the husband she killed; Omar Salvoy, one of the many personalities in the Plumtree body, tries to use the fragmented personalities of his daughter (He leaped his intact personality into her body at the moment of his death; therefore, he's more than a ghost).
Variations of incest again show up. Last Call ended with the marriage of adopted children Scott and Diane Crane to each other; Sukie Sullivan has incestous longings for brother Peter which drive him away in Expiration Date; Omar Salvoy wants another body to impregnate his psychically dead daughter. Fragmented families show up: (Scott must escape father George in Last Call and his playing in the card game at Lake Mead estranges him from his adopted father and sister; Peter Sullivan constantly thinks about the death of his father and sister in Expiration Date, and Kootie has his parents killed; Plumtree is a fragmented family in one body with a reconstruction of her mother's personality, her various selves, and being possessed by her father's ghost.)
Families come together. The Cranes marry in Last Call; Peter and Angelica decide to marry and adopt orphan Kootie in Expiration Date; Cochran and Plumtree marry at the end of this novel.
Powers has said that this trilogy represents the season of the year. Last Call takes place in the spring. Expiration Date takes place in the fall around Halloween. This novel takes place in January. Summer works its way in at the end of this novel when Plumtree and Cochran marry during midsummer.
But it is the themes of guilt, shame, sacrifice, and loyalty which are strongest throughout this trilogy, particularly in this, the last part, not the least because my favorite character, Archimedes Mavranos, dies heroically (in the deepest sense of the word -- with fear filled deliberation) by giving his body so that its flesh could be used in Scott Crane's resurrection. (And Fred the dog, from Expiration Date inexplicably comes back with him -- the only thing I can think of is Sherman Oaks aka Long Beach in this novel becoming the Fool before his death, and the Fool usually has a dog with him in Tarot decks.) Mavranos is the archetype of the loyal family retainer, the squire (the crew of the Sullivans and Cranes and Plumtree and Cochran is more than once referred to as the Fisher King's army and family), but he was not always perfect. He almost deserted Crane in Last Call, but he realized that his wife and daughters love him for his integrity and loyalty, and, ultimately, he will not sacrifice that to save himself when resurrecting Crane with his flesh becomes necessary.
Many of the other characters are called upon to sacrifice here. All face physical dangers. Plumtree and Kootie face more possession too. Sacrifice and duty and duty run throughout this trilogy. Ozzie gives his life in Last Call to save adopted son Scott. Angelica overcomes here fear to try to set things right in Expiration Date, and Peter also feels a duty to his dead father's ghost in that novel. All the novels deal with characters trying to right wrongs they have committed. This is not so true in Last Call but still there when Scott must save himself from inadvertently selling his body and soul at Lake Mead and also endangering Diane and her family. In Expiration Date, Angelica goes back to Los Angeles to deal with the consequences of her lethal seance, and Peter Sullivan goes back to try to keep his father's ghost from deLarava. In this novel, Plumtree realizes, even though it was the Omar Salvoy personality that used her body (he tried to become the Fisher King in the same card game that Scott lost his soul in) to commit the murder, she must atone for killing Crane. (As Mavranos almost succumbs to the temptation to abandon Crane in Last Call, Cochran almost succumbs to the temptation to implant his wife's ghost in Plumtree.)
There is a strong moral point to this novel, negatively exemplified in the character of Dr. Armentrout, a murderous doctor trying to escape, through supernatural means, the ghost of the mother he murdered (and, later, the ghost of a colleague he also murdered). He views shame and guilt as things to being sucked away, the psychic consequences of sin to be born by someone else (like Kooties braindead body). All his magic is bent towards avoiding those consequences. In Expiration Date, Angelica, also a psychologist, thinks that people should feel shame and guilt for what they have done -- and it is shame and guilt which draw ghost to people.
