The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.
Brendan Doyle is just quietly minding his own business being a professor of English literature when a man comes to him with a modest proposal; join me on an assignment - a well-paid assignment, moreover - wherein your interest and expertise in the works of 19th-century poets will be of immense practical value.
Well, that all sounds great, but what could the nature of this assignment possibly be that would require the services of an expert in early-19th-century English poetry? Ah, well, I'm glad you asked: I, elderly and eccentric millionaire J. Cochran Darrow, have somehow discovered a series of portals that permit travel between different locations in time and space. The nature of this wavily-defined thing is such that you don't have total control over the when and where, and it just happens that I've found a portal that will shortly (literally in a few hours from now) be accessible from our current location in 1983 Los Angeles and which links for a period of time with 1810 London and will permit a small group of customers, paying lavishly for the privilege, to travel there/then, hear an in-person lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with extra context and biographical detail supplied by you, and then return home again. Pretty cool, huh?
A bit of exposition is offered by Darrow in the course of explaining the assignment to Doyle, and the reader also gets the benefit of a brief prologue set in 1802 wherein a couple of mysterious wielders of sorcery attempt to summon up the ancient Egyptian God Anubis, as you do, and succeed only in inflicting harm upon themselves and opening up a series of rents, "gates" if you will, in space-time radiating out in both directions from 1802 and allowing those possessed of the relevant arcane knowledge to travel between them.
So anyway, Darrow, Doyle, and various millionaire enthusiasts get dolled up in suitable period garb and travel back to 1810 to hear Coleridge speak; all goes pretty smoothly for everyone except Doyle, who is coshed senseless and abducted by mysterious persons who turn out to be, among others, Doctor Romany, one of the magicians associated with the 1802 shenanigans who is keen to understand and contain what's been unleashed. Doyle, having missed the window of opportunity to return to 1983, escapes and flees back into London.
But how to survive in early-19th-century London? Doyle finds his way into a loose guild of beggars and street thieves and is taken under the wing of the slightly Artful Dodger-esque Jacky. Meanwhile he is hatching a plan to make contact with another poet of the time, William Ashbless, whose more obscure oeuvre he has made a special study of, and whose documented movements he is familiar with to the extent of knowing that he'll be in a particular tavern in a day or two's time.
Lots of plot strands here that we'll just summarise to save time: the mysterious Dog-Face Joe, seemingly able to swap bodies with unsuspecting individuals (who inherit the ruined shell of whatever body he was previously in, usually for a short period ended by its death) and the odd outbreak of seemingly insane short-lived hairy individuals attacking people around London all turn out to be aspects of the same thing, the continued existence of the other 1802 magician, Amenophis Fikee, after the events of that night evicted him from his original body. The first magician, Doctor Romany (the one who briefly abducted Doyle in 1810), is running a pickpocketing and murdering guild of his own, headquartered in some subterranean caverns connected to the sewer system and the Thames, and continuing his attempt to conjure up various Egyptian gods. Finally Darrow, Doyle's mysterious benefactor from 1983, has returned to 1810 and is using his knowledge of stock market performance in the intervening 173 years to make a fortune and negotiating with Dog-Face Joe aka Fikee to make use of his body-swapping knowledge to achieve eternal youth.
