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The Ægypt Cycle #1
The Solitudes
Reengaging the ideas of alternate lives, worlds, and worldviews that pulsed through his remarkable Little, Big, John Crowley's Ægypt series is a landmark in contemporary fiction. The series helped earn Crowley the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and Harold Bloom installed the first two books in the series in his 1993 Western canon. Now, following the Spring 2007 hardcover release of the final book in the series (Endless Things), Overlook is bringing the entire tetralogy back into print--and, for the first time, presenting it as a real series.
In The Solitudes, the opening of the series, we are introduced to Pierce Moffett, an unorthodox historian and an expert in ancient astrology, myths, and superstition. The land that Moffett studies is not the real, geographical Egypt but Ægypt, a country of the imagination. When Moffett discovers the historical novels of local writer Fellowes Kraft, his course is charted. Kraft's books interweave stories of Italian heretic Giordano Bruno, young Will Shakespeare, and Elizabethan occultist John Dee--stories that begin to mingle with the narrative of Moffett's real and dream life in 1970s America. As Moffett's journey in and out of his comfortable reality continues, what becomes clear is revelatory: there is more than one history of the world.
This is the dazzling first novel in a series that will certainly take its place amongst the great books of our time. Completely revised by the author to further the power of the series as a whole, this is a perfect chance to rediscover one of our truly great writers, and one of our truly magical stories.
427 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1987
194 people are currently reading
4551 people want to read
About the author
John Crowley
129 books832 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942; his father was then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 15th volume of fiction (Endless Things) in 2007. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
His first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1979) was nominated for the 1980 American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s 100 Best Science Fiction Novels.
In 1981 came Little, Big, which Ursula Le Guin described as a book that “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.”
In 1980 Crowley embarked on an ambitious four-volume novel, Ægypt, comprising The Solitudes (originally published as Ægypt), Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things, published in May 2007. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
He is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaianno (Italy), and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet. A novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, appeared in 2002. A museum-quality 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, featuring the art of Peter Milton and a critical introduction by Harold Bloom, is in preparation.
Note: The John Crowley who wrote Sans épines, la rose: Tony Blair, un modèle pour l'Europe? is a different author with the same name. (website)
John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942; his father was then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 15th volume of fiction (Endless Things) in 2007. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
His first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1979) was nominated for the 1980 American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s 100 Best Science Fiction Novels.
In 1981 came Little, Big, which Ursula Le Guin described as a book that “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.”
In 1980 Crowley embarked on an ambitious four-volume novel, Ægypt, comprising The Solitudes (originally published as Ægypt), Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things, published in May 2007. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
He is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaianno (Italy), and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet. A novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, appeared in 2002. A museum-quality 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, featuring the art of Peter Milton and a critical introduction by Harold Bloom, is in preparation.
Note: The John Crowley who wrote Sans épines, la rose: Tony Blair, un modèle pour l'Europe? is a different author with the same name. (website)
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June 7, 2017
3 and a half... I think?
So before I get into the review, a few things you need to know about this book. This is not a book for everyone. It's complicated, it requires the reader to stop and think really hard constantly, there's little to no "external" plot, but what's going on inside the characters is hugely important. To read Crowley's prose, you need to be focused and awake: if you miss so much as a sentence, entire pages will stop making sense. Avid readers of classical literature and writers will find his work very rich, multilayered and interesting, though maybe not entertaining. People who like "The Da Vinci" code won't understand squat. This book will appeal to readers who are fascinated with history, philosophy, the occult and the possibility that the generally-accepted concept of reality is not all there is. People who like solid realism will roll their eyes and throw the book out the window. This is a book about how our perception affects our understanding of the world, about how Western mysticism and the related beliefs and superstitions affect our reality through our worldview.
The "Aegypt" tetralogy is my husband's favorite work of fiction. He's huge nerd with a English literature degree, so those books are a rare treat to him. Just like the main character of "The Solitudes", he let go of a frustrating and circular academic career and spent some time figuring out "What now?". But the resemblance ends there. He told me this book would take me through a lot of emotions, including frustration and hilarity, and he was right. Every once in a while, I would shake the book, yelling "Why are you so stupid?!", and then giggle myself silly halfway through the following chapter. So if my review feels scattered and a bit confusing, consider that a preview of what you are in for when you pick up this book!
"Solitudes" is the story of how Pierce Moffet's life suddenly turns upside down and he winds up landing in a tiny village somewhere in New York state, where he slowly rebuilds his life. In that process of finding a new path, falling in love, dealing with his family history and so on, he begins to dive into a question an old professor of his planted in his mind: is there more than one history of the world? Can the metaphysical be completely ripped apart from the scientific? Should it? After all, it's only a relatively recent trend to separate science and spirituality: the thing about magic is that when we start understanding it, it becomes science. Pierce becomes convinced that a country called Aegypt is the answer, that it exists just outside of our perceptions, perhaps at a different time than the historical Egypt; it is the land where magic and occult knowledge comes from and Pierce wants to write its history.
Summarizing any more than that is really tricky, because Crowley takes this story all over the place, in a non-linear narrative that includes a book-within-a-book, stories about John Dee and William Shakespeare, Giordanno Bruno's mnemonic techniques and the hippie lifestyle in a small country town.
There is no doubt that this is a beautifully, excessively cleverly written book. But I found it just a bit too ethereal for my taste. It's definitely a rewarding read, but even Jason admits that it's not a particularly fun one: the style can be confusing. Crowley omits to put the text of "Bitten Apples" (the book within the book) in quotation marks or italics, so when the narrative switches abruptly from the fictional book back to the main story, you get that exact feeling of aggravated confusion you get when someone rudely interrupts your reading break and pulls you back into reality. It's jarring, despite the cleverness of the trick. The characters are not particularly likable, but they are not flat-out awful either. I actually think my problem with Crowley's characters is their blandness. Smokey in "Little, Big", as well as most of Alice's family gave me that same feeling of faded outlines of people, as opposed to bright and multi-dimensional people. That being said the idea of an internal and external history is a very intriguing topic and I have always been fascinated by occult systems and their history, so digging into those ideas kept me interested to the end.
It took me a bit longer than usual to finish this book, probably because I read other books while I was working on this one: I knew my entertainment and escapism fix wasn't going to come from "Solitudes", but it had its own rewards. I really appreciated the beauty of the prose and the technical brilliance, but it was exhausting and I suspect Crowley might have been on a variety of substances when he outlined this story... It might take me a while to get to the sequel, but I would really love to see what happens next!
So before I get into the review, a few things you need to know about this book. This is not a book for everyone. It's complicated, it requires the reader to stop and think really hard constantly, there's little to no "external" plot, but what's going on inside the characters is hugely important. To read Crowley's prose, you need to be focused and awake: if you miss so much as a sentence, entire pages will stop making sense. Avid readers of classical literature and writers will find his work very rich, multilayered and interesting, though maybe not entertaining. People who like "The Da Vinci" code won't understand squat. This book will appeal to readers who are fascinated with history, philosophy, the occult and the possibility that the generally-accepted concept of reality is not all there is. People who like solid realism will roll their eyes and throw the book out the window. This is a book about how our perception affects our understanding of the world, about how Western mysticism and the related beliefs and superstitions affect our reality through our worldview.
The "Aegypt" tetralogy is my husband's favorite work of fiction. He's huge nerd with a English literature degree, so those books are a rare treat to him. Just like the main character of "The Solitudes", he let go of a frustrating and circular academic career and spent some time figuring out "What now?". But the resemblance ends there. He told me this book would take me through a lot of emotions, including frustration and hilarity, and he was right. Every once in a while, I would shake the book, yelling "Why are you so stupid?!", and then giggle myself silly halfway through the following chapter. So if my review feels scattered and a bit confusing, consider that a preview of what you are in for when you pick up this book!
"Solitudes" is the story of how Pierce Moffet's life suddenly turns upside down and he winds up landing in a tiny village somewhere in New York state, where he slowly rebuilds his life. In that process of finding a new path, falling in love, dealing with his family history and so on, he begins to dive into a question an old professor of his planted in his mind: is there more than one history of the world? Can the metaphysical be completely ripped apart from the scientific? Should it? After all, it's only a relatively recent trend to separate science and spirituality: the thing about magic is that when we start understanding it, it becomes science. Pierce becomes convinced that a country called Aegypt is the answer, that it exists just outside of our perceptions, perhaps at a different time than the historical Egypt; it is the land where magic and occult knowledge comes from and Pierce wants to write its history.
Summarizing any more than that is really tricky, because Crowley takes this story all over the place, in a non-linear narrative that includes a book-within-a-book, stories about John Dee and William Shakespeare, Giordanno Bruno's mnemonic techniques and the hippie lifestyle in a small country town.