I did have a few quibbles here. Powers doesn't outline a precise nature of the afterlife, the afterlife that ghosts pass on to, and he doesn't provide much of an explanation why the Fisher King Scott Crane gets in trouble for not embracing one archetype of the Tarot deck in his being -- death here also known as Dionysus. We don't get a lot more sense of the magical logic other than that fertility cults often have a death and sacrifice side, a mythic acknowledgement that life must die to fertilize new life. (I did like the gift of forgetfullness that Dionysus offers and that Cochran, in relation to dead wife Nina -- who just married him because he was marked by the god, her family being part of a Dionysus worshipping cult in France, takes it.) I also liked the Lever Blank peddling toy kids set based on the Tarot archetypes and how the representation of the Fool was inducing random madness in a whole generation. A nice throwaway bit.
Powers is a very skilled writer to mingle character, myth, the Tarot, literature, and secret history altogether in a fairly coherent trilogy with memorable characters and a strong moral point.
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LibraryThing member williemeikle
EARTHQUAKE WEATHER was, unfortunately a bit of a slog to get through. Powers mashed together the worlds and characters of LAST CALL and EXPIRATION DATE, but although, like all Powers books, it had its moments, there were just too many characters that I didn't care about, and too much time spent
The Fisher King mythology took too much of a back seat to the ghost plot devices for me in this one, and, like EXPIRATION DATE, I felt it suffered because of it. Personally I'd have liked more focus on the Tarot and archetypes to take center stage instead of the bickering characters and multiple real, and ghostly, personalities.
But again, like EXPIRATION DATE, a sub par Powers is still better than most everything else. It's just that my expectations had been set too high after the brilliance of LAST CALL.
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with them all bickering while sitting around in a variety of rooms or vehicles. You know that long bit of the AVENGERS movie where they all act like spoiled kids? It's a bit like that, but goes on for longer. The Fisher King mythology took too much of a back seat to the ghost plot devices for me in this one, and, like EXPIRATION DATE, I felt it suffered because of it. Personally I'd have liked more focus on the Tarot and archetypes to take center stage instead of the bickering characters and multiple real, and ghostly, personalities.
But again, like EXPIRATION DATE, a sub par Powers is still better than most everything else. It's just that my expectations had been set too high after the brilliance of LAST CALL.
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LibraryThing member LastCall
Third part of the "Last Call Trilogy" or the "Fault Lines Trilogy". Either way this is an awesome finale to the trilogy. First book is the best with the 2nd and 3rd being tied for second place.
LibraryThing member iayork
This is NOT for the beginner: I'll say this now, if you're sitting here shopping for new books and you've heard a little bit about this Tim Powers guy and you want to give him a shot because everyone says he's really good (and he is) and this is the book that you want to use as an introduction to
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him . . . you're doomed. There's just no good way to put it. For the newcomer, unless they're really good at reading between the lines, this book is going to come across as impenetrable. Not that it isn't good, but new readers are going to feel like they've missed something. Powers doesn't do many sequels to his books, most of his stuff is standalone, but this time he decided to merge some threads from other novels. In the novel prior to this Expiration Date, he introduced some urban fantasy stuff about ghost swallowing and the general rules about haunts and so on, as well as introducing Koot Hoomie and his adopted parents, Pete Sullivan and Angelica. Meanwhile in the now classic (and written some time ago) Last Call, Powers told the story of Scott Crane and how he became the Fisher King, the ruler of the West Coast (and so on and so forth). So this novel is basically a sequel to both those novels as Powers rams the two plotlines together. What happens is that Scott Crane is murdered by a woman apparently possessed by ghosts and Kootie is tapped to be the next king. However he's too young and not really prepared for it and so one of the Crane's loyalists, Arky, comes up with a plan to restore him to life. Confused yet? What follows then is a narrative that seems both ponderous and breakneck as new characters start to mingle with old, with two new catalysts for the plot, Janis Plumtree (the murderer) and Sid Cochran, who just lost his wife and has some history with the god Dionysus. Plumtree is supposed to be possessed but is mostly just someone with Multiple Personality Disorder, constantly switching from one to the other (in a way that reminded me of Crazy Jane from Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol run, except that Plumtree's don't have superpowers). The two of them meet in a mental hospital, but escape due to a convenient earthquake and from there hook up with the rest of the cast. It's hard to review this book without describing most of the setup of the plot because if I don't I