Book Review: Last Call

Tim Powers

1992

Awards: Locus

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

In general, I enjoyed this book, although I was somewhat hindered in my enjoyment by my lack of poker savvy.

The story revolves mainly around one character, Scott Crane. Scott’s father, Georges Leon, is not only a professional Vegas poker player, but also a master of the black arts of the tarot. When Scott is a little boy, his father uses the magic of the cards to take over Scott’s brother’s body, using it as an alternate vessel for himself. He is planning to do the same to Scott, except that Scott’s mother realizes it in time and sacrifices her own life to set Scott free and hide him in Los Angeles, far from his father.

Scott is adopted (coincidentally?) by another magic-aware card player, albeit a kind-hearted one, who also adopts a baby girl a little bit later under similar circumstances to Scott. Scott and his adoptive father and sister grow up relatively happily after that...

...except that Scott, in his 20s, makes the mistake of playing in one poker-like card game called “Assumption” on a houseboat on Lake Mead, and he doesn’t realize that the game is actually a magical one run by his biological father, who is using it to ritually procure more bodies to inhabit (having lost Scott’s). The deal with Assumption is that if his father “buys” someone’s hand in the game, he’s really bought their physical body, except that it takes twenty years for his power over them to mature and to actually let him take control.

Of course Scott does lose a hand in the game and has it bought by his father, thus putting him in line to have his father assume his body in twenty years’ time.

Unaware of this, Scott goes his merry way after the game. He lives a basically normal (if somewhat alcoholic) life for the next twenty years, until finally fate and the pull of the cards conspire to draw him, and his adoptive father and sister, and a horde of other cosmic hangers-on, back to Vegas where his father is once again preparing to host another game of Assumption in the same houseboat on Lake Mead, and is getting ready to take over the bodies he acquired two decades before, not realizing that his real son is among them.

Scott is slow to realize what is happening to him, and the power of the magic he’s dealing with, so he marches into the situation unprepared. He has to sober up and pull together his wits and defenses, fast, to try to prevent his father from taking over his body.

The premise is definitely clever. And the good guys are mainly likeable, except that the seediness of their lives of gambling and alcohol does stick to them like grease. The bad guys are quite repellant and some are completely bat-crazy insane.

The action drags on a bit too long to be completely riveting. The plot goes slowly in the first half of the book, as you are introduced to the characters and the tarot and the magic, and then the pace picks up considerably in the second half, after everyone converges on Las Vegas and starts getting ready for the big game. But it still seems to take quite a long time to get to the final showdown between Scott and his father—especially when for a frustratingly large amount of that time Scott is barely functional, drunk on beer and whisky.

There is a lot of card playing in Last Call. Mostly it is the standard varieties of poker, but there are also more obscure alternate versions, including Lowball (where the lowest hand wins the pot) and the aforementioned Assumption (which uses antique Tarot cards and is magical). Most of the suspenseful action in the book happens around very tense hands of cards. The play is thick and fast, and I have to admit I got kind of lost in the dust with all the calling and raising and remembering what beats an unsuited flush. And when the ancient suits and major arcana of the tarot were added to the mix, it got even harder to follow. But Powers’ writing explained enough to at least let me follow the generalities of what is happening, even if I didn’t get all the specifics. I got it enough to feel suspense when the game was suspenseful, and to be nervous when the good guys had dicey hands.

What I liked the most about Last Call was how Powers brought the mythical power of the tarot to life in the real gritty world. I liked the manifestations of magic in everyday things—like that you could tell that a particularly cosmically powerful card game was going on when the water in the drinking glasses balanced oddly and the cigarette smoke formed strange patterns in the air. And I liked how mythical characters from the tarot were personified in actual human beings. Sometimes that meant that the god or spirit itself took human form, as with Death and the goddess of the moon. And sometimes that meant that the real human characters took on attributes of the legendary beings, like the joker and the one-eyed jack.

It reminded me of Neil Gaiman’s later book American Gods, in that both books involved the physical embodiment of legendary figures from ancient cultures who were mostly forgotten, but who still held a lot of power for those that did remember them. Except that Last Call did it with more depth and subtlety and didn’t make the technique feel so much like a gimmick.