There is no doubt that this is a beautifully, excessively cleverly written book. But I found it just a bit too ethereal for my taste. It's definitely a rewarding read, but even Jason admits that it's not a particularly fun one: the style can be confusing. Crowley omits to put the text of "Bitten Apples" (the book within the book) in quotation marks or italics, so when the narrative switches abruptly from the fictional book back to the main story, you get that exact feeling of aggravated confusion you get when someone rudely interrupts your reading break and pulls you back into reality. It's jarring, despite the cleverness of the trick. The characters are not particularly likable, but they are not flat-out awful either. I actually think my problem with Crowley's characters is their blandness. Smokey in "Little, Big", as well as most of Alice's family gave me that same feeling of faded outlines of people, as opposed to bright and multi-dimensional people. That being said the idea of an internal and external history is a very intriguing topic and I have always been fascinated by occult systems and their history, so digging into those ideas kept me interested to the end.
It took me a bit longer than usual to finish this book, probably because I read other books while I was working on this one: I knew my entertainment and escapism fix wasn't going to come from "Solitudes", but it had its own rewards. I really appreciated the beauty of the prose and the technical brilliance, but it was exhausting and I suspect Crowley might have been on a variety of substances when he outlined this story... It might take me a while to get to the sequel, but I would really love to see what happens next!
October 6, 2011
This cuts my soul the way prime John Crowley always does, but this book takes that stream of inspiration to its most fantastically baroque consequences. This is the author of "Little, Big" writing both "Foucault's Pendulum" and something like the "Quicksilver" books simultaneously. With some borrowed tone from "Against the Day." Doesn't matter that only one of those books had yet been written.
There is more than one history of the world.
This is an absurdly self-referential love letter to kooky frustrated academics, to anyone who has constructed an esoteric universe out of a year of reading, to dreamers out of time who read too much and think too much and just BRIEFLY glimpse the absolute contingency of this fragile world of ours, to anyone who has read a book and felt it must have stolen their last five years of learning and thinking . . . and, well, to ME.
Most of all this is about how in the moments BETWEEN things (Pynchon loves these too), there are uncountable possible futures and pasts, all waiting to collapse quantumlike into the world we know. What we never realize is that nothing _compelled_ the track we have now. The seams are papered over by storytelling. We never stop telling stories. When the world is round, it suddenly always has been. (Or has it?)
This is never going to be a novel for very many people, but for those who it is, I am pointing the way.
Ecstatic to start "Love and Sleep."
There is more than one history of the world.
This is an absurdly self-referential love letter to kooky frustrated academics, to anyone who has constructed an esoteric universe out of a year of reading, to dreamers out of time who read too much and think too much and just BRIEFLY glimpse the absolute contingency of this fragile world of ours, to anyone who has read a book and felt it must have stolen their last five years of learning and thinking . . . and, well, to ME.
Most of all this is about how in the moments BETWEEN things (Pynchon loves these too), there are uncountable possible futures and pasts, all waiting to collapse quantumlike into the world we know. What we never realize is that nothing _compelled_ the track we have now. The seams are papered over by storytelling. We never stop telling stories. When the world is round, it suddenly always has been. (Or has it?)
This is never going to be a novel for very many people, but for those who it is, I am pointing the way.
Ecstatic to start "Love and Sleep."
March 3, 2018
So you have read The Solitudes or (this is the same book) Aegypt, and you're wondering whether you'd like to read the other three books in this tetralogy (The Aegypt Cycle). So -- no spoilers -- here's what I can tell you:
Pierce Moffett and the people of Blackbury Jambs remain prominent in all four volumes, and the thread that runs from start to finish is Pierce's little life -- his flawed, sad, typical, and yet inspiring, often challenging, life as a flawed and ultimately redeemable, forgivable, human being.
However, we don't follow Pierce for decades, and we don't travel with him into his old age. I think of the tetralogy as being anchored to Pierce's midlife crisis -- although he's a bit younger than literal midlife, he's certainly having a crisis. He doesn't know why he's here, what his purpose is, what his direction should be. Around him he observes the people of this rural wayside where he has found himself stopping, almost by accident. He circles around and around a grand idea for a massive literary work centered on Aegypt -- a chimera, a parallel universe where magic was real, a world where people used to live and then -- and then? -- and this is all tangled up with the life's work of a dead author named Fellowes Kraft, whose house (and final manuscript) happen to be in the same village where Pierce is staying.
And what happens then? If this all sounds like I am describing the first of the four volumes, that's not surprising -- but I am also describing all four of them. The movement forward is tangible as you continue reading. Neither Pierce nor any of the other characters (including John Dee, Edward Kelley and Giordano Bruno) stands still for very long. Religion, science, magic, past and present flow in and out, currents of different temperatures but all part of one sea. Everything rushes toward a conclusion, like hurtling down a long, twisting tunnel (sometimes very dark) from which, in the end, all will burst out into the clean air again.
Circling and hurtling at once are, I think, good metaphors for the way this story travels toward its very satisfying conclusion. Along the way you'll find yourself smiling at the recurrences of dogs and roses, the numerous words containing the grapheme æ, the werewolves, the fairies, and angels.
So if you, my friend, would like me to tell you how it all ends -- I can't do that. It wouldn't make sense. You need to get on the raft along with Pierce and ride it through, because the experience is much more than the plot.
Pierce Moffett and the people of Blackbury Jambs remain prominent in all four volumes, and the thread that runs from start to finish is Pierce's little life -- his flawed, sad, typical, and yet inspiring, often challenging, life as a flawed and ultimately redeemable, forgivable, human being.
However, we don't follow Pierce for decades, and we don't travel with him into his old age. I think of the tetralogy as being anchored to Pierce's midlife crisis -- although he's a bit younger than literal midlife, he's certainly having a crisis. He doesn't know why he's here, what his purpose is, what his direction should be. Around him he observes the people of this rural wayside where he has found himself stopping, almost by accident. He circles around and around a grand idea for a massive literary work centered on Aegypt -- a chimera, a parallel universe where magic was real, a world where people used to live and then -- and then? -- and this is all tangled up with the life's work of a dead author named Fellowes Kraft, whose house (and final manuscript) happen to be in the same village where Pierce is staying.
And what happens then? If this all sounds like I am describing the first of the four volumes, that's not surprising -- but I am also describing all four of them. The movement forward is tangible as you continue reading. Neither Pierce nor any of the other characters (including John Dee, Edward Kelley and Giordano Bruno) stands still for very long. Religion, science, magic, past and present flow in and out, currents of different temperatures but all part of one sea. Everything rushes toward a conclusion, like hurtling down a long, twisting tunnel (sometimes very dark) from which, in the end, all will burst out into the clean air again.
Circling and hurtling at once are, I think, good metaphors for the way this story travels toward its very satisfying conclusion. Along the way you'll find yourself smiling at the recurrences of dogs and roses, the numerous words containing the grapheme æ, the werewolves, the fairies, and angels.
So if you, my friend, would like me to tell you how it all ends -- I can't do that. It wouldn't make sense. You need to get on the raft along with Pierce and ride it through, because the experience is much more than the plot.
November 19, 2012
A collection of unlikable, mildly revolting characters, do a lot of thinking, a bit of drugs, some solid ruining of their own lives, and occasionally have sex/affairs and/or randomly end up in pornos. Also, there's something about maybe how the old magical stories might be true even though they're false, which is repeated over and over throughout the book, but never actually gets any further than that. An utterly baffling book that wastes everyone's time. Now that you've read this synopsis, you don't even need to read the book, because this is all that's in it.
January 22, 2022
A typical, deep down, deep thinking, meandering and slow like hell Crowly book.
I wouldn't recommend it to anybody unless I know their reading habits very, very well. But it is exactly my kind of thing.
Crowley has become one of my favourite authors, because I can lose myself in his musings. Here his protagonist tries to figure out if there is more than one history, if time goes down different branches at specific moments. It is a complete brain book and we spend a lot of time in the Renaissance with Bruno Giordano and Shakespeare's milieu.
I guess readers who liked Jo Walton's Or What you Will could be okay with this as well. I was often reminded of Walton while reading.
I was listening to the audiobook narrated by Crowley himself which was well done. I will definitely go on with the series.
I wouldn't recommend it to anybody unless I know their reading habits very, very well. But it is exactly my kind of thing.
Crowley has become one of my favourite authors, because I can lose myself in his musings. Here his protagonist tries to figure out if there is more than one history, if time goes down different branches at specific moments. It is a complete brain book and we spend a lot of time in the Renaissance with Bruno Giordano and Shakespeare's milieu.