feel like I'm losing context but at the same time there just seems to be no way around it. Powers' streamlining of the two earlier books is neat and fairly seamless but all the fancy stuff just seems to come at the expense of his normally complex plotting and we're left with something turgid, with the characters lurching from one scene to another. As long as you keep a handle on the main plot, you're all right but once sideplots start getting dragged in things start getting confusing since it's hard to say how relevant they are. Plus, a lot of the plot seems to consist of "plot coupons" where the characters have to gather special objects that will help them for no other reason than the plot requires it. Some of this confusion might be because I haven't read Last Call in years (or Expiration Date, though that was sooner), so that the stuff with the god Dionysus isn't too clear and I really wasn't clear what significance Armentrout had to the plot, except he was somebody to chase the other characters around (and that mannequin thing was weird), and I really don't know who half the other nameless people who were chasing the cast around were, either. Basically this is a book where you just have to "go with it" and hope that it will all make sense by the end and Powers is enough of a professional to keep things moving adequately so that you don't spend too much time worrying about the stuff that just doesn't seem to work. But while his other books felt tighly constructed and taut, this one has a more rambling feel to it and suffers a little bit for it. Not that there aren't bright spots, the relationship between Cochran and Plumtree (and her several personalities) is cute, the constant barrage of nifty ideas about ghosts is always fun, and I like how Powers does urban fantasy effortlessly, so that you could believe all this magic stuff is going on right alongside the "real world". The down side to all of this is that instead of getting a dazzling book (which is what we're used to) we get something that's merely "good". And as an introduction to the world of Tim Powers, it's terrible, but as a nice continuation of the lives of characters we've already met, it does that well and for longtime readers it might be worth it just for that. Show Less
LibraryThing member PamelaDLloyd
The first section of the book felt somewhat disorienting and fractured, which may have been a purposeful reflection of Janis/Cody/et al Plumtree's multiple personalities. As Plumtree and her new-met friend Cochran meet up with the companions (all familiar from the first two books of the Fault Lines
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series), the book begins to gain cohesion. In part, this is because the enlarged cast has a single primary goal which provides a focus to both the novel and the characters, even as each of the characters has his or her own personal goals and motivations. Amazingly, Power's manages to bring the multiple threads of plot and character development to a satisfactory conclusion. Show Less
LibraryThing member mbg0312
I often really enjoy Tim Powers, but he just got a little too convoluted in this one for my taste.
LibraryThing member Spoonbridge
I read the first book of the Faultline trilogy, Last Call, some years ago and recall having quite enjoyed its novel take on fusing mythology and magic with mundane history, intertwining the legends of the Arthurian Fisher King and the archetypes of the Tarot cards with the history of Las Vegas and
Here, Scott Crane, the hapless everyman of Last Call who found himself set up for the role of the King of the West, has been murdered in Southern California, his kingship up for grabs. Formerly ghost-possessed teen Koot Hoomie Parganas and his adoptive parents from Expiration Date, may be set up to take up the mantle, but do they want it? Finally, Plumtree, the woman who houses the disembodied spirit who killed Crane, and “Scant” Corcoran, another hapless everyman, having escaped from a murderous, ghost-haunted psychiatrist, find that they might need the aid of the god Dionysus himself and his fabled wine to put to right Crane’s death and save themselves. Trying to tie together the battle for the archetypical “kingship of the West,” all of Expiration Date’s ghost lore, and the wine based mythology of Dionysus might have been a bit too much, especially when we have to fill in some characters who need to be filled in on existence of all this supernatural stuff.
That’s not to say there’s nothing to enjoy- as in the previous books, much interesting tidbits and weird coincidences of historical figures are explained in a magical light- from Bugsy Siegel to Thomas Edison to Mary Ellen Pleasant, from the Queen Mary to the Winchester Mystery House, and it can be difficult to separate out the real from the extrapolated. However, here, I felt that there was just too much packed in, just too many threads and elements that bogged down the action and pace this time around. There was quite a bit of egregious info dumping, sometimes not even masked under long, detailed conversations among the large stable of characters. Occasionally, paragraphs were set aside for simply filling us in in the long backstory of various minor characters and how all the threads fit together, which, however interesting they were, dragged the pace of the story to a crawl. Also, I was less enamored of the role of destiny and fate this time around, which made the proceedings feel a bit preordained.
In the end, Earthquake Weather does an okay job at pulling all of the threads from the previous two novels into a tangled but complete ending in which most, if not all, come to a complete resolution. The feeling of the unavoidable destiny and the pages of exposition, though, really tangled up the reader here, I felt, and I would not recommend this one unless you really loved both previous books and really need to know what happens, or are super into Greek and Arthurian mythology in the modern world.
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its gambling. The cast of characters was weird, the history was arcane, the action was packed and I was loving it. The second, Expiration Date, introduced the secret world of ghosts and those who “smoke” them on the mean streets of LA and began to be a little bogged down with all of the cool details. Finally, I just read the last of the series, Earthquake Weather, which brought together the themes and characters from the first two and all their cool ideas, and just began a bit too unwieldy in the culmination. Here, Scott Crane, the hapless everyman of Last Call who found himself set up for the role of the King of the West, has been murdered in Southern California, his kingship up for grabs. Formerly ghost-possessed teen Koot Hoomie Parganas and his adoptive parents from Expiration Date, may be set up to take up the mantle, but do they want it? Finally, Plumtree, the woman who houses the disembodied spirit who killed Crane, and “Scant” Corcoran, another hapless everyman, having escaped from a murderous, ghost-haunted psychiatrist, find that they might need the aid of the god Dionysus himself and his fabled wine to put to right Crane’s death and save themselves. Trying to tie together the battle for the archetypical “kingship of the West,” all of Expiration Date’s ghost lore, and the wine based mythology of Dionysus might have been a bit too much, especially when we have to fill in some characters who need to be filled in on existence of all this supernatural stuff.
That’s not to say there’s nothing to enjoy- as in the previous books, much interesting tidbits and weird coincidences of historical figures are explained in a magical light- from Bugsy Siegel to Thomas Edison to Mary Ellen Pleasant, from the Queen Mary to the Winchester Mystery House, and it can be difficult to separate out the real from the extrapolated. However, here, I felt that there was just too much packed in, just too many threads and elements that bogged down the action and pace this time around. There was quite a bit of egregious info dumping, sometimes not even masked under long, detailed conversations among the large stable of characters. Occasionally, paragraphs were set aside for simply filling us in in the long backstory of various minor characters and how all the threads fit together, which, however interesting they were, dragged the pace of the story to a crawl. Also, I was less enamored of the role of destiny and fate this time around, which made the proceedings feel a bit preordained.
In the end, Earthquake Weather does an okay job at pulling all of the threads from the previous two novels into a tangled but complete ending in which most, if not all, come to a complete resolution. The feeling of the unavoidable destiny and the pages of exposition, though, really tangled up the reader here, I felt, and I would not recommend this one unless you really loved both previous books and really need to know what happens, or are super into Greek and Arthurian mythology in the modern world.
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LibraryThing member NatalieSW
Not as good as the previous two in the trilogy, but not bad. In this one, Powers tried to pull #1 and #2 together, but for me it didn't quite work. There were too many characters, and their voices weren't distinct enough from each other. Also, and this is just me, I don't find wine, its flavor,
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history, agriculture, as magical and fascinating as some people do, Powers among them. Cards, from their tarot forebears to contemporary games of chance and risk were the "them," so to speak, of the first one, so Powers's use of them in "Last Call" really got my interest. I'll definitely be reading more of his work. Show Less
LibraryThing member bespen
Earthquake Weather is Tim Powers' third book in the Fault Lines trilogy. Powers wraps up all the weirdness of the first two into something even stranger than either. In much the same way Last Call and Expiration Date were about the Fisher King and the sad not-quite-life of ghosts, Earthquake
Also, much like Last Call and Expiration Date, this is also a novel about mental illness, and the indignities and injustice of our attempts to treat the most serious cases, in the mold of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Janis Cordelia Plumtree, sufferer of multiple personality disorder, and unwilling ward of the state of California, personifies the mostly invisible struggles of everyone whose mind is broken in some serious way.
Multiple personality disorder is no longer considered a serious diagnosis, a fact noted by Angelica Sullivan in the book, but with magical means Powers is able to make it more real than the real world. Plumtree doesn't just have different personalities, she has different people inhabiting her body on a daily basis. Janis tries to keep a bottle of mouthwash handy, because she finds it disturbing that someone else's spit is in her mouth. In this case, that is a totally reasonable thing to do, and the oddly specific nature of this complaint makes me wonder if Powers stumbled on this example in his research for the book.
Janis and the exceptionally ill-fated Sid Cochran meet up with all of the characters from Last Call and Expiration Date to complete the quest for Dionysus. What follows is typical Powers, and I won't explore the plot here, because I think the grand concept of the whole trilogy is more interesting, and also more subtle. The first time I read this book, I found it both strangely disturbing, and a little ho-hum. As Powers' books go, the plot doesn't seem as tightly wound, and the large ensemble cast from the previous two books can be hard to keep track of. That explains the ho-hum feeling.
It is the disturbing part that I only recently figured out. I find the quest to win the favor of the god Dionysus horrifying, because the boons he offers seem to be worse than enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. For example, the pagadebiti, Dionysus' wine of forgiveness and a central feature of both the backstory and the quest, exacts a steep price: you must surrender to Dionysus every memory and emotion you have regarding he person involved. For Sid Cochran, his role in the quest is to offer up his beloved and freshly dead wife Nina [who it turns out was really married to Dionysus using Sid as a proxy] and their unborn child to Dionysus as a peace offering or gesture of goodwill.
This strikes me as very odd, but I didn't realize why until the third time through the book. The key bit in that realization was a story told about St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. St. Margaret started having visions of Christ. In a prudent move, he approached her confessor and told him about them. The confessor, a stolid sort who knew that most reports of visions were just fantasies or hallucinations, asked her to query Christ in her visions and report back to him. St. Margaret dutifully did so, and the confessor was surprised to find his questions had been answered accurately. At this point, he got suspicious, since Catholics take Satanic temptation seriously. He asked St. Margaret to ask Christ what sins he had confessed last week.
St. Margaret reported back: "He told me he did not know. He said he had forgotten." The priest was dumbfounded by this, because he had expected to have his sins thrown back in his face. What he got instead, was mercy. The sacrament of reconciliation, popularly known as confession, only asks for honesty and penitence. The only forgetting that happens is apparently on God's part, as mysterious as that sounds. I used to think that it was a burden to remember all the sins you have been forgiven, but Powers showed me that it is not.
What I think Powers has done with Earthquake Weather is to write a negative theodicy. A complaint often advanced against theism in general, and Christianity in particular, is that a just god could not allow for so much unjust suffering in the world. If God were truly good, and truly all powerful, then it would be simple to alleviate the cries of the poor, for example.
Using myth, Powers has written for us the world that would result from the attentions of a god that is good, after a fashion, but willing to force his intentions onto people to guarantee results. By the end of Earthquake Weather, nearly every character has been found to be the pawn of Dionysus in some fashion. Even Sherman Oaks, the villain of Expiration Date, is in his service. I also realized that Dionysus is so terrible because he is so just. Everyone gets what they deserve. Precisely.
If you've lived in Christendom your whole life, you probably don't expect this. Neil Gaiman's books helped me realize that people playing at paganism in the United States and Europe are almost always just lapsed Christians. These, and the internet atheists, are the quarters from which complaints about God's goodness usually come. As Chesterton noted in The Everlasting Man, they haven't actually managed to get far enough away from Christianity to judge it accurately.
In his way, I think Powers is trying to help.
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Weather is about a desperate quest to appease Dionysus, god of wine and death.Also, much like Last Call and Expiration Date, this is also a novel about mental illness, and the indignities and injustice of our attempts to treat the most serious cases, in the mold of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Janis Cordelia Plumtree, sufferer of multiple personality disorder, and unwilling ward of the state of California, personifies the mostly invisible struggles of everyone whose mind is broken in some serious way.
Multiple personality disorder is no longer considered a serious diagnosis, a fact noted by Angelica Sullivan in the book, but with magical means Powers is able to make it more real than the real world. Plumtree doesn't just have different personalities, she has different people inhabiting her body on a daily basis. Janis tries to keep a bottle of mouthwash handy, because she finds it disturbing that someone else's spit is in her mouth. In this case, that is a totally reasonable thing to do, and the oddly specific nature of this complaint makes me wonder if Powers stumbled on this example in his research for the book.
Janis and the exceptionally ill-fated Sid Cochran meet up with all of the characters from Last Call and Expiration Date to complete the quest for Dionysus. What follows is typical Powers, and I won't explore the plot here, because I think the grand concept of the whole trilogy is more interesting, and also more subtle. The first time I read this book, I found it both strangely disturbing, and a little ho-hum. As Powers' books go, the plot doesn't seem as tightly wound, and the large ensemble cast from the previous two books can be hard to keep track of. That explains the ho-hum feeling.
It is the disturbing part that I only recently figured out. I find the quest to win the favor of the god Dionysus horrifying, because the boons he offers seem to be worse than enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. For example, the pagadebiti, Dionysus' wine of forgiveness and a central feature of both the backstory and the quest, exacts a steep price: you must surrender to Dionysus every memory and emotion you have regarding he person involved. For Sid Cochran, his role in the quest is to offer up his beloved and freshly dead wife Nina [who it turns out was really married to Dionysus using Sid as a proxy] and their unborn child to Dionysus as a peace offering or gesture of goodwill.
This strikes me as very odd, but I didn't realize why until the third time through the book. The key bit in that realization was a story told about St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. St. Margaret started having visions of Christ. In a prudent move, he approached her confessor and told him about them. The confessor, a stolid sort who knew that most reports of visions were just fantasies or hallucinations, asked her to query Christ in her visions and report back to him. St. Margaret dutifully did so, and the confessor was surprised to find his questions had been answered accurately. At this point, he got suspicious, since Catholics take Satanic temptation seriously. He asked St. Margaret to ask Christ what sins he had confessed last week.
St. Margaret reported back: "He told me he did not know. He said he had forgotten." The priest was dumbfounded by this, because he had expected to have his sins thrown back in his face. What he got instead, was mercy. The sacrament of reconciliation, popularly known as confession, only asks for honesty and penitence. The only forgetting that happens is apparently on God's part, as mysterious as that sounds. I used to think that it was a burden to remember all the sins you have been forgiven, but Powers showed me that it is not.
What I think Powers has done with Earthquake Weather is to write a negative theodicy. A complaint often advanced against theism in general, and Christianity in particular, is that a just god could not allow for so much unjust suffering in the world. If God were truly good, and truly all powerful, then it would be simple to alleviate the cries of the poor, for example.
Using myth, Powers has written for us the world that would result from the attentions of a god that is good, after a fashion, but willing to force his intentions onto people to guarantee results. By the end of Earthquake Weather, nearly every character has been found to be the pawn of Dionysus in some fashion. Even Sherman Oaks, the villain of Expiration Date, is in his service. I also realized that Dionysus is so terrible because he is so just. Everyone gets what they deserve. Precisely.
If you've lived in Christendom your whole life, you probably don't expect this. Neil Gaiman's books helped me realize that people playing at paganism in the United States and Europe are almost always just lapsed Christians. These, and the internet atheists, are the quarters from which complaints about God's goodness usually come. As Chesterton noted in The Everlasting Man, they haven't actually managed to get far enough away from Christianity to judge it accurately.
In his way, I think Powers is trying to help.
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Subjects
Awards
Locus Award (Finalist — Fantasy Novel — 1998)
Bram Stoker Award (Nominee — Novel — 1997)
British Science Fiction Association Award (Shortlist — Novel — 1997)
Language
Original publication date
1997-10
Physical description
500 p.; 9.1 inches
ISBN
1596061898 / 9781596061897
Local notes
The Fisher King of the American West, Scott Crane, has been killed, and 14-year-old Koot Hoomie Parganas's perpetually bleeding wound makes him the most likely candidate for a supernatural successor. But the king's body has not yet begun to decay, and as long as there is a chance that he can be restored to the throne, his right-hand man, Archimedes Mavranos, is willing to risk all to revive Crane. But to do that he'll need the help of the woman who killed Crane, plus that of a recently widowed winemaker who has been touched by the god Dionysus, and the cooperation of Parganas's reluctant foster parents.