This is one of my favourite books of all time, and I really don't see how I could be improved upon. The minor infelicities of style are caused by the fantastic verve with which it's written, and more polishing would detract from its amiability.
Obscure scholar Brendan Doyle is hired to give a lecture on Samuel Coleridge to a group of wealthy Americans. He swiftly realizes that this is because his patron intends to take the party back to visit the year 1810 to witness the man himself in action. However, Doyle is shanghaied by a group of villainous gypsies and misses the return to 1983. After a momentary disquiet he reasons that as a man of the future he should be able to make a success of himself in the 19th century, in particular by meeting up with William Ashbless, the obscure poet whose study is his particular speciality, who is due to arrive in London shortly.
But things almost at once start to go horribly wrong. Doyle finds himself the object of pursuit by an ancient-Egyptian-inspired group of sorcerers who believe him to possess the secret of travel through time. In attempting to evade them Doyle finds himself on an increasingly bizarre road which takes in a further leap backwards to 1684, a visit to Egypt itself, and a journey on Ra's solar bark as it passes through the twelve hours of the night. You will have guessed that he ends up being William Ashbless himself, to close the loop of that poet's work. But quite how this is managed, given that Ashbless is known by history to have been huge, hirsute and burly, while Doyle is small, balding and puny, is by no means straightforward. At several points Doyle exists in two parallel versions of himself from different timestreams, confused further by a cack-handed replica of him with a limited will of its own, constructed by the desperate enemy. It seems impossible that all the plot ends will be tied up as the end of the book approaches, but amazingly enough they all are, very satisfyingly; with even a doubly happy ending in which Ashbless-Doyle manages to dodge his historical death, which we had assumed was the one event that actually was graven in stone.
Apart from the spectacular plotting, the book's great virtue is its vividity. London of history is drawn broadly and swiftly as a teeming stew, populated by costermongers, dwarf beggars, Punch-and-Judy men, a plot by Lord Byron to kill King George, failed vivisection experiments, ice schooners racing across the frozen Thames, and sinister stilt-walking clowns. Ancient Egyptian magic and mysticism - the dry phrasing of the Book of the Dead - is brought to life more tangibly than seems possible.
The Anubis Gates is not an attempt at great literature. It does not greatly edify or give rise to consideration. But as sheer entertainment, as far as I'm concerned, it's pretty much unbeatable.