Keeping up? Excellent. So Doyle gets to experience first-hand knowledge of some of this when he is forcibly body-swapped in the tavern he'd gone to to meet Ashbless (who didn't show) and wakes up in a different body which has just taken a large dose of strychnine. Luckily Doyle has enough knowledge to be able to vomit up the poison and after a day or two is as right as rain and, moreover, inhabiting a body that's considerably younger and physically more imposing than his old one. Doyle soon realises that in some weird paradoxical time-travel accidentally-becoming-your-own-grandfather way he is actually William Ashbless. He's not sure what the magicians are up to but resolves to thwart them, with some help from some locals who are in the know. This involves a bewildering series of trips including a time-hop to 1684 and a brief trip by sea to Cairo to meet (and subsequently kill) the chief magician. Upon returning to London, Doyle/Ashbless, Jacky and, slightly bizarrely, a laudanum-crazed Samuel Taylor Coleridge are abducted into the subterranean caverns and, after some odd encounters with some of the mysterious creatures who also live down there (remnants of some botched magical experiments) and a couple of telling interventions from the Egyptian gods who the magicians have been bothering (notably the snake-god Apep), Jacky and Doyle/Ashbless are vomited out into the Thames while the magicians and their various minions are consumed by Apep and Ra and various other entities not best pleased at being bothered from their centuries-long slumber.
Doyle is now in the odd philosophical position of being free to live out the rest of his life as Ashbless while knowing, from his 20th-century studies, most of the biographical details up to and including the date and manner of his death (thankfully a few decades off yet). He also knows the name of his future wife and WAIT A MINUTE Jacky reveals to him that she's been a woman disguised as a man all along and her real name is, well, I expect you can join the dots here. Ashbless and the future Mrs. Ashbless link arms and head off to enjoy their future together, with only the small inconvenience of Ashbless already knowing pretty much all of it.
That was quite a long synopsis and you can see I had to skate over some of it - and omit some of it altogether, including the rationale for Jacky actually being an upper-class young woman disguised as a street urchin - lest this become the longest blog post ever. The TL;DR version would be: there's a lot going on here, possibly a bit too much to allow every plot contrivance to be tied up satisfactorily at the end. The nature of how the gates work is hand-waved away and while they're obviously important to the plot (important enough to give the book its title, after all) they're arguably just a contrivance to insert Doyle in 1810 where the rest of the action takes place.
The important thing is not to worry about any of that too much and just be swept along by the action, and as long as you do that then this is generally a hoot. The committee that awards the annual Philip K Dick Award evidently thought so too, as The Anubis Gates was the winner in 1984. Powers won it again in 1986; his two wins sandwich the only other recipient I've read, William Gibson's Neuromancer. Powers is also known for his 1987 novel On Stranger Tides which was loosely adapted into the fourth Pirates Of The Caribbean film.
Many echoes of other fictional works here, as you can imagine - here's a few:
- there is an odd parallel with the only other novel in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series to appear on this list, Time And Again, in that both start with our protagonist being approached by someone he doesn't know and offered a large sum of money to make use of some ill-defined time-travel device to travel to the 19th century and carry out an assignment.
- a couple of weird parallels with the work of Douglas Adams: firstly the use of Coleridge as a plot device, with the suggestion that some of his experiences may have bled through (facilitated by his heroic opium intake) into his later poetry, is similar to what happens in The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul, the second Dirk Gently novel [postscript: it was actually the first one, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. In my defence it's a long time since I read either of them]. Secondly both The Anubis Gates and the later novels in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy series feature a plot device of the main character having foreknowledge relating to his own death. In Ashbless' case it's the date and circumstances, in Arthur Dent's case it's knowing that he can't die yet because he hasn't visited the nightclub on Stavromula Beta where he carries out one of his multiple accidental murders of the creature Agrajag.
- the idea of a ka as a sort of disembodied vital essence is familiar from the works of Dennis Wheatley, in particular his 1956 novel The Ka Of Gifford Hillary (which I have never read). In the particular context of The Anubis Gates its meaning is extended to a sort of animated copy of a person conjured from the usual blood/hair combo and therefore a bit more like a golem. It was also used (with some further twisting of its original meaning) by Stephen King in the Dark Tower series.
- the body-swapping thing, in particular - as I put it elsewhere - the "unceremonious yeeting" of the body's previous occupant, is a device used in Ancillary Justice and more briefly in Transition.
Tim Powers provides the latest in a shortish series of different authors on this list who share a surname. Here are the ones I've spotted on a brief trawl of the archives, in no particular order:
