I have been a fan of Tim Powers since I first encountered his writings in the the early 90s and Three Days To Never is the seventh book by Tim Powers that I have read.
What attracts me again and again to his works is both the creativity in his stories and the humanity of his characters.
I’ll talk more about the story in a bit, but is is the protaganists of his stories that I want to ramble on for a bit first. There are trends in his characters that I have noticed when reading this book and that is that all his characters are, on some level, flawed.
Their flaws are part of what makes them so easy to recognize and relate too. The main characters of Three Days To Never are Frank Marrity and his twelve-year old daughter Daphne. His wife had died from cancer, and he had been raised as an orphan by his grandmother after his father had disappeared and his mother had died in a car crash.
He is emotionally scarred by that in ways we, the readers, can relate to and recognize as most of us have at some point in our lives had a close relative died or felt abandoned by someone who had been close to us.
To some degree or another most of his main characters have wounds like those. Old emotional scars that they can’t help but pick at, quirks or ticks that, while we may not want to admit it, we recognize because we
ourselves behave in similar ways.
By that I mean that the characters, ultimately, are selfish in their goals and wants. They don’t want to ‘save the day’ or some other heroic or noble end. They are fathers who want their daughter to be safe, blind people who want to see, or selfish businessmen who just want to make money.
It makes the cast and characters of his writing far easier to empathize with or relate to then they would be if they were perfect and bright and noble and brave. Everyone in the real world has some baggage they carry
with them and dreams that are ultimately selfish and the characters in his stories do as well.
As to the story… His stories follow a style that I would call “Secret Histories of the World”. In this case while the story takes place in the late 80s (1987 to be exact I believe) the backstory of it is woven through
the actual history of Einstein’s life (as well as Charlie Chaplin). It is about an invention of Einstein’s that was so awful (more so than the atomic bomb) that he felt it must forever be kept secret, if not outright destroyed. Naturally that means that people want it, two groups of people in this case: Mossad (the Israeli Secret Service) and a group of European occultists.
The story weaves togethor real actual history and those moments in the characters lives that wouldn’t have made it into the history books. Trips they took to visit friends and the conversations they had on them, looking at actual history events and giving new explanations for why people behaved as they did, weaving the supernatural and mysticism togethor with ideas about modern science and physics into something that seems a bit more than halfway-plausible if you can suspend disbelief for just a few seconds.
This isn’t my favorite book by Tim Powers (that would be On Stranger Tides which is now being ruined by Disney and used as fodder for the next Pirates of the Carribean film) but it is one of his most human ones and most approachable ones. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes the heroes of their stories to be ‘human’ rather than ‘superhuman’.