Evadare Volney's Blog - Posts Tagged "occult"

The Compact by Charlie Raven

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I enjoyed this book immensely - just as much as I liked A Case of Domestic Pilfering, if not even more. Raven writes delightfully about a class-varied cast of fin-de-siecle types, and weaves a complex and compelling story about a murder and a sinister businesswoman that includes both mundane and paranormal elements. Much of the tension and emotional momentum is fueled by something we don't see very often - a love triangle of sorts between three middle-aged women. Around them are a supporting cast of theatricals, decadents, some honest police and some crooked ones, quick-eyed servants, and people damaged and deprived by the Victorian closet.

A good mix of well-loved other folks' characters combined with fascinating real historical figures is something I always enjoy: sheer genius that the mystery deduction here is driven by Dr. Watson (a little bit lost since Holmes has gone to the continent without him) finding a passable substitute in a young, callow Aleister Crowley (who is much better suited than Holmes would have been to take on the occult aspects of the case - and his mountaineering skills also come into play at the terrifying climax). Crowley's rocky relationship with Jerome Pollitt gets a lot of exploration and is beautifully handled - as superficial as Pollitt sometimes seems, he's sympathetic in his frustrated love for a brilliant eccentric. Pollitt's friendship with the tragic Aubrey Beardsley is also alluded to. (I was struck how very different Crowley's characterization was from a Sherlock Holmes pastiche I read recently that he also appears in, Guy Adams's The Breath of God.)

I loved the atmosphere of this - the rooming houses of London, the Gothic landscape of Minerva Atwell's creepy health spa. I loved the characters and their relationships; I loved the organic motivations rooted in fear of aging, fear of loss, fear of discovery; I loved a mostly mature cast who have loved and lost before; I love ethereal George's visions-cum-past-life-memories. I quibble just a little with the pacing - first part felt slow and second half rushed - but that is a minor flaw among so many things it does right.



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John Dee and the Empire of Angels: Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World by Jason Louv

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was a fascinating read, and the most striking thing about it for me is the way it builds on earlier writers on Dee and his life and work like Dame Frances Yates and Benjamin Woolley to carry that legacy of, not just Hermetic magick but also his apocalyptic worldview, into the present day: through the Rosicrucian movement, the Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, and Jack Parsons (whom he compares to Dee as someone who was both a committed occultist and a pioneer in the cutting-edge science of his time and saw no conflict between the two whatsoever - a POV you'd expect in the 16th century but rather more striking, if not completely un-heard of, in the 20th). This is a brand-new book and it works events like the Trump election into a legacy of spiritual conflict and desire to take material control of occult energies that's rooted in the very history of Western religious iconography. Jason Louv also runs the Ultraculture blog (https://ultraculture.org/) and is deeply immersed in this background - I enjoyed this book immensely not only for its intense modern-day relevance but for the way the various characters in this centuries-long drama come through as people: flawed, sometimes unhinged, dedicated, torn between their mortal lives and the spiritual forces that pushed them beyond human limits.



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