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464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1927
The lips of the Angel were red as rubies and formed into a strange smile, turned up at the corners, where they tapered to a delicate point. The child before had seemed unnatural in its flatness, this gigantic creature was stupefying in its corporeal presence, which surpassed all earthly measure: there was not the slightest shadow cast by its garments to give it emphasis or perspective. Yet in spite of — or perhaps because of — that, it made me feel that until that point I had in my whole life on earth seen nothing but flat surfaces, when compared with the sight of this being from another world.
Each mortal has his god, his demon; and in him, in the words of the Apostle Paul, we live and move and have our being.A reclusive gentleman in Prague by the name of Baron Müller receives a mysterious packet of genealogical materials left to him by his deceased English cousin John Roger. Thus begins this occult literary tour de force representing a lifetime of inquiry into supernatural phenomena by the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink. Here, by interleaving Roger's various documents with Müller's first-person narrative account, Meyrink envisions the life of the English mathematician-alchemist John Dee and his spirit medium cohort Edward Kelley, who acts as Dee's intercessor with the Green Angel throughout years of their efforts to achieve the philosopher's stone and gain immortality. As Müller sifts through his cousin's papers at random, he discovers more about his ancestral link to Dee, slowly piercing the veil between this world and 'the other side', thus revealing Meyrink's memorable characters to be much more than what they first seem. The nefarious Bartlett Greene, the dark goddess Black Isais, the Russian antique dealer Lipotin, Dee's wife Jane—all of these fascinating figures mingle in the broad tapestry of infinite time. The less plot details shared the better in this case, but suffice to say that a careful reading of this alluring and intricately coiled narrative yields myriad rewards.