I guess readers who liked Jo Walton's Or What you Will could be okay with this as well. I was often reminded of Walton while reading.
I was listening to the audiobook narrated by Crowley himself which was well done. I will definitely go on with the series.
June 22, 2021
'He didn't understand what his book was about.'
I don't know if Crowley was attempting something different or merely struggling to fulfill a contractual obligation, but this was a meandering slog that I look forward to forgetting. I now know more about divorce and lesson planning than I want to.
There's nothing fantastical about this story to justify it being shelved as such by my library. It's a John Steinbeck novel without any meaningful social commentary.
I don't know if Crowley was attempting something different or merely struggling to fulfill a contractual obligation, but this was a meandering slog that I look forward to forgetting. I now know more about divorce and lesson planning than I want to.
There's nothing fantastical about this story to justify it being shelved as such by my library. It's a John Steinbeck novel without any meaningful social commentary.
September 4, 2017
Objavljena par godina nakon Kroulijevog Little Big-a, Aegypt (odn. The Solitudes kakav je naslov Krouli želeo da nosi ovaj roman, ali izdavač je bio bezobrazan) je prirodna evolucija tema načetih u prethodno pomenutom romanu. Magija sećanja, Hermes Triput-veliki (sl. prevod) i njegova učenja hermetizma: neki drugi, posebniji svet koji se krije u ovom našem.
Čudna struktura koja prati dva stvarna lika i dva semifiktivna (Djordano Bruno i Džon Di, likovi dva romana-unutar-romana istorijske fikcije) ponekad se čini napornom i kao da pravi pešačke prelaze za mahnito obrtanje stranica - što nije nužno loša stvar. Uživao sam i upijao i zamišljao kako bi to bilo da zaista svet ima Zaplet, da je svet nekada bio drugačije mesto. Jedina mana je što malo klimavo stoji kao nezavisan roman, kao Roman, pa treba pročitati i ostale delove. A njih prvo treba iskopati er Krauli, uvek negde izmedju "literarne" tzv. visoke književnosti i fantastike, nikad nije bio nešto naročito popularan, te se to odrazilo i na tiraž njegovih knjiga: četvrtu i poslednju ovog ciklusa iz nekog razloga gotovo je nemoguće naći u mekom povezu, bar na internetu odn. bukdepozitoriju.
4+
Čudna struktura koja prati dva stvarna lika i dva semifiktivna (Djordano Bruno i Džon Di, likovi dva romana-unutar-romana istorijske fikcije) ponekad se čini napornom i kao da pravi pešačke prelaze za mahnito obrtanje stranica - što nije nužno loša stvar. Uživao sam i upijao i zamišljao kako bi to bilo da zaista svet ima Zaplet, da je svet nekada bio drugačije mesto. Jedina mana je što malo klimavo stoji kao nezavisan roman, kao Roman, pa treba pročitati i ostale delove. A njih prvo treba iskopati er Krauli, uvek negde izmedju "literarne" tzv. visoke književnosti i fantastike, nikad nije bio nešto naročito popularan, te se to odrazilo i na tiraž njegovih knjiga: četvrtu i poslednju ovog ciklusa iz nekog razloga gotovo je nemoguće naći u mekom povezu, bar na internetu odn. bukdepozitoriju.
4+
June 29, 2016
Despite all the awards and claims, this is probably going to be a fundamentally disappointing book to anyone who is not a dedicated literature major.
Admittedly, it is only the first colume of an ambitious tetralogy but such a volume should make you want to read the next in sequence. My instinct was not to waste a mature life by doing so.
So what is wrong here? There is no doubt that it is well crafted (though with all the introspective confusions that seem to be de rigueur with the late twentieth century literary crowd) and it comes alive at moments.
Crowley can write exceptionally well when he wants to write well but the passages of lucidity are often subsumed in something that clearly demands four books, too much concentration and a lot of trust on the part of the reader.
In the end, the attraction of the book has to come down to the personality of the reader. It certainly can't be regarded as a classic fantasy but more an elaborate fiction about the concept of literary fantasy.
The literary component is well within the East Coast tradition of baby boomer narcissism and the fantasy element mere wistful posturing based on not having the courage to think the world other than it is without caveats.
It is a case of having one's cake and eat it perhaps - guardedly to embrace the fantasies of the past as if they were new discovered lands and yet embed oneself in a fictional working out of one's own life through literary evasion.
The book suffers from its era. The esoteric material that seems so exciting in 1987 is now widely available and in more interesting form on the 21st century internet. Few educated people now find Bruno or Dee an utter surprise.
Similarly, the gentle naivete of the baby boomer generation with its yearning for safe fantasy now looks more like a self-regarding irresponsibility whose effects have been dumped on their children and grand-children.
We start with Esalen and (at our best) with Martin Luther King and we end up with Hillary Clinton, perpetual warfare and low level economic gloom. This was the world the evasive fantastics made.
Wistful esotericism is the wrong sort of fantasy, an evasion based on words, instead of a deep insanely existential engagement with the other or a pragmatic facing off of the world geared to action.
Still, those of a literary cast of mind who have no sense of the fantastic - though every fiction is no more than a mental projection masquerading more or less as the 'real' - might find this an easy path to some otherkin thinking.
Personally, I would not dabble around the edges - I would leap straight into the radical fantastic and give up 'raffine' literary quality for more direct immersion in subversive thoughts and experiences.
October 30, 2016
I have heard about Crowley's Aegypt cycle for years but found it difficult to find. When I learned that the cycle was being re-issued, I brought the first volume warily, fearful that it would not live up to the hype. It does. What I really liked about this first book was Pierce's musing at the end. Pierce is thinking about an idea of alternative realities and right before he wonders about the outside world and the inner world. There is such truth to that. The book is a the first of the cycle so the pacing is a little leisurely, but because most of the main characters live, it isn't an issue. The reader is also treated to a couple stories within a story, including one about Shakespeare.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 4, 2025
4 - 4.5 stars
The world is a strange place. Or at least it can be. Somewhere behind the mundane facts of Egypt lies the storied land of Aegypt, the land from which mythic truths are born into the world. There is, as Crowley would say, more than one history of the world.
This is a secret that is discovered one day by Pierce Moffet, a history instructor at a small liberal college in New York whose lack of motivation, and strange ideas, are making his current academic position tenuous. Carried by his interests, and the synchronicity of fate, from the big city to the small town of Blackberry Jambs in the Faraway Hills, Pierce embarks on a strange adventure that could change not only his life, but perhaps even the very fabric of reality as we thought we knew it.
The book switches between telling us about Pierce’s recent past and current adventures in the country (along with the stories of some of the unique individuals he comes to meet in his new home) with the story of Doctor John Dee, occult advisor and intelligencer for Queen Elizabeth, in the 16th century and the possibly related tale of Hermeticist Giordano Bruno. What do the two storylines share in common and how are they connected? The reader soon finds that the historical segments of the story come from a book within the book we are reading: specifically, a historical fiction novel written by the equally fictional Fellowes Kraft (former resident of Blackberry Jambs and literary hero of Pierce’s childhood). I have to say that while I enjoyed the book as is, I would have been even happier to have had a complete copy of the novel of Kraft’s instead of simply a few excerpts.
This is the start of an epic tetralogy (and while it may be Crowley’s most ambitious work I doubt that many would argue that it displaces the more famous _Little, Big_ as his magnum opus), and many of Crowley’s obsessions from _Little, Big_ appear once again in this book, given an even wider scope for development and examination. From musings on the nature of reality and the intersection of the mundane with the numinous, the ‘real’ with the mythic, to the place of a somewhat ambivalent hero (who is about as much a cipher as a main character can be) lost in a world whose meaning lies far beyond his understanding, and a view of the retroactive creation of the stories that we make of the stuff of our lives, Crowley’s obsessions and interests are on full display. Not least of these is his ongoing fascination with John Dee who takes something close to center stage, though it must be admitted that the real occult hero of the story is Giordano Bruno, the de-frocked monk martyred in the name of magic (or was it science?)
I first read this book many moons ago and remember enjoying it while being somewhat baffled by it as well. I’d like to think my bafflement was a little less this time around, but my enjoyment was equal, if not greater, than it was before.
The world is a strange place. Or at least it can be. Somewhere behind the mundane facts of Egypt lies the storied land of Aegypt, the land from which mythic truths are born into the world. There is, as Crowley would say, more than one history of the world.
This is a secret that is discovered one day by Pierce Moffet, a history instructor at a small liberal college in New York whose lack of motivation, and strange ideas, are making his current academic position tenuous. Carried by his interests, and the synchronicity of fate, from the big city to the small town of Blackberry Jambs in the Faraway Hills, Pierce embarks on a strange adventure that could change not only his life, but perhaps even the very fabric of reality as we thought we knew it.
The book switches between telling us about Pierce’s recent past and current adventures in the country (along with the stories of some of the unique individuals he comes to meet in his new home) with the story of Doctor John Dee, occult advisor and intelligencer for Queen Elizabeth, in the 16th century and the possibly related tale of Hermeticist Giordano Bruno. What do the two storylines share in common and how are they connected? The reader soon finds that the historical segments of the story come from a book within the book we are reading: specifically, a historical fiction novel written by the equally fictional Fellowes Kraft (former resident of Blackberry Jambs and literary hero of Pierce’s childhood). I have to say that while I enjoyed the book as is, I would have been even happier to have had a complete copy of the novel of Kraft’s instead of simply a few excerpts.
This is the start of an epic tetralogy (and while it may be Crowley’s most ambitious work I doubt that many would argue that it displaces the more famous _Little, Big_ as his magnum opus), and many of Crowley’s obsessions from _Little, Big_ appear once again in this book, given an even wider scope for development and examination. From musings on the nature of reality and the intersection of the mundane with the numinous, the ‘real’ with the mythic, to the place of a somewhat ambivalent hero (who is about as much a cipher as a main character can be) lost in a world whose meaning lies far beyond his understanding, and a view of the retroactive creation of the stories that we make of the stuff of our lives, Crowley’s obsessions and interests are on full display. Not least of these is his ongoing fascination with John Dee who takes something close to center stage, though it must be admitted that the real occult hero of the story is Giordano Bruno, the de-frocked monk martyred in the name of magic (or was it science?)
I first read this book many moons ago and remember enjoying it while being somewhat baffled by it as well. I’d like to think my bafflement was a little less this time around, but my enjoyment was equal, if not greater, than it was before.
February 13, 2008
(My full review of this book is much longer than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)
So to even begin understanding today's essay, you need to first understand the following -- that what we now know as modern "science," back when it was invented in the 1500s, was in fact mostly a religious pursuit when it was first created. See, such deep thinkers back then ultimately wanted to be closer to God, and that led them to closely studying the way that God works out in nature; and since they wanted to share these discoveries with other deep thinkers, and be able to reproduce the discoveries in other environments around the world, a whole set of systematic rules started getting developed for how to perform and record such observations. And thus did the entire thing start resembling the "scientific process" we know today (form a theory; test it under unbiased conditions that can be reproduced by anyone; share your findings no matter what they are); and thus did such a process have less and less to do with religion over the centuries, with such "scientists" deliberately drubbing out such former mystical elements of their profession as alchemy so as to get the public to take them more seriously.
But was it in fact a mistake to drub out such metaphysical elements from what we now know as science? Did in fact the deep thinkers of humanity before the Renaissance have a different understanding of the way the world works, precisely by combining science with mysticism in the way they did back then, and did the deep thinkers of the Renaissance actually ruin something for humanity by separating the two topics? That's the question at the heart of John Crowley's The Solitudes, part 1 of a four-book cycle known officially as "Ægypt" (or "AEgypt" as I'll be calling it for the remainder of today's essay, to better accommodate those on web devices that cannot display special characters), a book which originally came out in 1987 but just last year received a major reworking and publishing. It is a frustrating book, I'll warn you right off the bat -- a dense, thick, scholarly novel, written in a style meant to sometimes deliberately confuse the reader, with a pacing that can drive you crazy at points and a storyline that is constantly flying at least a little bit right over your head. But it's also one of the most fascinating books I've read in years as well, a book that proposes ideas I've never heard another fantastical author even mention, ideas that literally take a lifetime of academic study to produce in the first place. It's a confusing book that elicits all kinds of shifting emotions in me that are hard to pin down; all of those things are of course going to end up affecting what I have to say about it today.
For example, let's start with just the surface-level plot itself; it is ostensibly the story of Pierce Moffett, a burned-out '60s history professor now muddling through life in the late '70s when our story takes place, who at the beginning of the book is just finishing up a disastrous few years in New York City, teaching at a hipster college in Brooklyn and living with a cunning and beautiful coke dealer in a concrete-lined condo in midtown Manhattan, going deeply into debt to support both the lifestyle the girlfriend brings and to help finance the illegal schemes she's constantly in the middle of cooking up. All of the elements just mentioned have recently blown up in Pierce's face, which is what finds him traveling by bus at the beginning of the novel to attend an interview at a precious private college in the northeast boonies; but right in the middle of the trip the bus breaks down, by complete coincidence in the picturesque upstate New York town of Faraway Hills, where by complete and utter coincidence an old '60s radical friend of his is now living and raising sheep. And thus does Pierce ditch the unmade interview and decide to relocate to Faraway Hills instead; and thus does he attend a series of precious small-town events like annual town-wide croquet matches and hot-air balloon races; and thus does Pierce ring up an ex-girlfriend who's now a literary agent and propose a new job for himself -- as the author of a series of Tolkien-style "Chariot of the Gods" type fantasy novels, so trendily popular in the late '70s, positing a world in which ancient races in mythical cities actually carved out the world we now know, just to fall into obscurity and to be forgotten in modern times.
Ah, but here's the first big complication -- that Pierce isn't kidding about any of the stuff being proposed, and in fact...
So to even begin understanding today's essay, you need to first understand the following -- that what we now know as modern "science," back when it was invented in the 1500s, was in fact mostly a religious pursuit when it was first created. See, such deep thinkers back then ultimately wanted to be closer to God, and that led them to closely studying the way that God works out in nature; and since they wanted to share these discoveries with other deep thinkers, and be able to reproduce the discoveries in other environments around the world, a whole set of systematic rules started getting developed for how to perform and record such observations. And thus did the entire thing start resembling the "scientific process" we know today (form a theory; test it under unbiased conditions that can be reproduced by anyone; share your findings no matter what they are); and thus did such a process have less and less to do with religion over the centuries, with such "scientists" deliberately drubbing out such former mystical elements of their profession as alchemy so as to get the public to take them more seriously.
But was it in fact a mistake to drub out such metaphysical elements from what we now know as science? Did in fact the deep thinkers of humanity before the Renaissance have a different understanding of the way the world works, precisely by combining science with mysticism in the way they did back then, and did the deep thinkers of the Renaissance actually ruin something for humanity by separating the two topics? That's the question at the heart of John Crowley's The Solitudes, part 1 of a four-book cycle known officially as "Ægypt" (or "AEgypt" as I'll be calling it for the remainder of today's essay, to better accommodate those on web devices that cannot display special characters), a book which originally came out in 1987 but just last year received a major reworking and publishing. It is a frustrating book, I'll warn you right off the bat -- a dense, thick, scholarly novel, written in a style meant to sometimes deliberately confuse the reader, with a pacing that can drive you crazy at points and a storyline that is constantly flying at least a little bit right over your head. But it's also one of the most fascinating books I've read in years as well, a book that proposes ideas I've never heard another fantastical author even mention, ideas that literally take a lifetime of academic study to produce in the first place. It's a confusing book that elicits all kinds of shifting emotions in me that are hard to pin down; all of those things are of course going to end up affecting what I have to say about it today.
For example, let's start with just the surface-level plot itself; it is ostensibly the story of Pierce Moffett, a burned-out '60s history professor now muddling through life in the late '70s when our story takes place, who at the beginning of the book is just finishing up a disastrous few years in New York City, teaching at a hipster college in Brooklyn and living with a cunning and beautiful coke dealer in a concrete-lined condo in midtown Manhattan, going deeply into debt to support both the lifestyle the girlfriend brings and to help finance the illegal schemes she's constantly in the middle of cooking up. All of the elements just mentioned have recently blown up in Pierce's face, which is what finds him traveling by bus at the beginning of the novel to attend an interview at a precious private college in the northeast boonies; but right in the middle of the trip the bus breaks down, by complete coincidence in the picturesque upstate New York town of Faraway Hills, where by complete and utter coincidence an old '60s radical friend of his is now living and raising sheep. And thus does Pierce ditch the unmade interview and decide to relocate to Faraway Hills instead; and thus does he attend a series of precious small-town events like annual town-wide croquet matches and hot-air balloon races; and thus does Pierce ring up an ex-girlfriend who's now a literary agent and propose a new job for himself -- as the author of a series of Tolkien-style "Chariot of the Gods" type fantasy novels, so trendily popular in the late '70s, positing a world in which ancient races in mythical cities actually carved out the world we now know, just to fall into obscurity and to be forgotten in modern times.
Ah, but here's the first big complication -- that Pierce isn't kidding about any of the stuff being proposed, and in fact...
July 5, 2017
I loved this book. Not only did it include invented works of historical fiction about Shakespeare, John Dee, and Giordano Bruno, the present-day "philosophical romance" was perfectly beautiful. For example, a summer night's party harkens back to paradisaical innocence. It's dreamy and a little hard to follow, but that's how it is, isn't it?
And the ideas... as good as any philosophy book. Better, because form and content are so intertwined. What is history? What does it mean that humans are so intent on creating meaning? And how does meaning come to be embodied in tangible ways? Maybe what I love most is the balance the book strikes--no, our fantasies aren't real, but no, they're also not impotent--Somehow the myths we create change the world, somehow Mind is more infinite than we realize. I can't wait to read the rest of the tetrology.
And the ideas... as good as any philosophy book. Better, because form and content are so intertwined. What is history? What does it mean that humans are so intent on creating meaning? And how does meaning come to be embodied in tangible ways? Maybe what I love most is the balance the book strikes--no, our fantasies aren't real, but no, they're also not impotent--Somehow the myths we create change the world, somehow Mind is more infinite than we realize. I can't wait to read the rest of the tetrology.
March 22, 2009
Toward the end of this very strange and ingenious novel, the author reviews it himself. The hero, Pierce Moffett, has come across an unpublished manuscript by a deceased author, and it sounds very much like The Solitudes itself:
"For it wasn't a *good* book at all, Pierce supposed, considered as a book, a novel; it was a philosophical romance, remote and extravagant, without much of the tang of life as it really must have gone on in the world--as it really *had* gone on if you meant *this* world, this only one in which, metaphors aside, we all have really and solely lived in. The character were hungry ghosts. . .the actual incidents great and small in which they in fact participated, all reduced to a winter's tale by the springs their actions were imagined here to have: the birth-pangs and death-throes of world-ages, the agonies of potent magicians, the work of daemons, of Christ's tears, of the ordering stars."
In other words, if you're reading for character and verisimilitude, you'll find it only in occasional patches: this is an idea-driven book. But the ideas are so intriguing, and Crowley's writing so lyrical, and some scenes so eerie and gripping, that you're never bored -- though you might well be exasperated!
"For it wasn't a *good* book at all, Pierce supposed, considered as a book, a novel; it was a philosophical romance, remote and extravagant, without much of the tang of life as it really must have gone on in the world--as it really *had* gone on if you meant *this* world, this only one in which, metaphors aside, we all have really and solely lived in. The character were hungry ghosts. . .the actual incidents great and small in which they in fact participated, all reduced to a winter's tale by the springs their actions were imagined here to have: the birth-pangs and death-throes of world-ages, the agonies of potent magicians, the work of daemons, of Christ's tears, of the ordering stars."
In other words, if you're reading for character and verisimilitude, you'll find it only in occasional patches: this is an idea-driven book. But the ideas are so intriguing, and Crowley's writing so lyrical, and some scenes so eerie and gripping, that you're never bored -- though you might well be exasperated!
April 10, 2017
Update: there is some genuinely beautiful writing here. Crowley crafts images and scenes that for me are exceptionally vivid. A joy to revisit.
When I first read this book (under its original title _Aegypt_) I greatly enjoyed it but I didn't have a mature enough perspective to get the most out of it. I also didn't know there was a sequel, and so when I read the third book in the sequence (_Daemonomania_) I was completely lost.
There is another history of the world, concurrent with the history taught to you in school, and Pierce Moffett seeks to chronicle this secret history (peopled by Giordano Bruno, John Dee, and Will Shakespeare among others). This book is the first part of four in the sequence, so you do get the sense that their journey is only beginning; if you only read this book, though, you're bound to think that the plot's going nowhere. I love occultism, and scholasticism, and rich stories that unfold slowly and gradually, so this (and any other Crowley, really) is perfect fare for me. Patience will be rewarded.
When I first read this book (under its original title _Aegypt_) I greatly enjoyed it but I didn't have a mature enough perspective to get the most out of it. I also didn't know there was a sequel, and so when I read the third book in the sequence (_Daemonomania_) I was completely lost.
There is another history of the world, concurrent with the history taught to you in school, and Pierce Moffett seeks to chronicle this secret history (peopled by Giordano Bruno, John Dee, and Will Shakespeare among others). This book is the first part of four in the sequence, so you do get the sense that their journey is only beginning; if you only read this book, though, you're bound to think that the plot's going nowhere. I love occultism, and scholasticism, and rich stories that unfold slowly and gradually, so this (and any other Crowley, really) is perfect fare for me. Patience will be rewarded.
July 13, 2010
I tried to read this twice. The first time, I mired in a very long description of landscape toward the end of Chapter Two. The landscape being described was sort of nice, I guess, but I did not feel it merited that many words. I would have been happier if he had said "there was a river there", and then moved on to the plot.
I came back to this book much later, shortly after discovering Kindle-For-Android. I made it through the description of how the protagonist was a broke ex-druggie who had been fired from his job as a liberal arts professor, and then there was some description of history books, and at that point I stopped reading, I think, for good.
I'm not specifically of the belief that a novel must have space aliens and KGB agents to hold my attention. But at the least, y'know... witty dialog? Something more than landscape.
I came back to this book much later, shortly after discovering Kindle-For-Android. I made it through the description of how the protagonist was a broke ex-druggie who had been fired from his job as a liberal arts professor, and then there was some description of history books, and at that point I stopped reading, I think, for good.
I'm not specifically of the belief that a novel must have space aliens and KGB agents to hold my attention. But at the least, y'know... witty dialog? Something more than landscape.
April 13, 2022
En inglés son cuatro tomos, pero en español se editaron sólo tres (ya conocemos esta historia los fans de sagas de fantasía). Los libros se pueden leer de manera independiente y tratan de Pierre Moffett, un historiador que se envuelto en una trama de ocultismo, alquimia y magia, guiado (por así decirlo) por John Dee y Giordano Bruno. La trama es un canto de amor al Renacimiento y al arte que produjo el Hermetismo de la época. Puede ser un poco denso a veces, pero tiene partes preciosas y juega con la estructura favorita de Crowley, un libro dentro de un libro.
May 4, 2023
There's little to say about this first novel in the quartet of John Crowley's Aegypt Cycle, only that it is a monumental and widescreen epic of time, perspective, love's labours lost, angels, magic, religion, and so much more. It is a wayfaring novel without villainy, and has the heroic yet deeply intellectual scope to make your mind breathless within so many levels, intensities, withdrawals of reality. The Solitudes is not just about one history, nor one individual, but many. Perhaps, it is one of the loneliest but most life-affirming novels I've ever read.
Absolutely stunning.
Absolutely stunning.
November 16, 2019
First book of four, a slowly evolving story of meta-mythology. Establishing Crowley not only as a master of the fantastic, but as a world-class writer. And since he surpasses most other writers in the fantastic, he will probably remain unknown to the greater audience. Luckily enough he went on to write even more fascinating tales.
July 28, 2020
To grasp the truth of stories patently false
To recover the dream-logic of history
ÆGYPT is an erudite and gorgeously written fantasy that has nothing whatsoever to do with the genre of fantasy. Fantastic yet completely realistic, static in setting and plotting yet spanning centuries and dozens of characters, it's like no other book I've ever read. It plods occasionally in its real-world moments, but soars delightfully when it gets back to its ecstatic flights of fancy. It's an incredible intellectual journey that has you in awe at its many-layered construction.
Based entirely in the real world (1976 New York), on the surface the book is about a historian conceptualizing a book he wants to write. Over the course of his research, the story begins to unfold on another level parallel to reality, and his descriptions of concepts and figures transform into meandering meditations on the nature of history and storytelling, that seem to bleed back into his reality and create echoes everywhere you look. This shadow narrative evokes wonder without ever describing anything but things that, at one time or another through history, were actually taught and believed, but which, over the course of the gradual accrual of scientific knowledge during the ensuing centuries, we left behind, one by one, and which consequently now strike we the living as wildly fanciful - sheer, utter, preposterous fantasy.
Rather than fantasy, then, this is Fantastic History: the history of our perception of reality, which has changed from age to age. An homage to the incredible bodies of arcane knowledge - Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Lullism, Neoplatonism - that mages and scholars now forgotten - names like Proclus, Iamblichus, Paracelsus, Horapollo - built up with painstaking care, learned scholars in century after century passing the torch of ever-evolving arcana, which comes down to us today in only fragments, and corrupted into contemptible new-age beliefs, which the book doesn't fail to poke fun at. The difference, the protagonist notes, between his book and the sort of new-agey books his publisher wants him to write instead (poke at the publishing industry), is that the protagonist knows the subject matter is false. He simply finds it incredibly fascinating.
Lamenting the state of affairs that has led us to completely forget where we came from, protagonist historian Pierce Moffett proposes to write a book that will bring to light the lost patrimony of this vast body of interconnected, defunct knowledge, this vanished history. Over the course of the book, he gradually re-discovers and connects the many and varied and truly incredible threads of philosophy and science and magic of the past, which were essentially all one and the same - as if an alternate history existed in which these things were real.
Alongside and beneath this green England there lay another country, made of time.
Much of the book's sheer, hedonistic pleasure comes from bathing in the cascade of esoteric philosophies and thinkers and concepts and metaphors that rain down on us from every page of this journey - the moirai, picatrix, Heimarmene, semhamaphore, Origen, Rosicrucianism, Zoroastrianism, Jewish Kabala, alchemy, talismans, horoscopi, the Monas Heiroglyphicae of John Dee, Plato's theory of forms, the concept of gates of horn and ivory... the list goes on...
Everything is interconnected, and has its parallels. The book's structure is based on the 12 signs of the zodiac, which parallels the concept of the celestial spheres that had dominated for centuries to be supplanted by the heliocentric model, partly with the help of Giordano Bruno, who parallels the book's historian protagonist, who moves from the city to the countryside to participate in the transhumance, which parallels the soul's journey outward through the spheres, which parallels Bruno's journey over the mountains out of Italy into Switzerland during his exile, which parallels the last chapter where the real-life characters go in hot-air balloons... etc.
A book by a writer who has obviously studied history, told from the point of view of a historian, who in the process of conceptualizing his book, discovers a book of historical fiction that seems to do exactly what he has been attempting with his own...
"Organize the book according to the twelve houses," he wrote, "each house a chapter or segment. Somewhere tell story of how 12 houses came to be, how changed meaning over time, but save this till late; let reader ponder, Vita? Lucrum? What's up, etc." ...so writes the protagonist, of the protagonist's book on page 328 of Crowley's book, 100 pages before the end.
A book within a book, storytellers telling of storytellers, spheres within spheres, cycles of ages repeating. The sheer intellectual bravado of the massively complicated web of interconnections he creates sends shivers down my spine. This was a tremendously interesting read, if a little unconventional in its narrative stasis. Everything that makes the novel great is essentially the protagonist thinking about the book he wants to write. And yet this is a delightful, beautiful book. It's impressive to pull off such a feat.
The book is the first of four, and although I think I need a break (my first thought upon finishing was: "Whew. Heady stuff."), I would like to get to them eventually, less for the usual mundane reasons of wanting to know how the story ends ("unlike histories, stories need endings") than simply to savor more of John Crowley's incredible scholarship and writing chops, and to bathe again in the glow of his dazzling reconstruction of our civilization's alternate history.
To recover the dream-logic of history
ÆGYPT is an erudite and gorgeously written fantasy that has nothing whatsoever to do with the genre of fantasy. Fantastic yet completely realistic, static in setting and plotting yet spanning centuries and dozens of characters, it's like no other book I've ever read. It plods occasionally in its real-world moments, but soars delightfully when it gets back to its ecstatic flights of fancy. It's an incredible intellectual journey that has you in awe at its many-layered construction.
Based entirely in the real world (1976 New York), on the surface the book is about a historian conceptualizing a book he wants to write. Over the course of his research, the story begins to unfold on another level parallel to reality, and his descriptions of concepts and figures transform into meandering meditations on the nature of history and storytelling, that seem to bleed back into his reality and create echoes everywhere you look. This shadow narrative evokes wonder without ever describing anything but things that, at one time or another through history, were actually taught and believed, but which, over the course of the gradual accrual of scientific knowledge during the ensuing centuries, we left behind, one by one, and which consequently now strike we the living as wildly fanciful - sheer, utter, preposterous fantasy.
Rather than fantasy, then, this is Fantastic History: the history of our perception of reality, which has changed from age to age. An homage to the incredible bodies of arcane knowledge - Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Lullism, Neoplatonism - that mages and scholars now forgotten - names like Proclus, Iamblichus, Paracelsus, Horapollo - built up with painstaking care, learned scholars in century after century passing the torch of ever-evolving arcana, which comes down to us today in only fragments, and corrupted into contemptible new-age beliefs, which the book doesn't fail to poke fun at. The difference, the protagonist notes, between his book and the sort of new-agey books his publisher wants him to write instead (poke at the publishing industry), is that the protagonist knows the subject matter is false. He simply finds it incredibly fascinating.
Lamenting the state of affairs that has led us to completely forget where we came from, protagonist historian Pierce Moffett proposes to write a book that will bring to light the lost patrimony of this vast body of interconnected, defunct knowledge, this vanished history. Over the course of the book, he gradually re-discovers and connects the many and varied and truly incredible threads of philosophy and science and magic of the past, which were essentially all one and the same - as if an alternate history existed in which these things were real.
Alongside and beneath this green England there lay another country, made of time.
Much of the book's sheer, hedonistic pleasure comes from bathing in the cascade of esoteric philosophies and thinkers and concepts and metaphors that rain down on us from every page of this journey - the moirai, picatrix, Heimarmene, semhamaphore, Origen, Rosicrucianism, Zoroastrianism, Jewish Kabala, alchemy, talismans, horoscopi, the Monas Heiroglyphicae of John Dee, Plato's theory of forms, the concept of gates of horn and ivory... the list goes on...
Everything is interconnected, and has its parallels. The book's structure is based on the 12 signs of the zodiac, which parallels the concept of the celestial spheres that had dominated for centuries to be supplanted by the heliocentric model, partly with the help of Giordano Bruno, who parallels the book's historian protagonist, who moves from the city to the countryside to participate in the transhumance, which parallels the soul's journey outward through the spheres, which parallels Bruno's journey over the mountains out of Italy into Switzerland during his exile, which parallels the last chapter where the real-life characters go in hot-air balloons... etc.
A book by a writer who has obviously studied history, told from the point of view of a historian, who in the process of conceptualizing his book, discovers a book of historical fiction that seems to do exactly what he has been attempting with his own...
"Organize the book according to the twelve houses," he wrote, "each house a chapter or segment. Somewhere tell story of how 12 houses came to be, how changed meaning over time, but save this till late; let reader ponder, Vita? Lucrum? What's up, etc." ...so writes the protagonist, of the protagonist's book on page 328 of Crowley's book, 100 pages before the end.
A book within a book, storytellers telling of storytellers, spheres within spheres, cycles of ages repeating. The sheer intellectual bravado of the massively complicated web of interconnections he creates sends shivers down my spine. This was a tremendously interesting read, if a little unconventional in its narrative stasis. Everything that makes the novel great is essentially the protagonist thinking about the book he wants to write. And yet this is a delightful, beautiful book. It's impressive to pull off such a feat.
The book is the first of four, and although I think I need a break (my first thought upon finishing was: "Whew. Heady stuff."), I would like to get to them eventually, less for the usual mundane reasons of wanting to know how the story ends ("unlike histories, stories need endings") than simply to savor more of John Crowley's incredible scholarship and writing chops, and to bathe again in the glow of his dazzling reconstruction of our civilization's alternate history.
January 24, 2019
I don't think it is fair to have to rate a book before reviewing it - this is my second read through of this book and I positively dislike it.
I suspect I am as shallow and vapid as most of the characters in this God awful book because I tried really hard to read it again after a glowing review in The American Scholar which said that this is THE book for any serious reader to read. I consider myself a serious reader and so I decided to tackle it. I even bought all four volumes at once. For future reference when any glowing review contains the following phrases " summarizing the plot is near impossible", "the book is less about plot than about the internal workings of its main characters", " the reader has to do most of the work", put down your digital device and run in the opposite direction.
Aegypt is about Pierce Moffett, a shallow and self obsessed academic licking his wounds after a failed love affair. His bus breaks down on his way to a job interview in a all village called Blackburn Jambs chock full of the sort of hippies that gave the eighties a bad name. There's even a thinly veiled bacchanalian revel that leads to some casual nudity. Everyone speaks in lazy sentences that leave their endings hanging and you wonder if Crowley himself used a liberal amount of pot while writing the opening chapters.
Crowley is an amazing wordsmith. With emphasis on wordsmith. He is brilliant at evoking images and wordplay but his characters are not people you want to spend time with and his paragraphs and chapters tend to swell and bloat until you realize that the difference between the ideas in his head and what he puts to paper is the difference between a supermodel and his/her body after fishing it out of a river.
And for those who think I haven't gotten the underlying allegories and symbolism - I got a lot of it and I am sure I missed a lot more - still I found none of it enriching my experience of reading this book. Beau and Spofford are both compared to the Christ. Beau is compared to Pan. The number three crops up a million times. And so on and so forth. Yes Mr. Crowley, you are very clever. But cleverness without a point or direction is nothing more than shallow egotism.
Those who are looking for some answers or even a partial resolution by the end of this book - let me be very frank (and this is not a spoiler) nothing happens. Even if something does happen I don't care. Pierce, Rose and Rosie can all collect digital dust in the unopened sequels on my Kindle.
I suspect I am as shallow and vapid as most of the characters in this God awful book because I tried really hard to read it again after a glowing review in The American Scholar which said that this is THE book for any serious reader to read. I consider myself a serious reader and so I decided to tackle it. I even bought all four volumes at once. For future reference when any glowing review contains the following phrases " summarizing the plot is near impossible", "the book is less about plot than about the internal workings of its main characters", " the reader has to do most of the work", put down your digital device and run in the opposite direction.
Aegypt is about Pierce Moffett, a shallow and self obsessed academic licking his wounds after a failed love affair. His bus breaks down on his way to a job interview in a all village called Blackburn Jambs chock full of the sort of hippies that gave the eighties a bad name. There's even a thinly veiled bacchanalian revel that leads to some casual nudity. Everyone speaks in lazy sentences that leave their endings hanging and you wonder if Crowley himself used a liberal amount of pot while writing the opening chapters.
Crowley is an amazing wordsmith. With emphasis on wordsmith. He is brilliant at evoking images and wordplay but his characters are not people you want to spend time with and his paragraphs and chapters tend to swell and bloat until you realize that the difference between the ideas in his head and what he puts to paper is the difference between a supermodel and his/her body after fishing it out of a river.
And for those who think I haven't gotten the underlying allegories and symbolism - I got a lot of it and I am sure I missed a lot more - still I found none of it enriching my experience of reading this book. Beau and Spofford are both compared to the Christ. Beau is compared to Pan. The number three crops up a million times. And so on and so forth. Yes Mr. Crowley, you are very clever. But cleverness without a point or direction is nothing more than shallow egotism.
Those who are looking for some answers or even a partial resolution by the end of this book - let me be very frank (and this is not a spoiler) nothing happens. Even if something does happen I don't care. Pierce, Rose and Rosie can all collect digital dust in the unopened sequels on my Kindle.
May 31, 2017
This novel requires the reader to give it thought and patience in order to absorb its multiple layers. The simplest description I can give it is that it is a strange combination of any novel by Dan Brown and the first novel in The Magicians trilogy. Aegypt treads a line between fantasy and quantum physics, and its theme is that truth and history can vary with time, data, and the observer. It's also about coming of age in America, and a good chunk of it is historical fiction.
Ursula Le Guin said that Crowley's book Little, Big, published in 1981 “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” Having not yet read the Little, Big, I will say that I saw in Aegypt--published in 1988--the foundation for more recent fantasy novels, such as the aforementioned Magicians trilogy. The characters in Aegypt are similar in a variety of ways to those of The Magicians--Americans stumbling through life, not quite fitting in--but the most important commonality is the existence of magic (theurgy) in the real world. Aegypt (and I must note that I mean the first volume of the series because I haven't yet read the rest) subtly explores this theme by positing that magic exists as a body of knowledge that was suppressed (by Christian religious leaders) and then forgotten, as practitioners died and the sciences of physics and astronomy moved forward. But small clues remain to suggest that these sciences cannot completely explain the functioning of the universe on either a macro or micro scale, and the central character of Aegypt, Pierce Moffett, has finally reached a point and place in time and in his life to be able to explore those clues.
But if you choose to read Aegypt, do not expect the adventures and drama that are frequently found in books that cover fantasy and magic. Aegypt is subtle almost to a fault, and it wasn't until I got well into the book and did some additional background reading on people like Giordano Bruno and John Dee that I felt like I had caught or been lured into the flow of the novel. By the end, though, I was definitely hooked and am looking forward to part two.
Ursula Le Guin said that Crowley's book Little, Big, published in 1981 “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” Having not yet read the Little, Big, I will say that I saw in Aegypt--published in 1988--the foundation for more recent fantasy novels, such as the aforementioned Magicians trilogy. The characters in Aegypt are similar in a variety of ways to those of The Magicians--Americans stumbling through life, not quite fitting in--but the most important commonality is the existence of magic (theurgy) in the real world. Aegypt (and I must note that I mean the first volume of the series because I haven't yet read the rest) subtly explores this theme by positing that magic exists as a body of knowledge that was suppressed (by Christian religious leaders) and then forgotten, as practitioners died and the sciences of physics and astronomy moved forward. But small clues remain to suggest that these sciences cannot completely explain the functioning of the universe on either a macro or micro scale, and the central character of Aegypt, Pierce Moffett, has finally reached a point and place in time and in his life to be able to explore those clues.
But if you choose to read Aegypt, do not expect the adventures and drama that are frequently found in books that cover fantasy and magic. Aegypt is subtle almost to a fault, and it wasn't until I got well into the book and did some additional background reading on people like Giordano Bruno and John Dee that I felt like I had caught or been lured into the flow of the novel. By the end, though, I was definitely hooked and am looking forward to part two.
June 25, 2025
Der innere Monolog Pierce Moffats, der auf einer Busfahrt zu einem Vorstellungsgespräch ist. Welche 3 Wünsche würde er sich von einem Dschinn erfüllen lassen? Er hat sich das genauestens überlegt. Was bedeuten ihm die Namen der Städte entlang der Mautstrasse?
Mir scheint, das ist ein Buch eines Intellektuellen für Intellektuelle. Ich bin keiner. Es ist nichts für mich. Auch den 2. Versuch, das Buch zu lesen, habe ich bald aufgegeben.
Mir scheint, das ist ein Buch eines Intellektuellen für Intellektuelle. Ich bin keiner. Es ist nichts für mich. Auch den 2. Versuch, das Buch zu lesen, habe ich bald aufgegeben.
February 25, 2024
Best book I've read in years - maybe since the last thing I've read of his, Little, Big. Crowley is able to write in such a way as to make things beautiful: he reminds me of Fellini in setting up relatively mundane characters, places and scenes and creating a surreal, vivid and perfect dream of them. I tried to only read a few pages at a time, so that the book wouldn't end as fast.
"When Doctor Dee took his shoulder, everything in the glass - the ship, the child, the powers, the depths - closed up one after another as though he hurtled backward away from them through curtains rapidly drawn: backward through the window, through the showstone in the armed child's hand, through the row of strong young men in green whose names all began with A (seeming startled and windblown just for a moment, looking on one another, before a hand - it was the skryer's own - drew a bright curtain over them and they too were gone), and he fell backward into the upper chamber at Mortlake and the night: the real globe of smoky quartz came into view, and his own hand before it was the curtain drawn over it; he was groaning, and Doctor Dee waa helping him to his feet and to a chair."
"There were angels in the glass, two four six many of them, they kept pressing in one by one, always room for one more; they linked arms of clasped their hands behind them and looked out at the two mortals who looked in at them. They were all dressed in green, and wore fillets or wreaths of flowers and green leaves in their loose hair; their eyes were strangely gay, and their names all began with A."
The book is set about 65% in the US in the 70s or 80s, and the rest following the history of Renaissance magic, via Doctor Dee and Giordano Bruno. The US bits are not that exciting per se but very cozy; the Renaissance bits are just so fucking cool.
It's not an easy book, but it's a rewarding one. If you want something challenging and immensely beautiful, read it.
"When Doctor Dee took his shoulder, everything in the glass - the ship, the child, the powers, the depths - closed up one after another as though he hurtled backward away from them through curtains rapidly drawn: backward through the window, through the showstone in the armed child's hand, through the row of strong young men in green whose names all began with A (seeming startled and windblown just for a moment, looking on one another, before a hand - it was the skryer's own - drew a bright curtain over them and they too were gone), and he fell backward into the upper chamber at Mortlake and the night: the real globe of smoky quartz came into view, and his own hand before it was the curtain drawn over it; he was groaning, and Doctor Dee waa helping him to his feet and to a chair."
"There were angels in the glass, two four six many of them, they kept pressing in one by one, always room for one more; they linked arms of clasped their hands behind them and looked out at the two mortals who looked in at them. They were all dressed in green, and wore fillets or wreaths of flowers and green leaves in their loose hair; their eyes were strangely gay, and their names all began with A."
The book is set about 65% in the US in the 70s or 80s, and the rest following the history of Renaissance magic, via Doctor Dee and Giordano Bruno. The US bits are not that exciting per se but very cozy; the Renaissance bits are just so fucking cool.
It's not an easy book, but it's a rewarding one. If you want something challenging and immensely beautiful, read it.
January 19, 2021
Un libro interesante. No creo que ser parte del público apropiado para comprender y disfrutar con profundidad su lectura, pero aun así me alegro de haberlo leído.
December 1, 2021
As I've come to familiarize myself with John Crowley's work, I have found that, as with many authors, there are specific themes and motifs that writers will often come back to again and again, and I think with Crowley, one of those is the notion of myth-making; the act of reading and writing stories that have generational longevity and power, and elements of the fantastical. Little, Big was all about the culmination of "the Tale" of the Drinkwaters, for example.
Aegypt (or, The Solitudes, I should say) is Crowley's most metafictional work so far, being centered on the writing of a novel that combined history, speculative history and fictional history, as those elements start bleeding into the events of the immediate narrative.
It's Crowley, so of course it's beautifully written, expertly realized and complexly layered and dense-- and there's a lot of other aspects in here that have solidified his status as one of my favorites... The character interaction and dialogue is so compelling and naturalistic, and I don't think many other authors in the genre have been able to match Crowley's talent for that.
That all said, I do think that the slipstream-esque, postmodernist quality the book takes on makes it a tad too much on the highbrow side for my taste-- it's catering to a very very specific kind of reader, and while I did largely enjoy it, I think it's a series that I not only have to read in its entirety to understand more fully, but one that I'll likely have to reread to get as much out of it as I can.
Aegypt (or, The Solitudes, I should say) is Crowley's most metafictional work so far, being centered on the writing of a novel that combined history, speculative history and fictional history, as those elements start bleeding into the events of the immediate narrative.
It's Crowley, so of course it's beautifully written, expertly realized and complexly layered and dense-- and there's a lot of other aspects in here that have solidified his status as one of my favorites... The character interaction and dialogue is so compelling and naturalistic, and I don't think many other authors in the genre have been able to match Crowley's talent for that.
That all said, I do think that the slipstream-esque, postmodernist quality the book takes on makes it a tad too much on the highbrow side for my taste-- it's catering to a very very specific kind of reader, and while I did largely enjoy it, I think it's a series that I not only have to read in its entirety to understand more fully, but one that I'll likely have to reread to get as much out of it as I can.
December 7, 2016
It hurts to write this, but I can't remember a letdown as big as Aegypt. Because I loved Little, Big and recommend it to everyone, I was expecting so much more from Crowley. This book is bad.
Crowley is at his best when dealing with the occult and esoteric history. But then he interrupts with dull scenes from the daily life of baby boomers driving around and running errands. There's a very long scene of a hippie party by a lake in the woods, an event where absolutely nothing happens. Characters laugh for no apparent reason, as if to say, "hey reader, isn't modern life so crazy!" And finally, there appear to be two important characters both named Rose. How am I supposed to tell them apart?
A short list of howlers:
Page 123: "Boney noticed her following, but took no notice." Boney is a man of contradictions.
Page 128: sample dialogue:
"Hello."
"Hello, Rosie."
"Hi Mike."
I feel as though I have pierced deep into the souls of these people, and now I know all.
Page 131: "The dense hot air was charged with its nearness." Indeed, the air is so near, it's practically touching the skin.
Page 133: "Spofford, who poured red wine for him black in the moonlight." Is it red or black? Or maybe it's purple, like the prose.
Four red flags in the space of 10 pages. I give up. There are better books that need reading.
Skip Aegypt and go straight to Little, Big.
Crowley is at his best when dealing with the occult and esoteric history. But then he interrupts with dull scenes from the daily life of baby boomers driving around and running errands. There's a very long scene of a hippie party by a lake in the woods, an event where absolutely nothing happens. Characters laugh for no apparent reason, as if to say, "hey reader, isn't modern life so crazy!" And finally, there appear to be two important characters both named Rose. How am I supposed to tell them apart?
A short list of howlers:
Page 123: "Boney noticed her following, but took no notice." Boney is a man of contradictions.
Page 128: sample dialogue:
"Hello."
"Hello, Rosie."
"Hi Mike."
I feel as though I have pierced deep into the souls of these people, and now I know all.
Page 131: "The dense hot air was charged with its nearness." Indeed, the air is so near, it's practically touching the skin.
Page 133: "Spofford, who poured red wine for him black in the moonlight." Is it red or black? Or maybe it's purple, like the prose.
Four red flags in the space of 10 pages. I give up. There are better books that need reading.
Skip Aegypt and go straight to Little, Big.
November 17, 2017
I read this book at two different times in my life, two decades apart. The first time, I didn’t like the book, found it vague, the characters unsympathetic, and the many references unfamiliar and this meant nothing to me. On the heels of my favorite much-reread Little, Big, this was deeply unsatisfying.
But twenty years later, in my 50s, after a degree in literary studies and much, much more reading, my experience with this book is completely different.
This time I experienced it as an audiobook, read to me during the quiet moments of my life —on car trips, while waiting, at bedtime—in the author’s own gentle, friendly voice that gave life to the characters. My own life experiences brought deeper understanding of the events and my education gave rich color to the references. Now I’m ready for the book as I simply was not 20 years ago.
Crowley is a master, probably the one great literary masters of our time.
But twenty years later, in my 50s, after a degree in literary studies and much, much more reading, my experience with this book is completely different.
This time I experienced it as an audiobook, read to me during the quiet moments of my life —on car trips, while waiting, at bedtime—in the author’s own gentle, friendly voice that gave life to the characters. My own life experiences brought deeper understanding of the events and my education gave rich color to the references. Now I’m ready for the book as I simply was not 20 years ago.
Crowley is a master, probably the one great literary masters of our time.
September 30, 2023
This was a re-read.
I love this book. Absolutely nothing happens, but it's somehow still compelling.
The book is really *about* books, and stories, and the way the story is framed (sort of recursively nested) is very clever.
The book is full of a lot of little interesting historical tidbits (mostly about astrology and other esoteric topics) that cause you to think a little differently about the history of the world, as it is presently known.
And John Crowley's prose is beautiful, as should be evident from the above quotes.
I love this book. Absolutely nothing happens, but it's somehow still compelling.
For it wasn't a good book at all, Pierce supposed, considered as a book, a novel; it was a philosophical romance, remote and extravagant...
The book is really *about* books, and stories, and the way the story is framed (sort of recursively nested) is very clever.
Stories inside, each one nested within all the others; as though all the stories we had ever been inside of lay still nested inside of us, back to the beginning, whenever that is or was.
The book is full of a lot of little interesting historical tidbits (mostly about astrology and other esoteric topics) that cause you to think a little differently about the history of the world, as it is presently known.
And John Crowley's prose is beautiful, as should be evident from the above quotes.
July 16, 2014
No quite sure how to comment on this book; it was a long read for me, which is usually a sign that I didn't like it. In this case, I would say that it took me longer because it was a difficult read for me.
The author utilizes a book within a book conceit (at one point 4 regressions deep) that left me struggling to understand the overall thrust of the book.
In the end, I'm not sure if I understood what Crowley was trying to get across. I have 3-4 candidates for that understanding, but none is sufficiently clear to choose as the winner. I found the book to be a rewarding read, and one for which a book club-style discussion would have been helpful.
The author utilizes a book within a book conceit (at one point 4 regressions deep) that left me struggling to understand the overall thrust of the book.
In the end, I'm not sure if I understood what Crowley was trying to get across. I have 3-4 candidates for that understanding, but none is sufficiently clear to choose as the winner. I found the book to be a rewarding read, and one for which a book club-style discussion would have been helpful.
November 20, 2007
Possibly the most formative book I've ever read. The main character, Pierce Moffat, feels so familiar to me that it was easy for Crowley's brilliant prose to influence how I saw the world.
Often compared to Robertson Davies in his use of history and sense of detail, Crowley actually leaves the old master behind with the sheer world-cracking scope of the piece.
Intellectually demanding, but rewarding beyond belief.
This is the beginning of a four book series which was completed this year and yet this one can stand on its own. (The others in the series can't.)
Often compared to Robertson Davies in his use of history and sense of detail, Crowley actually leaves the old master behind with the sheer world-cracking scope of the piece.
Intellectually demanding, but rewarding beyond belief.
This is the beginning of a four book series which was completed this year and yet this one can stand on its own. (The others in the series can't.)
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