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The Ægypt Cycle #4
Endless Things
Praise for the Aegypt sequence:
"A dizzying experience, achieved with unerring security of technique."-The New York Times Book Review
"A master of language, plot, and characterization."-Harold Bloom
"The further in you go, the bigger it gets."-James Hynes
"The writing here is intricate and thoughtful, allusive and ironic. . . . Aegypt bears many resemblances, incidental and substantive, to Thomas Pynchon's wonderful 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49."-USA Today
"An original moralist of the same giddy heights occupied by Thomas Mann and Robertson Davies."-San Francisco Chronicle
This is the fourth novel-and much-anticipated conclusion-of John Crowley's astonishing and lauded Aegypt sequence: a dense, lyrical meditation on history, alchemy, and memory. Spanning three centuries, and weaving together the stories of Renaissance magician John Dee, philosopher Giordano Bruno, and present-day itinerant historian and writer Pierce Moffitt, the Aegypt sequence is as richly significant as Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet or Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time. Crowley, a master prose stylist, explores transformations physical, magical, alchemical, and personal in this epic, distinctly American novel where the past, present, and future reflect each other.
John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine. His most recent novel is Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land. He teaches creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He finds it more gratifying that almost all of his work is still in print.
341 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2007
30 people are currently reading
809 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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Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
April 9, 2008
I don't know why anyone would want to read this little mini-review, but here it goes. This is the fourth and final part of the Aegypt series of books, the books started coming out in the late 80's and then at longer and longer intervals they continued to come out till last year the final installment appeared, along with the eventual re-issue of the previous novels.
This series of books is quite interesting, a great mixture of occult and esoterica, with very good writing and engaging characters. The first book offered up a lot of hope that the whole series would be incredible, and I described the book as being what I imagined the Da Vinci Code, would be like if it had actually been a good book. (See I say things like that without having read much of the Dan Brown mega-bestseller. And I feel safe saying it because I've read little bits and pieces and seen the chapter lengths and I've deduced that the book must be kind of awful. I make statements like that all the time. One may call them close-minded and snobbish, or educated guesses.) But anyway, the book had many interesting aspects to it, a multi-thread story in the 'present' day and in Elizabethan England with historical figures like Dee and Bruno.
The general gist of the whole series is that what if the world has not always been as it is now, and that there is one or more secret histories to the world, or alternate histories. The basis of this being that there was once a world with magic (alchemy), and that this all stemmed from the country of Aegypt, which is the same but not the same at all as the country we would call Egypt. The books protagonist, an unemployed history professor sort of stumbles on the idea of writing a book about the world with it's different histories, and how ages come into being and die leaving things essentially the same but subtly different.
As the series progresses the story of a new age coming into being moves forward (ok, if you're reading this, you might want to stop here, I'm going to ruin things for the reader who likes not knowing what happens next), but by the fourth book it seems as if something radically different has happened to the way the story would head. Instead of rushing into a headlong rush to a certain teleological endpoint, the story swings around and leaves a lot of it's mysticism behind and moves forward in the way that the characters progress. This is a slight disappointment for the reader (like myself), who kind of wants more mysticism, more ultimate good fighting ultimate evil, but the diverging trajectory of the storyline makes a certain thematic sense when looked at in the light of events in the multiple threads of the story.
Jeez, is this making any sense? The more I'm thinking of the book, the more I'm appreciating some of the subtlety employed in the last book.
In the end I'd highly recommend this series of books, and in a just world many people would read this, especially since watered down versions of the subjects covered in this book have been racing around the best-seller lists these past couple of years (Dan Brown, The Secret and it's Hermetic lite ideas). Good intelligent engaging fiction.
This series of books is quite interesting, a great mixture of occult and esoterica, with very good writing and engaging characters. The first book offered up a lot of hope that the whole series would be incredible, and I described the book as being what I imagined the Da Vinci Code, would be like if it had actually been a good book. (See I say things like that without having read much of the Dan Brown mega-bestseller. And I feel safe saying it because I've read little bits and pieces and seen the chapter lengths and I've deduced that the book must be kind of awful. I make statements like that all the time. One may call them close-minded and snobbish, or educated guesses.) But anyway, the book had many interesting aspects to it, a multi-thread story in the 'present' day and in Elizabethan England with historical figures like Dee and Bruno.
The general gist of the whole series is that what if the world has not always been as it is now, and that there is one or more secret histories to the world, or alternate histories. The basis of this being that there was once a world with magic (alchemy), and that this all stemmed from the country of Aegypt, which is the same but not the same at all as the country we would call Egypt. The books protagonist, an unemployed history professor sort of stumbles on the idea of writing a book about the world with it's different histories, and how ages come into being and die leaving things essentially the same but subtly different.
As the series progresses the story of a new age coming into being moves forward (ok, if you're reading this, you might want to stop here, I'm going to ruin things for the reader who likes not knowing what happens next), but by the fourth book it seems as if something radically different has happened to the way the story would head. Instead of rushing into a headlong rush to a certain teleological endpoint, the story swings around and leaves a lot of it's mysticism behind and moves forward in the way that the characters progress. This is a slight disappointment for the reader (like myself), who kind of wants more mysticism, more ultimate good fighting ultimate evil, but the diverging trajectory of the storyline makes a certain thematic sense when looked at in the light of events in the multiple threads of the story.
Jeez, is this making any sense? The more I'm thinking of the book, the more I'm appreciating some of the subtlety employed in the last book.
In the end I'd highly recommend this series of books, and in a just world many people would read this, especially since watered down versions of the subjects covered in this book have been racing around the best-seller lists these past couple of years (Dan Brown, The Secret and it's Hermetic lite ideas). Good intelligent engaging fiction.
October 8, 2014
I would still give the Aegypt series as a whole 5 stars, if only for boldness and complexity of vision and its execution, but this final installment was something of a disappointment to me. But even as I say this I know that in a way the whole series was about disappointment and thwarted dreams that are forced to find other lesser avenues of expression.
The series started with the possibility of opening doorways into mansions containing new worlds within worlds, and ends with someone buying a simple house in a small town. There's a poignancy to the ending, and maybe a touch of natural magic, but nowhere near the earth-shaking possibilities present at the beginning.
So in a way the books trace a pattern that is true for most of our lives - big cosmic dreams giving way to simple earthly pleasures - which isn't so bad I guess...
The series started with the possibility of opening doorways into mansions containing new worlds within worlds, and ends with someone buying a simple house in a small town. There's a poignancy to the ending, and maybe a touch of natural magic, but nowhere near the earth-shaking possibilities present at the beginning.
So in a way the books trace a pattern that is true for most of our lives - big cosmic dreams giving way to simple earthly pleasures - which isn't so bad I guess...
June 29, 2013
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a World Fantasy Convention. As part of the package, I was given a tout-bag full of various books. Most of these are still sitting around somewhere... some have been given to friends. One of these books sent me on a literary journey which, thankfully, is not quite over. Endless Things was the first book by John Crowley that I have owned, but until recently have not had the previous three volumes to read. Along the way, searching for these lost books, I read Crowley's other works (with the exception of Four Freedoms and some of his short fiction)and he quickly became one of my favorite authors. I was anxious about reading this series, one that took twenty years to write... time for the author to lose his focus or change his writing style dramatically.
There was no need to worry.
I do not know how to review this concluding volume, so instead I'll make some comments on it and then review briefly the series as a whole. In Endless Things, several purposes are at work. This is a frame story to contain the previous three novels, a resolution to Pierce's character arc, and a sort of coda. A perfect ending to a wonderful series, the various changes in reference points concerning events of the entire series are breathtaking,insightful, and satisfying.
I am now convinced that Aegypt is a work of magic realism. This should clue you in on the actual type of work you are in for. If this were written by some of those authors at the World Fantasy Convention, there would be magical duels and a convoluted reason for magic and the battle for the history of our world as it competes with other histories. Not so in magic realism. Aegypt, despite its magical trappings, is about real struggles of characters that become all too real. Life is faced, and the swash-buckling techniques of fantasy to resolve problems are impossible here.
By reading something like this, you get an actual sense of what escapism actually is and what distinguishes genre fiction from literary masterpieces. Unfortunately, due to the troublesome publication history of this series coupled with the odd condition that Crowley's potential readership is going to be those used to genre fiction make this series inaccessible both in a physical and mental sense. Those used to genre fiction will want something different then what John Crowley actually has to offer, and unmet expectations is somehow a critical mistake to this readership.
But there is more then one history of the world, and the world does end from time to time. People's thoughts will change, and as the readership matures and hungers for what the typical fare can not provide, they will find from the past such works as John Crowley's Aegypt. Like Melville's Moby Dick or Edgar Alan Poe, it will burst into life further into the future though ignored mostly when published. These readers will then wonder, where was this series of books the entire time? And the answer, as with most important things in life, will be that it was always there... right in front of you, though it took a journey before you could recognize it at what you were looking for.
There was no need to worry.
I do not know how to review this concluding volume, so instead I'll make some comments on it and then review briefly the series as a whole. In Endless Things, several purposes are at work. This is a frame story to contain the previous three novels, a resolution to Pierce's character arc, and a sort of coda. A perfect ending to a wonderful series, the various changes in reference points concerning events of the entire series are breathtaking,insightful, and satisfying.
I am now convinced that Aegypt is a work of magic realism. This should clue you in on the actual type of work you are in for. If this were written by some of those authors at the World Fantasy Convention, there would be magical duels and a convoluted reason for magic and the battle for the history of our world as it competes with other histories. Not so in magic realism. Aegypt, despite its magical trappings, is about real struggles of characters that become all too real. Life is faced, and the swash-buckling techniques of fantasy to resolve problems are impossible here.
By reading something like this, you get an actual sense of what escapism actually is and what distinguishes genre fiction from literary masterpieces. Unfortunately, due to the troublesome publication history of this series coupled with the odd condition that Crowley's potential readership is going to be those used to genre fiction make this series inaccessible both in a physical and mental sense. Those used to genre fiction will want something different then what John Crowley actually has to offer, and unmet expectations is somehow a critical mistake to this readership.
But there is more then one history of the world, and the world does end from time to time. People's thoughts will change, and as the readership matures and hungers for what the typical fare can not provide, they will find from the past such works as John Crowley's Aegypt. Like Melville's Moby Dick or Edgar Alan Poe, it will burst into life further into the future though ignored mostly when published. These readers will then wonder, where was this series of books the entire time? And the answer, as with most important things in life, will be that it was always there... right in front of you, though it took a journey before you could recognize it at what you were looking for.
June 20, 2016
Wow, it feels like the end of an era. Or something like it. I read Aegypt (since retitled The Solitudes) when it first came out in 1987, still high on Crowley's earlier Little, Big, then and now one of my favorite novels of all time. Nearly 30 years later I've finally finished the series (half again the 20 it took Crowley). It's been challenging, and each volume has thrown me for a loop in one way or another, but it's been highly rewarding as well. Some time soon I'm going to have to read it all again, on a fast track, so I can (attempt to) take in the work in its entirety.
December 6, 2009
A sad disappointment after the first three books in the Aegypt cycle, which were marvelous though exasperating. This one is just exasperating. Crowley seems to be spinning his wheels here; he gives up on plot and character development and substitutes philosophical rumination and episodic fantasy. Characters we have come to love in the first three books barely appear in this one, and new ones are introduced that we don't have time to get interested in. That's what I find hardest to forgive, because I wanted so much to hear more about Rosie and Sam and Brent and Beau and even that idiotic twit Rose Ryder, but instead we get Roo and Vita and Mary and host of new peripherals,ancient and modern, "real" and imaginary.
Crowley seems to know he has written a bad book, because he tells us his fellow craftsman, Fellowes Kraft, is writing an equally bad one, and it is bad in exactly the same ways Endless Things is bad. But somehow this rueful joke doesn't help much. There were some lovely moments toward the end of the novel, but in general it was just plain tedious -- endless things, indeed.
Crowley seems to know he has written a bad book, because he tells us his fellow craftsman, Fellowes Kraft, is writing an equally bad one, and it is bad in exactly the same ways Endless Things is bad. But somehow this rueful joke doesn't help much. There were some lovely moments toward the end of the novel, but in general it was just plain tedious -- endless things, indeed.
March 23, 2022
What do you do when you've reached the end of your story and there's still one more book left?
In a sense, that's like a lot of lives . . . not all of us get to hit the high note and leave the stage while everyone is still applauding. All too many times we find the show's over, the set is struck and we're left standing around going "Now what?", wandering around with the lights out and waiting for it all to finally be over. The backend of a life can be its own kind of melancholy . . . with nothing left to be done and all the real accomplishments in the past, all that's left is a slow mopping up, a settling and a sorting.
Which brings us to the last novel in John Crowley's "Aegypt Cycle". With the series written over the course of twenty years (the first book came out in 1987, under a name that Crowley didn't even like), it still took seven years from the previous volume "Daemonomania" before readers could have a chance to see how the whole series wrapped up. Myself, I can't imagine what reading the series over two decades must have been like (I believe the first book and maybe the second were later revised so you'd have to hit up a used bookstore to even get the full original experience) . . . having to remind yourself of the various themes and threads every seven years probably wasn't fun, as the series can't really be boiled down to easy summaries. But then, I survived waiting for "The Wheel of Time" and Moorcock's Colonel Pyat Sequence to finally get around to finishing so I'm sure I would have found a way. Fortunately, I didn't have to.
I came into this book with no small degree of curiosity. Though the series as a whole was never big on conventional plotting, you at least got the sense that it was going somewhere, even if it wasn't always following the path you expected it to follow or moving with a, shall we say, more expeditious pace. But it was going somewhere, with that sense growing stronger with each succeeding volume. Whether it was Pierce's attempt to write his obscure book or have a normal relationship with Rosie Ryder, or Rosie Rassmussen's struggle to divorce her husband and start a new life with her daughter or even the medieval travails of John Dee and Giordano Bruno, you at least felt you were engaged in some sort of procession. And as the signs pointed more and more toward some kind of conflict with the intimidatingly odd religious cult that Rosie's ex belonged to, the arc of events started to feel like it would fall a bit short of a four book series.
And indeed, that does seem to be what happened. Most of the big events that were powering the last three books were, if not resolved, at least were relegated to a position that they wouldn't be a foregrounded concern and so you go into this volume with a sort of "What now?" feel to it. That said, I don't think this volume is filler . . . at one book every seven years, a literate thoughtful book completely devoid of action to boot, I don't think one can accuse Crowley of padding things out to make extra money (unlike studios that split a book into two movies, or publishers that just chop a novel in half so they can sell it twice). No doubt this was the structure intended all along. And again, read all the way through it makes a kind of sense. Read spaced out over two decades, its going to come across as a bit anti-climatic.
You have to look at the series as one giant book for it to fall into place and when you do you realize this is the epilogue, the final winding down. It’s the shortest volume by far, looking almost petite when compared to its brethren. For me it felt akin to the final third of Dave Sim and Gerhard's "Cerebus" comic, with the end of the story technically coming in two-thirds of the way through, the latter third is in a sense killing time (even if Crowley's and Sim's concerns are . . . quite different). Stuff happens and that stuff is important to the people that its happening to but in the scheme of things it just feels like life. Not as much feels at stake, or if there are stakes, they don't seem as vital.
Thus: Pierce's European vacation. Still, trying to finish a book that is looking less likely by the day, he takes a grant from the foundation that Rosie is now running and jets off to the old country to follow in the footsteps of Fellowes Kraft, the novelist who has been haunting this series one way or the other all the way through. These sections will probably frustrate some readers, even those who are inclined to enjoy Crowley's prose . . . Pierce's wanderings feel a bit aimless and maybe even self-indulgent at times, a travelogue written by someone who doesn't even appear to like traveling all that much. On some level it feels like Crowley's basically accepted that anyone still hanging around is in for the haul, willing to see where the rest of this story takes them. He's weeded out all the fairweather fans of novels discussing Hermeticism, only the hardcore are left.
Interestingly enough the medieval sections have a bit more resonance to me than the proverbial present day sequences. While they're just as meandering, for some reason they feel more about something, with Giordano Bruno apparently getting reincarnated as a donkey and engaging in a low key verison of "Au Hasard Balthazar" . . . wandering about in an era where just having certain thoughts was dangerous events have a bits more weight to them. Its that the modern days events are weightless in themselves, its just that they feel more like life, like someone going through their days and trying to put all these events together and wondering if it makes a narrative. It generally doesn't, but that's life. It keeps happening until it stops.
So we wander through the latter years of Pierce's life and if you haven't been able to care about Pierce thus far, this novel isn't going to do anything to change your mind, but then I doubt you would have made it to this point. Crowley's prose still has that pull and because of that I tend to give him a lot of leeway . . . there's just a way he has of describing the mundane that somehow gives it extra resonance without making it seem overtly magical. He's not looking at life with wide eyes of wonder, seeing nothing but stars and sunrises, but just giving it to us as it comes, year in and year out . . . even the gaps feel natural, the way that time can blur and suddenly we find ourselves in a new decade and a little greyer and wondering what the heck we've been up to.
It’s a novel of small things that gets smaller with every chapter, pushing the characters further apart while drilling down into them on a granular level so we can see the connections that still exist. Early on we wondered about the stars and the universe and planes of existence, how it all fits together and how we fit into it. It hardly seems to matter here. Pierce was writing a book and then the book becomes less important (the real Hermetic tradition was the friends we made along the way?). He left a place to go to another place and that place becomes its own anchor, even when he's not there, even if its not where he expects. The series started out with this aura of magic, of angels and heavenly spheres and existences that overlay the ones we know, as close as the skin is to the body but unable to be discerned, only recognized. But by the end all the magic appears to be gone, all the mysticism evaporated, leaving us with nothing but people fumbling through and finding each other and forming, if not a family, whatever the next best thing is to a family, or whatever the next step is into something better. That's the part of the cycle that could have been most disappointing to me (the angel stuff early on was intriguingly creepy!) but by the end I didn't mind its absence, instead I found myself appreciating more the gradual stripping away of all the magical elements, and then wondering if there was ever any fantastic elements in the first place, or if it was just a mistaken perception.
In the end all the philosophical themes of the cycle, as crucial as they were to the work as a whole, just wasn't as important to me as the rhythm of watching these people grow and change and learn about each other over the course of four books and however many years it took to write about them. That's what I found myself responding to more and with this last book being nothing but people finally coming around to learning about themselves, it hit me more than all the fancy Latin terms the series threw my way. But I think that's very specific to me, for some reason I'm a sucker for elegiac motions, for seeing people much younger gradually become much older, to look and see how far we've come from where we started. By the time we reach the final pages, with a vastly older Sam marking to us how long its been since we first met these people there's a palpable sense of both melancholy and joy in the air, and always, always, always, that aching precision Crowley has. It all ends on a note of grace, as you hoped it would and maybe actively wished it would.
I don't know if this series succeeded in doing what Crowley hoped it would do. It appears to have evolved so much over the course of the cycle that you do wonder at times how much was intentional and how much was Crowley rethinking his ideas. It strives to be a masterpiece and while I don't think it quite reaches there it probably comes as close as anything in second place probably does. I don't feel this one as much as I felt "Little, Big", though maybe that's more a question of a book finding a reader at the exact right time he needs to discover it. If this had been completed back then and I had read that first, would I have felt differently? Who knows? There's no way to tell now and that's fine. What we have here is something that slumbers and dreams in subtle elegance, that rolls over in its sleep and becomes a dream about something else, all different and all connected and running over the same foundation. I had a dream once about traveling with a group of people, and there were three sisters that were entered in multiple contests, and at some point in the dream I had a premonition that one of them was going to lose. And when I felt that I was standing outside with everyone and I saw the girl in question sitting by herself on a low stone wall, unaware of what was going to happen eventually. And so I went and sat with her, just to talk, because it seemed like the right thing to do. That's how I think of this series. It doesn't want to change your life, only walks with you for a bit and even if there's things each of you knows about the other but won't say, there's much that can be said and is said, that stays with you even when you separate, between and beyond, always in the air and always held close.
In a sense, that's like a lot of lives . . . not all of us get to hit the high note and leave the stage while everyone is still applauding. All too many times we find the show's over, the set is struck and we're left standing around going "Now what?", wandering around with the lights out and waiting for it all to finally be over. The backend of a life can be its own kind of melancholy . . . with nothing left to be done and all the real accomplishments in the past, all that's left is a slow mopping up, a settling and a sorting.
Which brings us to the last novel in John Crowley's "Aegypt Cycle". With the series written over the course of twenty years (the first book came out in 1987, under a name that Crowley didn't even like), it still took seven years from the previous volume "Daemonomania" before readers could have a chance to see how the whole series wrapped up. Myself, I can't imagine what reading the series over two decades must have been like (I believe the first book and maybe the second were later revised so you'd have to hit up a used bookstore to even get the full original experience) . . . having to remind yourself of the various themes and threads every seven years probably wasn't fun, as the series can't really be boiled down to easy summaries. But then, I survived waiting for "The Wheel of Time" and Moorcock's Colonel Pyat Sequence to finally get around to finishing so I'm sure I would have found a way. Fortunately, I didn't have to.
I came into this book with no small degree of curiosity. Though the series as a whole was never big on conventional plotting, you at least got the sense that it was going somewhere, even if it wasn't always following the path you expected it to follow or moving with a, shall we say, more expeditious pace. But it was going somewhere, with that sense growing stronger with each succeeding volume. Whether it was Pierce's attempt to write his obscure book or have a normal relationship with Rosie Ryder, or Rosie Rassmussen's struggle to divorce her husband and start a new life with her daughter or even the medieval travails of John Dee and Giordano Bruno, you at least felt you were engaged in some sort of procession. And as the signs pointed more and more toward some kind of conflict with the intimidatingly odd religious cult that Rosie's ex belonged to, the arc of events started to feel like it would fall a bit short of a four book series.
And indeed, that does seem to be what happened. Most of the big events that were powering the last three books were, if not resolved, at least were relegated to a position that they wouldn't be a foregrounded concern and so you go into this volume with a sort of "What now?" feel to it. That said, I don't think this volume is filler . . . at one book every seven years, a literate thoughtful book completely devoid of action to boot, I don't think one can accuse Crowley of padding things out to make extra money (unlike studios that split a book into two movies, or publishers that just chop a novel in half so they can sell it twice). No doubt this was the structure intended all along. And again, read all the way through it makes a kind of sense. Read spaced out over two decades, its going to come across as a bit anti-climatic.
You have to look at the series as one giant book for it to fall into place and when you do you realize this is the epilogue, the final winding down. It’s the shortest volume by far, looking almost petite when compared to its brethren. For me it felt akin to the final third of Dave Sim and Gerhard's "Cerebus" comic, with the end of the story technically coming in two-thirds of the way through, the latter third is in a sense killing time (even if Crowley's and Sim's concerns are . . . quite different). Stuff happens and that stuff is important to the people that its happening to but in the scheme of things it just feels like life. Not as much feels at stake, or if there are stakes, they don't seem as vital.
Thus: Pierce's European vacation. Still, trying to finish a book that is looking less likely by the day, he takes a grant from the foundation that Rosie is now running and jets off to the old country to follow in the footsteps of Fellowes Kraft, the novelist who has been haunting this series one way or the other all the way through. These sections will probably frustrate some readers, even those who are inclined to enjoy Crowley's prose . . . Pierce's wanderings feel a bit aimless and maybe even self-indulgent at times, a travelogue written by someone who doesn't even appear to like traveling all that much. On some level it feels like Crowley's basically accepted that anyone still hanging around is in for the haul, willing to see where the rest of this story takes them. He's weeded out all the fairweather fans of novels discussing Hermeticism, only the hardcore are left.
Interestingly enough the medieval sections have a bit more resonance to me than the proverbial present day sequences. While they're just as meandering, for some reason they feel more about something, with Giordano Bruno apparently getting reincarnated as a donkey and engaging in a low key verison of "Au Hasard Balthazar" . . . wandering about in an era where just having certain thoughts was dangerous events have a bits more weight to them. Its that the modern days events are weightless in themselves, its just that they feel more like life, like someone going through their days and trying to put all these events together and wondering if it makes a narrative. It generally doesn't, but that's life. It keeps happening until it stops.
So we wander through the latter years of Pierce's life and if you haven't been able to care about Pierce thus far, this novel isn't going to do anything to change your mind, but then I doubt you would have made it to this point. Crowley's prose still has that pull and because of that I tend to give him a lot of leeway . . . there's just a way he has of describing the mundane that somehow gives it extra resonance without making it seem overtly magical. He's not looking at life with wide eyes of wonder, seeing nothing but stars and sunrises, but just giving it to us as it comes, year in and year out . . . even the gaps feel natural, the way that time can blur and suddenly we find ourselves in a new decade and a little greyer and wondering what the heck we've been up to.
It’s a novel of small things that gets smaller with every chapter, pushing the characters further apart while drilling down into them on a granular level so we can see the connections that still exist. Early on we wondered about the stars and the universe and planes of existence, how it all fits together and how we fit into it. It hardly seems to matter here. Pierce was writing a book and then the book becomes less important (the real Hermetic tradition was the friends we made along the way?). He left a place to go to another place and that place becomes its own anchor, even when he's not there, even if its not where he expects. The series started out with this aura of magic, of angels and heavenly spheres and existences that overlay the ones we know, as close as the skin is to the body but unable to be discerned, only recognized. But by the end all the magic appears to be gone, all the mysticism evaporated, leaving us with nothing but people fumbling through and finding each other and forming, if not a family, whatever the next best thing is to a family, or whatever the next step is into something better. That's the part of the cycle that could have been most disappointing to me (the angel stuff early on was intriguingly creepy!) but by the end I didn't mind its absence, instead I found myself appreciating more the gradual stripping away of all the magical elements, and then wondering if there was ever any fantastic elements in the first place, or if it was just a mistaken perception.
In the end all the philosophical themes of the cycle, as crucial as they were to the work as a whole, just wasn't as important to me as the rhythm of watching these people grow and change and learn about each other over the course of four books and however many years it took to write about them. That's what I found myself responding to more and with this last book being nothing but people finally coming around to learning about themselves, it hit me more than all the fancy Latin terms the series threw my way. But I think that's very specific to me, for some reason I'm a sucker for elegiac motions, for seeing people much younger gradually become much older, to look and see how far we've come from where we started. By the time we reach the final pages, with a vastly older Sam marking to us how long its been since we first met these people there's a palpable sense of both melancholy and joy in the air, and always, always, always, that aching precision Crowley has. It all ends on a note of grace, as you hoped it would and maybe actively wished it would.
I don't know if this series succeeded in doing what Crowley hoped it would do. It appears to have evolved so much over the course of the cycle that you do wonder at times how much was intentional and how much was Crowley rethinking his ideas. It strives to be a masterpiece and while I don't think it quite reaches there it probably comes as close as anything in second place probably does. I don't feel this one as much as I felt "Little, Big", though maybe that's more a question of a book finding a reader at the exact right time he needs to discover it. If this had been completed back then and I had read that first, would I have felt differently? Who knows? There's no way to tell now and that's fine. What we have here is something that slumbers and dreams in subtle elegance, that rolls over in its sleep and becomes a dream about something else, all different and all connected and running over the same foundation. I had a dream once about traveling with a group of people, and there were three sisters that were entered in multiple contests, and at some point in the dream I had a premonition that one of them was going to lose. And when I felt that I was standing outside with everyone and I saw the girl in question sitting by herself on a low stone wall, unaware of what was going to happen eventually. And so I went and sat with her, just to talk, because it seemed like the right thing to do. That's how I think of this series. It doesn't want to change your life, only walks with you for a bit and even if there's things each of you knows about the other but won't say, there's much that can be said and is said, that stays with you even when you separate, between and beyond, always in the air and always held close.
September 10, 2012
I wish I could say this final part wasn't yet another disappointment, but I'm forced to say it is. There are glimmerings of something greater in the Aegypt sequence, but in the end the three later books completely fail to deliver on the promise of The Solitudes.
Even if one grants that the conclusion was Crowley's intent from the beginning (and given his talents, that's almost certainly the case), to stretch the work out to four volumes before leaving the reader with such a letdown--even if it does reflect the passage of most of our lives--seems simply perverse. Surely the point could have been made much more succinctly.
Add to this the fact that Aegypt is burdened by the research Crowley put into it. As someone who came to these books already familiar with their source material, Crowley has added much less to it than a general reader might think, and made much less of it than what one could reasonably have expected.
Unfortunately, the Aegypt sequence is much like Little Big (still Crowley's best): a work one wants to like more than its author allows. Crowley is so good in parts here, but those parts just aren't enough to constitute a satisfying whole.
Even if one grants that the conclusion was Crowley's intent from the beginning (and given his talents, that's almost certainly the case), to stretch the work out to four volumes before leaving the reader with such a letdown--even if it does reflect the passage of most of our lives--seems simply perverse. Surely the point could have been made much more succinctly.
Add to this the fact that Aegypt is burdened by the research Crowley put into it. As someone who came to these books already familiar with their source material, Crowley has added much less to it than a general reader might think, and made much less of it than what one could reasonably have expected.
Unfortunately, the Aegypt sequence is much like Little Big (still Crowley's best): a work one wants to like more than its author allows. Crowley is so good in parts here, but those parts just aren't enough to constitute a satisfying whole.
October 23, 2018
Michael Dirda's review of Aegypt.
Continuity
Crowley continues his (deliberate?) confusion about Pierce's age and thus the time-frame of the action. He holds Pierce's birth year at (probably) 1942:
Also, in the book's final scene, the main characters climb Mount Randa to visit a monument at its summit. In The Solitudes it is indicated, during Beau's out-of-body experience, that this is an elephant carrying an obelisk (Aegypt 259).
Author and Publisher
I sensed a kind of tension between Crowley and his original publisher. The first three volumes were published by Bantam (George R. R. Martin's publisher), but the final one came out from the perhaps aptly named Small Beer Press. Nothing in the presentation of of the volumes from Bantam indicate that the books are part of a series, and the narrative tends to recap essential information from earlier volumes when that is relevant to a scene - perhaps this was done at the insistence of Crowley's editor - though of course the many subtle connections essential to the author's art cannot be summarized in this way. At any rate, in this volume after alluding to an incident from Love & Sleep Crowley writes:
The Weight of Myth
Pierce Moffett sets out to write a book showing that "there is more than one history of the world," and that there are periods in history when the nature of reality changes. One such period was circa 1600, the timeframe of Fellowes Kraft's novel-within-a-novel. Before that date magic actually worked and alchemy was possible, after that date this wasn't true and it seemed, from then on, as if had always been untrue. Pierce also claims that another such shift in the nature of the real is occurring at the present time (the late 1970s) and the direction in which reality will shift can be influenced by the actions of people, the people presumably for whom Pierce is writing his book.
But for all the space devoted to these ideas, they ultimately seem irrelevant if the reader doesn't find the ideas rewarding in themselves, and I didn't. They are not necessary to explain or drive any of the events in the novels, in fact seem disproven in some ways. Magic supposedly stopped working around 1600, yet Pierce in the 1970s uses magical practices in his seduction of Rose Ryder. The only narrative purpose these ideas serve is to give Pierce something to write about, a book he ultimately does not write. In a way it's like reading a version of Middlemarch where the author felt the need to try to elucidate the concepts behind Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies and impose these concepts upon the characters and action of the novel, and with the text of Romola thrown in as well.
The weight the novel's narrative comes to bear can be seen in the progress of Beau Brachman, a supporting character who appears throughout the novels. We first see him running a kind of daycare center and women's shelter. At the end of the first scene in which he appears, he mediates a screaming match between two children trying to ride on the same toy motorcycle:
This seems to me about as much weight as a character like Beau can carry in the novel, but Crowley lays it on heavier in the final two volumes. Here we see Beau having met different characters in places in the US far distant from Blackbury Jambs - he seems to show up in their lives at the moment they need guidance wherever they happen to be physically located. He also takes on the role of psychopomp, traditionally given to Hermes, as his Buick 88 appears in Fellowes Kraft's driveway as the author is dying. Beau here pretty much leaves any kind of realistic role in the novel to become some sort of ubiquitous mythological figure - this fissure in the realistic narrative weakens the effect of the novel. Perhaps this is "magic realism" of a sort; if so, I don't like it any better than I expected I would.
But Beau is only one example of the mythic weight-bearing to which the characters are subject in Endless Things. Here Sam's childish wordless epithalamium at her mother's wedding becomes an annunciation of world-shifting changes:
Continuity
Crowley continues his (deliberate?) confusion about Pierce's age and thus the time-frame of the action. He holds Pierce's birth year at (probably) 1942:
"So you would have been born 1942 or so?"But gives us this:
"Um yes."
"I was in the Pacific then."(23)
Prague in Winter said the New York Times Magazine one Sunday in 1979 after Pierce returned, having not however gone there, and the big pages showed the snow thick on the palaces and the statues he hadn't seen, the people in the cobbled streets bent into the wind and the weather. (299)But we were told in Demonomania that Pierce was in Blackbury Jambs in December of 1979 before going to Europe. We also get another mention of the situation in Iran, alluded to in Demonomania, and here strongly suggesting February 1980 rather than 1979:
The Ayatollah's face and pisshole eyes, that seemed to hang on the screen like Emmanuel Goldstein's for a full two minutes' hate. (34)
Also, in the book's final scene, the main characters climb Mount Randa to visit a monument at its summit. In The Solitudes it is indicated, during Beau's out-of-body experience, that this is an elephant carrying an obelisk (Aegypt 259).
Author and Publisher
I sensed a kind of tension between Crowley and his original publisher. The first three volumes were published by Bantam (George R. R. Martin's publisher), but the final one came out from the perhaps aptly named Small Beer Press. Nothing in the presentation of of the volumes from Bantam indicate that the books are part of a series, and the narrative tends to recap essential information from earlier volumes when that is relevant to a scene - perhaps this was done at the insistence of Crowley's editor - though of course the many subtle connections essential to the author's art cannot be summarized in this way. At any rate, in this volume after alluding to an incident from Love & Sleep Crowley writes:
That's all been told; the story's still there to be discovered in at least a few libraries and in those blessed stores that keep unwanted books until their time at last comes around, if it does, or at least until they catch someone's eye or stir someone's heart, unless their paper yellows and crumbles into illegibility first: the whole story of how Pierce found the thing that he had sought for, right in his own backyard. (46)Perhaps this publisher / author conflict explains why, in the novel, we hear nothing about Pierce Moffett paying back the publisher's advance for a book he never wrote.
The Weight of Myth
Pierce Moffett sets out to write a book showing that "there is more than one history of the world," and that there are periods in history when the nature of reality changes. One such period was circa 1600, the timeframe of Fellowes Kraft's novel-within-a-novel. Before that date magic actually worked and alchemy was possible, after that date this wasn't true and it seemed, from then on, as if had always been untrue. Pierce also claims that another such shift in the nature of the real is occurring at the present time (the late 1970s) and the direction in which reality will shift can be influenced by the actions of people, the people presumably for whom Pierce is writing his book.
But for all the space devoted to these ideas, they ultimately seem irrelevant if the reader doesn't find the ideas rewarding in themselves, and I didn't. They are not necessary to explain or drive any of the events in the novels, in fact seem disproven in some ways. Magic supposedly stopped working around 1600, yet Pierce in the 1970s uses magical practices in his seduction of Rose Ryder. The only narrative purpose these ideas serve is to give Pierce something to write about, a book he ultimately does not write. In a way it's like reading a version of Middlemarch where the author felt the need to try to elucidate the concepts behind Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies and impose these concepts upon the characters and action of the novel, and with the text of Romola thrown in as well.
The weight the novel's narrative comes to bear can be seen in the progress of Beau Brachman, a supporting character who appears throughout the novels. We first see him running a kind of daycare center and women's shelter. At the end of the first scene in which he appears, he mediates a screaming match between two children trying to ride on the same toy motorcycle:
"Hey," Beau said, "Hey, what's all this energy, where's all that coming from? Hey, let's talk."This initially comic figure is shown as a kind of guru for many people in the town of Blackbury Jambs and in the course of the first two novels we see him dispense both highly practical advice and cryptic but comforting pronouncements, depending on what he senses, always accurately, his hearers require. We are also given some glimpses into the content of his meditations and, in one scene, his vision of the spiritual universe as explained to Pierce; in these some basic mystical themes of the novel, ideas that will recur in Fellowes Kraft's writing about Dee and Bruno, are laid out.
This seems to me about as much weight as a character like Beau can carry in the novel, but Crowley lays it on heavier in the final two volumes. Here we see Beau having met different characters in places in the US far distant from Blackbury Jambs - he seems to show up in their lives at the moment they need guidance wherever they happen to be physically located. He also takes on the role of psychopomp, traditionally given to Hermes, as his Buick 88 appears in Fellowes Kraft's driveway as the author is dying. Beau here pretty much leaves any kind of realistic role in the novel to become some sort of ubiquitous mythological figure - this fissure in the realistic narrative weakens the effect of the novel. Perhaps this is "magic realism" of a sort; if so, I don't like it any better than I expected I would.
But Beau is only one example of the mythic weight-bearing to which the characters are subject in Endless Things. Here Sam's childish wordless epithalamium at her mother's wedding becomes an annunciation of world-shifting changes:
Sam couldn't know that the song without words she sang was the last breath to be breathed, the last spirit exhalation of the previous age, or the first of the new, same thing. What I tell you three times is true: it was the Hieros gamos achieved in her own small person, and this achieved for everyone; it was the final reconciliation, too, of Wanting and Having, Having and Giving, kind Wisdom and hard Knowledge, if only for the space of one afternoon in one faraway county. Never mind: in her singing and our listening was completed the renovatio and atonement we all needed, whether or not we knew we had longed for it and sought for it, or would ever recognize we had it. It was the Great Instauration of everything that had all along been the case, the last part of the work set out for all of us to do, never to be finished, as it never has been nor ever will be. (249)And here Kraft's novel about Dee and Bruno - which is, literally, nothing world-shaking - is given a portentousness which the reader's own experience of it can hardly countenance:
When in his abbey cell he had set out on Kraft's typescript, Pierce thought it was going to turn out like a work out of the former age of the world, one of those vast ones like The Faerie Queene or The Canterbury Tales which are unfinished but not therefore necessarily incomplete, their completion actually hovering perceptibly around them like a connect-the-dots puzzle half connected, or like the ghost limb that amputees feel, only not amputated but never grown. And he thought that maybe if Kraft could himself have ended it, it might have been in that way, so that what he had left undone would be clear.This is actually more of a description of Aegypt itself rather than Kraft's competent but rather pedestrian historical novel, which itself is one of Crowley's "vicissitudes of transformation"; in a way Crowley is here providing a closing panegyric to his own work.
But no, it wasn't like any of those works. That was obvious to him now, now having reached the end of it again, again. It wasn't like any work of the former age. Nor was it a work of the first age, like one of those endlessly cycling epics that Barr used to talk about, with simply no reason to end. Rather it seemed to be trying to become a work of the age now beginning, the age to come, which it and other works like it (not only in prose or on paper) would bring into being, of which the new age would at length be seen to consist: works that don't cycle or promise completion as the old stories or tales did, nor that move as ours do by the one-way coital rhythms of initiation, arousal, climax, and inanition, but which produce other rhythms, moving by repetition, reversal, mirror image, echo, inversion: vicissitudes of transformation that can begin at any point, and are never brought to an end at all, but just close, like day. (302)
April 2, 2009
This whole series is something that you need to read more than once. I think this coda is a little weak for a reason and focuses on Pierce for a reason. In many ways, the story echoes life and the stories that we tie in life. And that, even here in this last book, is still strong. I think that is way it is a little weak. Its the aftermath.
November 16, 2014
Endless Books:
Recently finished this tetralogy. They are all beautifully written and challenging reads too. Why have I then rated the final book merely as "it was OK"? Because: The story has been a very long time in the making and finishing. While I feel Crowley deals reasonably well with Pierce, i.e. brings him through youth and to a place of simple human responsibility, of sincerely loving and caring for others, I also feel Crowley avoids the challenge of examining the subject he was purporting to write about, except indirectly. It's oblique, and rather frustrating, raised only to wander off in many other directions. Clever and yet unsure, his dismissal of the possibility of the survival of magic into contemporary times (many issues are included in this idea but are hardly examined in more than a fundamentally intellectual manner, despite much through-thrashing and many wandering interpretations of myths) felt, for me in the end, a fait accompli right from the beginning. He's interested in the answer, or was interested in it at some point in time, but has no firm experience with which he can make believers of his fictional characters or his readers. So, there is this feeling of avoidance. Like Pierce's book, Crowley's books somehow couldn't quite be written, at least by him. He loses the thread in the labyrinth he has created; his character Beau Brachman is gestured at and then written out, never really fully formed or made understandable... because he no longer exists(!); other interesting characters are abandoned in media res; so much which has been raised up, dribbles away in a postmodern "maybe, maybe not, let's change the philosophical standpoint here" kind of way. I felt lead astray by the false glamour and textual manipulativeness of these books; was perhaps also annoyed by their focus on Pierce's crippled Catholicism, as though that somehow of itself contained an answer or key to many of the questions raised but never answered. The lady from whom Crowley claimed to have taken many of his ideas is brought to life briefly too and is the only embarrassingly-stereotypical character in the books. These books promise so much more than they eventually deliver. A genuine shame, given the author's great talent and the commitment required by his admirers to read them.
Recently finished this tetralogy. They are all beautifully written and challenging reads too. Why have I then rated the final book merely as "it was OK"? Because: The story has been a very long time in the making and finishing. While I feel Crowley deals reasonably well with Pierce, i.e. brings him through youth and to a place of simple human responsibility, of sincerely loving and caring for others, I also feel Crowley avoids the challenge of examining the subject he was purporting to write about, except indirectly. It's oblique, and rather frustrating, raised only to wander off in many other directions. Clever and yet unsure, his dismissal of the possibility of the survival of magic into contemporary times (many issues are included in this idea but are hardly examined in more than a fundamentally intellectual manner, despite much through-thrashing and many wandering interpretations of myths) felt, for me in the end, a fait accompli right from the beginning. He's interested in the answer, or was interested in it at some point in time, but has no firm experience with which he can make believers of his fictional characters or his readers. So, there is this feeling of avoidance. Like Pierce's book, Crowley's books somehow couldn't quite be written, at least by him. He loses the thread in the labyrinth he has created; his character Beau Brachman is gestured at and then written out, never really fully formed or made understandable... because he no longer exists(!); other interesting characters are abandoned in media res; so much which has been raised up, dribbles away in a postmodern "maybe, maybe not, let's change the philosophical standpoint here" kind of way. I felt lead astray by the false glamour and textual manipulativeness of these books; was perhaps also annoyed by their focus on Pierce's crippled Catholicism, as though that somehow of itself contained an answer or key to many of the questions raised but never answered. The lady from whom Crowley claimed to have taken many of his ideas is brought to life briefly too and is the only embarrassingly-stereotypical character in the books. These books promise so much more than they eventually deliver. A genuine shame, given the author's great talent and the commitment required by his admirers to read them.
July 20, 2018
This book was my favorite of the series, and apparently I'm in the minority on goodreads for saying that. What I read was not a story that diminished magic but rather showed erudite and subtle thinking on what magic really entails.
After book 3, I needed this one. Didn't anyone else have a breakdown alongside Pierce when he realizes just what inventing stories and playing with magic could mean? (It leads Rose Ryder to a cult. It leads to Edward Kelley's lunacies.)
This book doesn't back away from the possibility of magic. (Spoilers start here.) I loved the imagined story of Bruno surviving as an Ass. I loved the exploration of gematria--language as transformation. But magic is fleeting--the world trembles for a moment with possibility, with magic, and then it continues on. Magic vanishes at the rate at which it is perceived (p207). Pierce's musings on The Tempest is one example of this: Prospero breaks his staff and the magic ends (p64-65). Magic seems to be bound with time and the turning of the world. God has the potential to create the universe at any moment in history (p38), or Chance as God's assistant does this (p322). And, I think the book goes so far as to suggest that Chance is Love, or Sex, or Death, by other names (P322, 335-336). Once the world has changed, once the moment has passed, it is impossible to speak of the magic that was present, and so Pierce calls himself a true Rosicrucian using the phrase "silentium post clamores" (p. 207)
I found this book incredibly inspiring and magical and also hauntingly real. Magic is in timing, in variation. Not in our abstractions and "logomantic games" with endless things (p324), but in the paradise of the world (p338).
After book 3, I needed this one. Didn't anyone else have a breakdown alongside Pierce when he realizes just what inventing stories and playing with magic could mean? (It leads Rose Ryder to a cult. It leads to Edward Kelley's lunacies.)
This book doesn't back away from the possibility of magic. (Spoilers start here.) I loved the imagined story of Bruno surviving as an Ass. I loved the exploration of gematria--language as transformation. But magic is fleeting--the world trembles for a moment with possibility, with magic, and then it continues on. Magic vanishes at the rate at which it is perceived (p207). Pierce's musings on The Tempest is one example of this: Prospero breaks his staff and the magic ends (p64-65). Magic seems to be bound with time and the turning of the world. God has the potential to create the universe at any moment in history (p38), or Chance as God's assistant does this (p322). And, I think the book goes so far as to suggest that Chance is Love, or Sex, or Death, by other names (P322, 335-336). Once the world has changed, once the moment has passed, it is impossible to speak of the magic that was present, and so Pierce calls himself a true Rosicrucian using the phrase "silentium post clamores" (p. 207)
I found this book incredibly inspiring and magical and also hauntingly real. Magic is in timing, in variation. Not in our abstractions and "logomantic games" with endless things (p324), but in the paradise of the world (p338).
March 4, 2020
I adored Aegypt, which I read when it came out, before it was renamed The Solitudes. It was breathtaking, with its question of whether magic really ever existed in the world and might still exist in another world nearby if you could find the doorway. Love & Sleep I enjoyed. Daemonomania I finished, but the creepy relationship between Pierce and Rose and Rosie made me uncomfortable enough that I didn't rush to read the final book. Just as well. Endless Things is a slog, impressed with its own cleverness. I pushed myself to keep reading out of love for Crowley's past work, but the second chapter from the point of view of Giordano Bruno as a donkey (no joke) was my breaking point.
If Pierce Moffat is correct and the world consists of a series of Ys where the magic peels off into a tapering leg that vanishes, then somewhere there is another series of Aegypt books that continue the magic of the first volume. I want to read those books.
If Pierce Moffat is correct and the world consists of a series of Ys where the magic peels off into a tapering leg that vanishes, then somewhere there is another series of Aegypt books that continue the magic of the first volume. I want to read those books.
November 30, 2014
"As the pages had silted up Kraft had seemingly begun making the worst of fictional errors, or ceased correcting them: all those things that alienate readers and annoy critics, like the introduction of new major characters at late stages of the story, unpacked and sent out on new adventures while the old main characters sit lifeless somewhere offstage, or stumble to keep up. New plot movements, departing from the main branch of the story for so long that they become the main branch without our, the readers', agreement or assent. All of it inducing that sense of reckless haste or - worse - droning inconsequence that sooner or later causes us - us, the only reason for any of it, the sole feelers of its feelings, sole knowers of its secrets - to sigh, or groan in impatience, or maybe even end (with a clap) the story the writer seems only to want to keep on beginning."
In the first book, Crowley made a number of jokes and references that paralleled and likened Kraft's novel, or the internal world of the book, to the series itself. In Endless Things, he seems to write a rather negative review of Endless Things about halfway through. The book literally makes all these mistakes, and it suffers from them. All of the momentum and energy built up in Daemonomania (the arc with Pierce and Rose, which I was excited to follow to its end) is literally truncated and never more than hinted at here. The historical/metaphysical bits made almost no sense to me this time. I guess I may not have been following carefully enough, but if so, come on - I'm not dumb, this is just ridiculous. Why did Giordano Bruno turn into an Ass? What was that all about? What was the deal about the Bohemian couple and Rosicrucians? Calm down, John. The final part jumps many years down the road - Pierce is married with two adopted girls and Sam is in college - and it feels jarring and unnecessary, not to mention kind of kitschy.
The tongue-in-cheek joke above is the first/best hint that Crowley's doing this on purpose. He's a mastermind, and my trust in his mastery hasn't necessarily waned - I imagine there's something here to "get" that may make more sense when I'm older, or something. Kraft's novel is reviewed harshly in the quote above, but Pierce later has a scarcely explained revelation that makes him see it was already finished, completely edited, that the traits he previously saw as mistakes were actually intentional and necessary to the point of the book. So, by metaphorical extension, the same must be true of Endless Things. Other reviewers have mentioned this - that the disappointment represents a logical culmination of ideas developed throughout the series.
I can't say I grasp what those are, however. I can sort of intuit a concept about "life itself" - something about how enchantment and imagination exist in the head, that pursuit of connections largely made in intuition end in disappointing reality checks or fizzle off into tangents; how life sometimes seems goal-oriented and wrought in values larger or more complex than life but that, in real life, the only thing that can ever be done is to go deeper in, move forward, and live an idiosyncratic but ultimately predictable, human life that is largely like everyone else's.
In the first book, Crowley made a number of jokes and references that paralleled and likened Kraft's novel, or the internal world of the book, to the series itself. In Endless Things, he seems to write a rather negative review of Endless Things about halfway through. The book literally makes all these mistakes, and it suffers from them. All of the momentum and energy built up in Daemonomania (the arc with Pierce and Rose, which I was excited to follow to its end) is literally truncated and never more than hinted at here. The historical/metaphysical bits made almost no sense to me this time. I guess I may not have been following carefully enough, but if so, come on - I'm not dumb, this is just ridiculous. Why did Giordano Bruno turn into an Ass? What was that all about? What was the deal about the Bohemian couple and Rosicrucians? Calm down, John. The final part jumps many years down the road - Pierce is married with two adopted girls and Sam is in college - and it feels jarring and unnecessary, not to mention kind of kitschy.
The tongue-in-cheek joke above is the first/best hint that Crowley's doing this on purpose. He's a mastermind, and my trust in his mastery hasn't necessarily waned - I imagine there's something here to "get" that may make more sense when I'm older, or something. Kraft's novel is reviewed harshly in the quote above, but Pierce later has a scarcely explained revelation that makes him see it was already finished, completely edited, that the traits he previously saw as mistakes were actually intentional and necessary to the point of the book. So, by metaphorical extension, the same must be true of Endless Things. Other reviewers have mentioned this - that the disappointment represents a logical culmination of ideas developed throughout the series.
I can't say I grasp what those are, however. I can sort of intuit a concept about "life itself" - something about how enchantment and imagination exist in the head, that pursuit of connections largely made in intuition end in disappointing reality checks or fizzle off into tangents; how life sometimes seems goal-oriented and wrought in values larger or more complex than life but that, in real life, the only thing that can ever be done is to go deeper in, move forward, and live an idiosyncratic but ultimately predictable, human life that is largely like everyone else's.
May 22, 2023
The road without end
Why is magic to be laid aside when the world's real work is taken up? A story of magic can't end until magic is given up.
Some things, like repairs, for example, cannot be finished, they can only be stopped. "Aegipet" is one of those. No, not a risky comparison. By and large, both have the same goal - to organize a part of the universe: the space of a separate apartment in case of renovation; the ocean of the collective unconscious for Crowley's tetralogy. What is below is similar to what is above and any increase in order reduces the amount of world chaos. "Aegipet", started in the mid-eighties of the last century, was completed in the mid-noughties of the current one. There is no need to explain how much the world has changed during this period, and books like this serve as an additional support for him in difficult times of change.
Now are the times of book cycles and TV series, reading which from beginning to end is akin to signing a contract: good. if from the first to the eightieth page it will be interesting, but how will it get boring? It's hard to drag. it's a pity to quit. Therefore, it is considered an additional advantage if you can say about the book that you can start from anywhere. you'll understand everything. I won't say that about Aegyptus, there are four volumes of this
the books are tightly tied into a single complex context, however, after reading the first one, few people will refuse to go to the end. I will not retell the contents of the previous ones in order to bring up to date the events of the second and third I have separate texts. And on the fourth, the indestructible optimism of Eksmo broke down, there is no Russian translation of Infinite Things, and anyone who wants to know how it ended can only read the original version.
Should we look for easy ways? So, the clumsy incompetent lucky, stupid smart guy Pierce Moffett, beloved and annoying, turns out to be a hostage of his own inability to bring things to a logical conclusion. The publisher's deposit has been spent, the deadlines are tight, but there is no book. That is, there are a lot of things written, but our hero is a deeply decent person, for which we love, and now all this seems to him a lightweight charlatan composition, unworthy of publication. Very incidentally (after all, Pierce is a solar Sagittarius, a child of Jupiter, for all his Saturnian failure), there is a grant from the Rassmussen Foundation for a European journey in the footsteps of the writer Phillows Kraft, whose novel about Giordano Bruno makes up the medieval layer of tetralogy.
We are in Europe with Pierce. We get the opportunity to finally get acquainted with the writer Kraft, whose invisible presence was felt all the time, with a story about Bruno, the astrologer John Dee, Shakespeare. And the events of that medieval book will unexpectedly continue with the story of the Winter King, the eve of the Thirty Years' War - the first all-European war. And the feeling of the crystal fragility of the world, so familiar to those who have read about the eve of the First World War.
Дорога без конца
Почему магия должна отступать перед реальностью? История магии не будет завершена, пока пока мы не перестанем eю заниматься.
Why is magic to be laid aside when the world's real work is taken up? A story of magic can't end until magic is given up,
Некоторые вещи, как ремонт, например, нельзя закончить, их можно только прекратить. "Эгипет" из числа таких. Нет, не рискованное сравнение. По большому счету у того и другого одна цель - упорядочить часть Вселенной: пространство отдельной квартиры в случае ремонта; океан коллективного бессознательного для тетралогии Краули. То, что внизу, подобно тому, что наверху и любое увеличение порядка уменьшает количество мирового хаоса. "Эгипет", начатый в середине восьмидесятых прошлого века, закончен в середине нулевых нынешнего. Объяснять, насколько переменился мир за этот срок, не нужно, а дополнительной опорой ему в нелегкие времена перемен служат такие книги, как эта.
Теперь времена книжных циклов и сериалов, читать которые от начала до конца сродни заключению контракта: хорошо. если с первой до дветыщивосьмидесятой страницы будет интересно, ну а как надоест? Тащить тяжело. бросить жалко. Потому, считается дополнительным достоинством, если о книге можно сказать, что начинать можно с любого места. все поймешь. О "Эгипте" такого не скажу, четыре тома этой
книги плотно ввязаны в единый сложный контекст, однако, прочтя первый, мало кто откажется идти до конца. Пересказывать содержание предыдущих не буду, чтобы ввести в курс событий второго и третьего у меня отдельные тексты. А на четвертом сломался несокрушимый оптимизм "Эксмо", русского перевода "Бесконечных вещей" нет и желающий знать, чем дело кончилось, может прочесть только оригинальную версию.
Нам ли искать легких путей? Итак, нескладный неумеха везунчик, дуралей умник Пирс Моффет, любимый и раздражающий, оказывается заложником собственного неумения доводить дела до логического завершения. Задаток издательства потрачен, сроки жмут, а книги нет. То есть - есть, понаписано всего много, но наш герой глубоко порядочный человек, за что любим, и теперь все это кажется ему легковесным шарлатанским сочинением, недостойным публикации. Весьма кстати (все-таки Пирс солнечный Стрелец, дитя Юпитера, при всей его сатурнианской не успешности) оказывается грант от фонда Рассмуссена на европейское путешествие по следам писателя Филлоуза Крафта, чей роман о Джордано Бруно составляет средневековый слой тетралогии.
С Пирсом мы в Европе. Получаем возможность свести наконец знакомство с писателем Крафтом, чье незримое присутствие ощущали все время, рассказом о Бруно, астрологе Джоне Ди, Шекспире. А события той средневековой книги неожиданно продолжатся историей Зимнего короля, преддверием Тридцатилетней войны - первой всеевропейской. И ощущением, хрустальной хрупкости мира, так знакомым тем, кто читал о кануне Первой Мировой.
И историей осла. Не так, Осла. Помните того маленького ослика, который вез на костер Джордано Бруно? Того, что в суматохе казни высвободился и бежал, не даваясь в руки доброхотам. так вот, знайте, о благородные господа, душа мятежного монаха в момент сожжения вошла в тело ослика и началась для него новая жизнь, какую ни веселой, ни интересной не назову. Такая мощная отсылка к "Золотому ослу" Апулея, с той разницей, что розы, сколько их ни съешь, бессильны вернуть ему человеческий облик. И от хозяйской жестокости придется претерпеть изрядно, но боги милостивы, приведут в сарай, где ночует герой, труппу бродячих артистов, та-дамм - джорданистов! То есть, они поклонники ересей, возглашаемых Бруно. И окажется, что даже пребывание в ослиной шкуре не совершенный ад земной. Кроме того, с ними можно будет говорить. В общем, чудесная история.
А что же Пирс? А, да у него тоже все сложится. Найдет свою третью Розу (помните, Рози Мучо, Роуз Райдер). В "Бесконечных вещах" он встретит Ру, славную милую жесткую сильную добрую суровую Ру, которая тоже окажется именем Роза. Такое вот розенкрейцерство, имея в виду дословный перевод имени Pierce - пронзающий. И да, у них будут две чудесных маленьких девочки. А что Саманта, Сэм? Как она? О, она вырастет, но, упс (делая замыкающее движение рукой у рта), не стану рассказывать. Может быть "Эксмо" сменит гнев на милость и переведет-издаст завершение тетралогии?
Why is magic to be laid aside when the world's real work is taken up? A story of magic can't end until magic is given up.
Some things, like repairs, for example, cannot be finished, they can only be stopped. "Aegipet" is one of those. No, not a risky comparison. By and large, both have the same goal - to organize a part of the universe: the space of a separate apartment in case of renovation; the ocean of the collective unconscious for Crowley's tetralogy. What is below is similar to what is above and any increase in order reduces the amount of world chaos. "Aegipet", started in the mid-eighties of the last century, was completed in the mid-noughties of the current one. There is no need to explain how much the world has changed during this period, and books like this serve as an additional support for him in difficult times of change.
Now are the times of book cycles and TV series, reading which from beginning to end is akin to signing a contract: good. if from the first to the eightieth page it will be interesting, but how will it get boring? It's hard to drag. it's a pity to quit. Therefore, it is considered an additional advantage if you can say about the book that you can start from anywhere. you'll understand everything. I won't say that about Aegyptus, there are four volumes of this
the books are tightly tied into a single complex context, however, after reading the first one, few people will refuse to go to the end. I will not retell the contents of the previous ones in order to bring up to date the events of the second and third I have separate texts. And on the fourth, the indestructible optimism of Eksmo broke down, there is no Russian translation of Infinite Things, and anyone who wants to know how it ended can only read the original version.
Should we look for easy ways? So, the clumsy incompetent lucky, stupid smart guy Pierce Moffett, beloved and annoying, turns out to be a hostage of his own inability to bring things to a logical conclusion. The publisher's deposit has been spent, the deadlines are tight, but there is no book. That is, there are a lot of things written, but our hero is a deeply decent person, for which we love, and now all this seems to him a lightweight charlatan composition, unworthy of publication. Very incidentally (after all, Pierce is a solar Sagittarius, a child of Jupiter, for all his Saturnian failure), there is a grant from the Rassmussen Foundation for a European journey in the footsteps of the writer Phillows Kraft, whose novel about Giordano Bruno makes up the medieval layer of tetralogy.
We are in Europe with Pierce. We get the opportunity to finally get acquainted with the writer Kraft, whose invisible presence was felt all the time, with a story about Bruno, the astrologer John Dee, Shakespeare. And the events of that medieval book will unexpectedly continue with the story of the Winter King, the eve of the Thirty Years' War - the first all-European war. And the feeling of the crystal fragility of the world, so familiar to those who have read about the eve of the First World War.
Дорога без конца
Почему магия должна отступать перед реальностью? История магии не будет завершена, пока пока мы не перестанем eю заниматься.
Why is magic to be laid aside when the world's real work is taken up? A story of magic can't end until magic is given up,
Некоторые вещи, как ремонт, например, нельзя закончить, их можно только прекратить. "Эгипет" из числа таких. Нет, не рискованное сравнение. По большому счету у того и другого одна цель - упорядочить часть Вселенной: пространство отдельной квартиры в случае ремонта; океан коллективного бессознательного для тетралогии Краули. То, что внизу, подобно тому, что наверху и любое увеличение порядка уменьшает количество мирового хаоса. "Эгипет", начатый в середине восьмидесятых прошлого века, закончен в середине нулевых нынешнего. Объяснять, насколько переменился мир за этот срок, не нужно, а дополнительной опорой ему в нелегкие времена перемен служат такие книги, как эта.
Теперь времена книжных циклов и сериалов, читать которые от начала до конца сродни заключению контракта: хорошо. если с первой до дветыщивосьмидесятой страницы будет интересно, ну а как надоест? Тащить тяжело. бросить жалко. Потому, считается дополнительным достоинством, если о книге можно сказать, что начинать можно с любого места. все поймешь. О "Эгипте" такого не скажу, четыре тома этой
книги плотно ввязаны в единый сложный контекст, однако, прочтя первый, мало кто откажется идти до конца. Пересказывать содержание предыдущих не буду, чтобы ввести в курс событий второго и третьего у меня отдельные тексты. А на четвертом сломался несокрушимый оптимизм "Эксмо", русского перевода "Бесконечных вещей" нет и желающий знать, чем дело кончилось, может прочесть только оригинальную версию.
Нам ли искать легких путей? Итак, нескладный неумеха везунчик, дуралей умник Пирс Моффет, любимый и раздражающий, оказывается заложником собственного неумения доводить дела до логического завершения. Задаток издательства потрачен, сроки жмут, а книги нет. То есть - есть, понаписано всего много, но наш герой глубоко порядочный человек, за что любим, и теперь все это кажется ему легковесным шарлатанским сочинением, недостойным публикации. Весьма кстати (все-таки Пирс солнечный Стрелец, дитя Юпитера, при всей его сатурнианской не успешности) оказывается грант от фонда Рассмуссена на европейское путешествие по следам писателя Филлоуза Крафта, чей роман о Джордано Бруно составляет средневековый слой тетралогии.
С Пирсом мы в Европе. Получаем возможность свести наконец знакомство с писателем Крафтом, чье незримое присутствие ощущали все время, рассказом о Бруно, астрологе Джоне Ди, Шекспире. А события той средневековой книги неожиданно продолжатся историей Зимнего короля, преддверием Тридцатилетней войны - первой всеевропейской. И ощущением, хрустальной хрупкости мира, так знакомым тем, кто читал о кануне Первой Мировой.
И историей осла. Не так, Осла. Помните того маленького ослика, который вез на костер Джордано Бруно? Того, что в суматохе казни высвободился и бежал, не даваясь в руки доброхотам. так вот, знайте, о благородные господа, душа мятежного монаха в момент сожжения вошла в тело ослика и началась для него новая жизнь, какую ни веселой, ни интересной не назову. Такая мощная отсылка к "Золотому ослу" Апулея, с той разницей, что розы, сколько их ни съешь, бессильны вернуть ему человеческий облик. И от хозяйской жестокости придется претерпеть изрядно, но боги милостивы, приведут в сарай, где ночует герой, труппу бродячих артистов, та-дамм - джорданистов! То есть, они поклонники ересей, возглашаемых Бруно. И окажется, что даже пребывание в ослиной шкуре не совершенный ад земной. Кроме того, с ними можно будет говорить. В общем, чудесная история.
А что же Пирс? А, да у него тоже все сложится. Найдет свою третью Розу (помните, Рози Мучо, Роуз Райдер). В "Бесконечных вещах" он встретит Ру, славную милую жесткую сильную добрую суровую Ру, которая тоже окажется именем Роза. Такое вот розенкрейцерство, имея в виду дословный перевод имени Pierce - пронзающий. И да, у них будут две чудесных маленьких девочки. А что Саманта, Сэм? Как она? О, она вырастет, но, упс (делая замыкающее движение рукой у рта), не стану рассказывать. Может быть "Эксмо" сменит гнев на милость и переведет-издаст завершение тетралогии?
October 1, 2025
It’s always hard to come up with new or interesting ways to talk about stories, especially those that require four volumes to complete, roughly 1800 pages all said and done. How much do you say about plot or character? We want to talk about the story, but at what point does it become a spoiler, and at what point would I just be offering a synopsis? It’s not always easy to discuss a story when there are integral sections or themes, parts you want to discuss, yet dare not for fear of ruining a key page turning discovery for the next reader.
An easy example of this is The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. The mystery that starts the novel (and series) is one of hallucinations and suicides and scientific stagnantion; all of which coalesces into the reveal, one the reader knows must be coming, but is still shocked by as long as no reviewer has spoiled it beforehand. To truly discuss the themes of the series as a whole one must detail some of that spoiler and yet there is so much fun to be had in facing the reveal by yourself.
Why is this relevant? John Crowley — author of perhaps my favourite novel of all time, Little, Big — has created something that completely eschews this fear on my part. I could tell you about the entire series: events that happen in the fourth book, great character twists along the way, unusual magicks and historical explorations, allusions to past and future — all of which are in the series; I could hand you a copy of the fourth and final book, let you read that by itself and you’d be none the wiser should you return and pick up the first.
This series wraps around itself, some kind of pretzel ouroboros, entire passages retelling what’s been told and telling what’s to come — and, on occasion, actually telling us what’s happening. I understand that might initially sound unappealing, even outright arduous, and I won’t entirely argue the second point, but what Crowley is doing is the possibly most extensive and painstaking take on layering his story with character and with meaning I’ve ever come across.
The series begins with Pierce Moffet’s, our “hero”’s, musings on a genie’s three wishes as he takes a bus towards a job interview and, despite the several paragraphs needed to detail his thoughts, doesn’t truly come to a conclusion, only a temporary answer that Pierce will return to across the story. It is, however, from this same mind comes the key conceit of Ægypt: magic used to be real; we used to commune with spirits, angels and devils, gods; used tarot cards, star charts, and special symbols to call upon these spirit realms. Not only that, but some great change took these magicks away from us, wiped them from our minds, from the Earth itself. Not only can we no longer access them the way we used to, we cannot even fathom the idea they were ever real.
With such arcane understanding placed upon his shoulders Pierce decides to write a book; a book about him coming to that revelation and his decision to write; a book that fellow author, Fellowes Kraft, might have already written. All of which leaves us readers bewildered as to who wrote the words we’re reading.
We’re offered up a number of other pov characters who collide with Pierce in one way or another: Rosie, who is dealing with a divorce and a young child is the other modern day deuterologist; while in the past we follow John Dee, notable English magician of Queen Elizabeth’s court, as well as Giordano Bruno, an Italian friar from a similar time, who took a firm stance regarding planets and stars, while incorrect, was seen as dangerous to the church.
Crowley’s writing is gorgeous in and of itself, just check out this opening to a middle chapter of book one, atmospheric and more evocative than several pages of other stories I’ve read:
“The storm did not come then; neither did it pass. After the darkening wind and few inconclusive drops it seemed to pause, leaving the evening sky clear; it lay still visible on the horizon, though, muttering lowly from time to time, probably raining (those at Spofford’s party said to one another) on someone else’s party, somewhere else. The dense hot air was charged with its nearness, and when the moon arose, to toasts and laughter, immense and as amber as whiskey, her light gilded the scalloped hem of its clouds.”
Or, should you want a glimpse of the ideas and themes at the heart of this series, here’s a part of a revelation Pierce undergoes in book two, Love & Sleep:
“With no inward fanfare, Pierce was just then visited by, or awarded, one of those large simple insights, logical solutions or dissolutions of a mental obstacle you had not even recognised as an obstacle, the sensation of finding that a stuck door opens inwards and not out. Infinite had of course nothing whatever to do with size. Nothing at all. In every other context he had known this to be so: large followed by very large followed by very very large was not eventually followed by infinite. He had only not ever applied this knowledge to an infinite God.”
The Ægypt cycle is filled with these philosophical meanderings, explorations of characters’ minds that, while yes, are sometimes tiresome, hefty ideas, are more often glimpses into the depths of the persons whose head we’re within. Not just their thoughts, but their emotions and what it is that turns those emotions. For what, in the end, is the point of philosophy but to garner an understanding of ourselves and of the world and of ourselves in the world and the world in ourselves.
This here is the key to the series. While it can spend dozens of paragraphs, sometimes pages, going over an idea (even returning to one), at the core it’s about humanity, both large and small. How social constructs are built up and around people at particular times and what it means for them to fail. About the everyday decisions we choose to make or not make and how the simple things can snowball.
I would also like to add that despite my attempts to make this series sound like it’s not idea focused, to maintain the attentions of those who care for character and emotion, the ideas explored are not dull, nor are those wandering musings uninteresting. Crowley’s writing obviously helps on that front, but even just the questions he allows you to mull over, often the way his characters are left to, are fascinating in their own right.
As a whole Ægypt is magnificent. This twisting and turning look at humanity, past and present; questions of the future, questions of what magic has been and could be again. Crowley’s prose holds its readers in place, enamouring them to his characters , enchanting them to his world, while the dense exploration of ideas, philosophies, and emotions comes together as one of the most convoluted, yet most beautiful bows I’ve ever seen.
An easy example of this is The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. The mystery that starts the novel (and series) is one of hallucinations and suicides and scientific stagnantion; all of which coalesces into the reveal, one the reader knows must be coming, but is still shocked by as long as no reviewer has spoiled it beforehand. To truly discuss the themes of the series as a whole one must detail some of that spoiler and yet there is so much fun to be had in facing the reveal by yourself.
Why is this relevant? John Crowley — author of perhaps my favourite novel of all time, Little, Big — has created something that completely eschews this fear on my part. I could tell you about the entire series: events that happen in the fourth book, great character twists along the way, unusual magicks and historical explorations, allusions to past and future — all of which are in the series; I could hand you a copy of the fourth and final book, let you read that by itself and you’d be none the wiser should you return and pick up the first.
This series wraps around itself, some kind of pretzel ouroboros, entire passages retelling what’s been told and telling what’s to come — and, on occasion, actually telling us what’s happening. I understand that might initially sound unappealing, even outright arduous, and I won’t entirely argue the second point, but what Crowley is doing is the possibly most extensive and painstaking take on layering his story with character and with meaning I’ve ever come across.
The series begins with Pierce Moffet’s, our “hero”’s, musings on a genie’s three wishes as he takes a bus towards a job interview and, despite the several paragraphs needed to detail his thoughts, doesn’t truly come to a conclusion, only a temporary answer that Pierce will return to across the story. It is, however, from this same mind comes the key conceit of Ægypt: magic used to be real; we used to commune with spirits, angels and devils, gods; used tarot cards, star charts, and special symbols to call upon these spirit realms. Not only that, but some great change took these magicks away from us, wiped them from our minds, from the Earth itself. Not only can we no longer access them the way we used to, we cannot even fathom the idea they were ever real.
With such arcane understanding placed upon his shoulders Pierce decides to write a book; a book about him coming to that revelation and his decision to write; a book that fellow author, Fellowes Kraft, might have already written. All of which leaves us readers bewildered as to who wrote the words we’re reading.
We’re offered up a number of other pov characters who collide with Pierce in one way or another: Rosie, who is dealing with a divorce and a young child is the other modern day deuterologist; while in the past we follow John Dee, notable English magician of Queen Elizabeth’s court, as well as Giordano Bruno, an Italian friar from a similar time, who took a firm stance regarding planets and stars, while incorrect, was seen as dangerous to the church.
Crowley’s writing is gorgeous in and of itself, just check out this opening to a middle chapter of book one, atmospheric and more evocative than several pages of other stories I’ve read:
“The storm did not come then; neither did it pass. After the darkening wind and few inconclusive drops it seemed to pause, leaving the evening sky clear; it lay still visible on the horizon, though, muttering lowly from time to time, probably raining (those at Spofford’s party said to one another) on someone else’s party, somewhere else. The dense hot air was charged with its nearness, and when the moon arose, to toasts and laughter, immense and as amber as whiskey, her light gilded the scalloped hem of its clouds.”
Or, should you want a glimpse of the ideas and themes at the heart of this series, here’s a part of a revelation Pierce undergoes in book two, Love & Sleep:
“With no inward fanfare, Pierce was just then visited by, or awarded, one of those large simple insights, logical solutions or dissolutions of a mental obstacle you had not even recognised as an obstacle, the sensation of finding that a stuck door opens inwards and not out. Infinite had of course nothing whatever to do with size. Nothing at all. In every other context he had known this to be so: large followed by very large followed by very very large was not eventually followed by infinite. He had only not ever applied this knowledge to an infinite God.”
The Ægypt cycle is filled with these philosophical meanderings, explorations of characters’ minds that, while yes, are sometimes tiresome, hefty ideas, are more often glimpses into the depths of the persons whose head we’re within. Not just their thoughts, but their emotions and what it is that turns those emotions. For what, in the end, is the point of philosophy but to garner an understanding of ourselves and of the world and of ourselves in the world and the world in ourselves.
This here is the key to the series. While it can spend dozens of paragraphs, sometimes pages, going over an idea (even returning to one), at the core it’s about humanity, both large and small. How social constructs are built up and around people at particular times and what it means for them to fail. About the everyday decisions we choose to make or not make and how the simple things can snowball.
I would also like to add that despite my attempts to make this series sound like it’s not idea focused, to maintain the attentions of those who care for character and emotion, the ideas explored are not dull, nor are those wandering musings uninteresting. Crowley’s writing obviously helps on that front, but even just the questions he allows you to mull over, often the way his characters are left to, are fascinating in their own right.
As a whole Ægypt is magnificent. This twisting and turning look at humanity, past and present; questions of the future, questions of what magic has been and could be again. Crowley’s prose holds its readers in place, enamouring them to his characters , enchanting them to his world, while the dense exploration of ideas, philosophies, and emotions comes together as one of the most convoluted, yet most beautiful bows I’ve ever seen.
May 12, 2009
Erudite and verbose, flowery and wise, elegaic... those adjectives and more describe the conclusion to John Crowley's AEgypt quartet. But sad, too, is an appropriate word. Perhaps even endless is a word that fits. Endings are hard, as Crowey says himself; they contain a hint of sadness even when they're written as happy ones, and this ending is no exception.
I find myself saddened, too, that I did not like this book more than I did, at how I had to force myself through it--for sometimes it seemed endless, and I say this as one who has been reading and enjoying Crowley's work since Engine Summer. But there is real depth here, for those with the patience to tease it out of Crowley's prose, and breadth of space and time as well, as Pierce Moffett travels from New England to Italy, from the iconic 1939 World's Fair and the immolation of Giordano Bruno to the Defenestration of Prague.
There is also insight. I remember feeling as Pierce does, on p. 297, "absentminded to an almost pathological degree", and on p. 298: "in the doghouse, often for reasons he couldn't entirely discern." The reader's perseverance is rewarded.
Starting with Chapter 10, Crowley does much to bring his multivolume work to as much of a close as may be. His ruminations on fiction, on a new kind of cyclic fiction which ends as much as it begins in medias res, while applied to Fellowes Kraft's unrevealed book-within-the-book, also I think apply to Endless Things itself.
The flame of knowledge burns brightly in this book. I only regret that my recurrent impulse was all too often to avert my eyes from its glare.
I find myself saddened, too, that I did not like this book more than I did, at how I had to force myself through it--for sometimes it seemed endless, and I say this as one who has been reading and enjoying Crowley's work since Engine Summer. But there is real depth here, for those with the patience to tease it out of Crowley's prose, and breadth of space and time as well, as Pierce Moffett travels from New England to Italy, from the iconic 1939 World's Fair and the immolation of Giordano Bruno to the Defenestration of Prague.
There is also insight. I remember feeling as Pierce does, on p. 297, "absentminded to an almost pathological degree", and on p. 298: "in the doghouse, often for reasons he couldn't entirely discern." The reader's perseverance is rewarded.
Starting with Chapter 10, Crowley does much to bring his multivolume work to as much of a close as may be. His ruminations on fiction, on a new kind of cyclic fiction which ends as much as it begins in medias res, while applied to Fellowes Kraft's unrevealed book-within-the-book, also I think apply to Endless Things itself.
The flame of knowledge burns brightly in this book. I only regret that my recurrent impulse was all too often to avert my eyes from its glare.
July 2, 2024
Worth all the frustration of the prior two volumes. (It even made me almost like Pierce! Almost.) So, so good and goosebump-inducing all the way through—from the trip to Europe and the end of Bruno's story to Kraft's childhood and everything with Roo. For those averse to philosophical rambling, this volume might strain patience, at the same time that its ultimate point is—quite emphatically—that all philosophical rambling is smoke, in the end. But we have to be allowed our indulgences, Crowley seems to be saying. We have to go through all these many and various attempts to arrive at meaning before we finally know its limits and become capable of giving it up in favor of a simple (if scary) freefall back into the Real.
Reminds me of what Aquinas said at the end of his life (after writing SO MANY volumes of systematic theology): "I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw."
P.S. Reading about the statue of Giordiano Bruno in Rome felt so eerily familiar I looked through my trip photos from 2022, and discovered I had taken a picture of it without even knowing who it depicted! Better yet: It's a night shot with a PLANET visible in the sky. (Not sure which one—Jupiter and Venus were both above the Pantheon earlier that night ...) More goosebumps.
Anyway, Crowley somehow manages to capture how all of this tumbling through life's hall of mirrors feels with his usual incredible precision. Endless Things is much closer, in both spirit and prose, to the books of his I love most—Ka and The Translator—confirming to me that, like most of my favorite authors, he's one who just got better with age.
Reminds me of what Aquinas said at the end of his life (after writing SO MANY volumes of systematic theology): "I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw."
P.S. Reading about the statue of Giordiano Bruno in Rome felt so eerily familiar I looked through my trip photos from 2022, and discovered I had taken a picture of it without even knowing who it depicted! Better yet: It's a night shot with a PLANET visible in the sky. (Not sure which one—Jupiter and Venus were both above the Pantheon earlier that night ...) More goosebumps.
Anyway, Crowley somehow manages to capture how all of this tumbling through life's hall of mirrors feels with his usual incredible precision. Endless Things is much closer, in both spirit and prose, to the books of his I love most—Ka and The Translator—confirming to me that, like most of my favorite authors, he's one who just got better with age.
August 29, 2007
I've finished reading John Crowley's Endless Things. For those who haven't drunk the kool-aid (and if you haven't what the hell is wrong with you!) this is the fourth, and last, book in his Aegypt series which first begun in 1987 when I was in high school. So this is a series I've been reading my entire adult life (sort of mirroring in some ways the life of the main character Pierce).
The Aegypt series involves the search, the dream quest of Pierce that there is a story that will uncover an alternate reality or a secret history where magic is possible. Pierce's pursuit of magic, alchemy, and other Gnostic systems of knowledge is less concerned with acquiring supernatural abilities and more preoccupied with a very natural longing for a lost romanticism, a philosophy of hope which will instill meaning and significance into Pierce's own great work, a palimpsest of half-forgotten memories and half-remembered stories. Along the way we glimpse Prospero, Dee, Shakespeare, Rudolph, Bruno, and even Dame Yeats (as a guardian angel of sorts).
Endless Things is really a love story about books and reading and romance. Lyrical and poetic, it is hard not to read in one giant gulp and savor for its complexity. If you’ve been following along with Aegypt at any point in the last 20 years go and read this. If you haven’t find the first book and embark on the journey with Crowley as your psychopomp, it is richly rewarded. And luckily the first book is coming back into print later this year, but you can find it at most libraries.
The Aegypt series involves the search, the dream quest of Pierce that there is a story that will uncover an alternate reality or a secret history where magic is possible. Pierce's pursuit of magic, alchemy, and other Gnostic systems of knowledge is less concerned with acquiring supernatural abilities and more preoccupied with a very natural longing for a lost romanticism, a philosophy of hope which will instill meaning and significance into Pierce's own great work, a palimpsest of half-forgotten memories and half-remembered stories. Along the way we glimpse Prospero, Dee, Shakespeare, Rudolph, Bruno, and even Dame Yeats (as a guardian angel of sorts).
Endless Things is really a love story about books and reading and romance. Lyrical and poetic, it is hard not to read in one giant gulp and savor for its complexity. If you’ve been following along with Aegypt at any point in the last 20 years go and read this. If you haven’t find the first book and embark on the journey with Crowley as your psychopomp, it is richly rewarded. And luckily the first book is coming back into print later this year, but you can find it at most libraries.
August 10, 2016
After re-reading for the umpteenth time two all time favorite Crowleys: Engine Summer (wrongly, I think, considered the last of his minor books instead of the first of his major ones), and the almost universally acclaimed Little, Big, I was still hungry for more. Sadly, I can't love what I've now read of the Aegypt quartet with the same passion as ES and LB; there are too many languors, too many tropes that are just a little too twee (all those heavily symbolic car names and fanciful place names, all that portentous italicization) and IMHO the unengaging, benighted intellectual Pierce Moffitt is simply not up to the job of central consciousness for this massive work (we do get breaks from him, thankfully, but not enough). And yet, all that said, Crowley still has the power to transfix with his narrative skills, his complex arcane histories, his epiphanies that arise believably out of the things of this world, and the often astoundingly lovely lyricism of his prose. He comes to the inevitable writer's conclusion that only stories offer the real possibility of transforming this world; it's his final abandonment of the mystery and magic he's so capable of calling into being that have disappointed a lot of readers of Aegypt--and while I get the rationale, I'm one of them, I hate to say.
September 5, 2014
Okay. Sometimes John Crowley's writing is so sublime it makes me want to cry. But I have to say, that after slogging through all four of the books in this cycle, that I really did not understand what was the point of the books. In fact, I feel a little cheated. Maybe I am just not smart enough or educated enough to understand what he was trying to do. That greatly reduced my ability to enjoy what I was reading. But I made it through them all and know I can move on to other things.....
March 7, 2018
Dense, nearly impenetrable at times, but richly rewarding, as with all of Crowley's work. It almost feels like a coda to the rest of the Aegypt sequence, but its secrets are most likely necessary to reach a proper understanding of the sequence as a whole. Ultimately, it's a gorgeous book, but certainly not for everyone.
May 3, 2018
So I didn't actually read this recently. I started it and realized I'd read it before. I liked the series when I was younger, but now it just seems annoying. Everything is all...is this real or not? first I'll say one thing and then the opposite. Blah blah esoterical Freemasons conspiracy theory. It goes nowhere, on purpose. Perhaps my tastes have just changed.
January 28, 2024
Every sequel in the Ægypt Cycle has made efforts to summarize previous books, which felt like an amusingly hopeless effort to any poor readers popping in halfway. In Endless Things, however, these reflections become the actual meat of the book, with every look back on the previous books' events serving to fill them with a new mature, clarifying unity (including a not-totally-convincing final word on the bizarre Robbie episode, but the effort is appreciated). This is clearly an epilogue, but it also feels like a return to the straight philosophical/esoterical musing of the first book freed from the strange swerves Love & Sleep introduced (though of course, this sequence wouldn't be what it is without those swerves, but I'm happy to see those squared away and the series returning to form for its ending).
Even with that bookend, Endless Things, without tears or fanfare, buries the intoxicating shape of history that the whole series was spent crafting (I genuinely feel like reading these have infected the way I look at ancient modes of thought). This is even after the narrator of Dæmonomania starts neutrally alluding to literal mystical happenings, and Endless Things itself concludes the unfinished historical story (without worrying about assigning it to any in-universe author anymore?). I've mentioned in my previous reviews how these don't feel like "real books", like Crowley is getting away with something. In the end, the whole series strikes me like the fluttering idea you get to undertake some massive, vague project about a grand philosophical idea, before realizing it can't actually be realized, and whatever seemed doable about it drifts away in time—except, the entire uncapturable process (from its initial allure to its evaporation) actually captured across four books. There's a reason why huge vague amorphous projects do not (should not? cannot?) get made. It's not a good idea, frankly, and not many people should do it, but if there's anything interesting you can do with that structure, Crowley does it, and the whole effort is intertwined with his intensely interesting thoughts spanning real-world history and theology and humanity's relation to it.
Although the book is ultimately focused on closure, it's still happy to wander into new eddies or have its fun aggravatingly toying the reader (having interesting things start to happen and then going, no, of course he didn't actually do that). Love & Sleep described Fellowes Kraft's efforts to write an ambitious, unfinishable novel about grand themes, which was impossible to not analyze as a mission statement for the books:
If there was any doubt, Endless Things describes Kraft's in-universe novel as doing
...before, you guessed it, immediately introducing new major characters into Pierce's life. Bastard's having fun with us! And yet, in spite of it all, this is a book that actually delivers on closing the most unclosable literary project maybe ever, revealing a kinder, traditional literary desire on Crowley's part after spending so much of the series shirking any normal thing about story-writing. I don't think anything will ever do what these books do, and even after 1700~ pages I'm still surprised they exist at all.
Now how do I find a way to recommend them to anyone?
Even with that bookend, Endless Things, without tears or fanfare, buries the intoxicating shape of history that the whole series was spent crafting (I genuinely feel like reading these have infected the way I look at ancient modes of thought). This is even after the narrator of Dæmonomania starts neutrally alluding to literal mystical happenings, and Endless Things itself concludes the unfinished historical story (without worrying about assigning it to any in-universe author anymore?). I've mentioned in my previous reviews how these don't feel like "real books", like Crowley is getting away with something. In the end, the whole series strikes me like the fluttering idea you get to undertake some massive, vague project about a grand philosophical idea, before realizing it can't actually be realized, and whatever seemed doable about it drifts away in time—except, the entire uncapturable process (from its initial allure to its evaporation) actually captured across four books. There's a reason why huge vague amorphous projects do not (should not? cannot?) get made. It's not a good idea, frankly, and not many people should do it, but if there's anything interesting you can do with that structure, Crowley does it, and the whole effort is intertwined with his intensely interesting thoughts spanning real-world history and theology and humanity's relation to it.
Although the book is ultimately focused on closure, it's still happy to wander into new eddies or have its fun aggravatingly toying the reader (having interesting things start to happen and then going, no, of course he didn't actually do that). Love & Sleep described Fellowes Kraft's efforts to write an ambitious, unfinishable novel about grand themes, which was impossible to not analyze as a mission statement for the books:
And yet in a sense there were really no people at all, no events in the book; all that was solid was thought; the characters were nothing but intimations of change in human form. The only real character was time; it was time that went through the transforming agonies of the hero, was bound, made to suffer, learned to change and arise again. Time's body.
Maybe that's why Kraft had left the book unfinished; maybe he had never intended it to be a book, a book with a plot and settings, at all. It was an abstraction, a kind of brilliant cartoon nonexistence infused with this shameful need, for the world to be able to change; to be subject to desire. As though the whole huge dry-smelling word-packed thing, all the potent jewels and angel voices and sailing ships, castles, armor, bound books, breadloaves, pisspots, the dogs, stars, stones, and roses really occurred within one instant of awful longing.
If there was any doubt, Endless Things describes Kraft's in-universe novel as doing
all those things that alienate readers and annoy critics, like the introduction of new major characters at late stages of the story, unpacked and sent out on new adventures while the old main characters sit lifeless somewhere offstage, or stumble to keep up. New plot movements, departing from the main branch of the story for so long that they become the main branch without our, the readers', agreement or assent.
...before, you guessed it, immediately introducing new major characters into Pierce's life. Bastard's having fun with us! And yet, in spite of it all, this is a book that actually delivers on closing the most unclosable literary project maybe ever, revealing a kinder, traditional literary desire on Crowley's part after spending so much of the series shirking any normal thing about story-writing. I don't think anything will ever do what these books do, and even after 1700~ pages I'm still surprised they exist at all.
Now how do I find a way to recommend them to anyone?
July 1, 2025
At last it is over, in spite of the threat in the title. This part of the novel is less of a slog than the previous 3 (and is shorter overall) but still can't let poor dead Bruno go. I'm happy for the characters that made it through the passage of their early lives, and I think Crowley really sticks the ending.
I am not reading this 4-volume novel again. Sorry, Michael Dirda.
I am not reading this 4-volume novel again. Sorry, Michael Dirda.
January 27, 2021
Definitely be coming back to these books in the future, I feel like I've only just scratched the surface, the joy of John Crowley's work, there are so many layers. I'm going miss Pierce and his mental explorations.
June 15, 2021
made the other three books worth the slog
not going to act like i didn't see the ending coming, not going to act like i enjoyed the flash-forwards and flash-backwards to set up the Important Symbolic Parallels, but if you take it for what it is? great book.
not going to act like i didn't see the ending coming, not going to act like i enjoyed the flash-forwards and flash-backwards to set up the Important Symbolic Parallels, but if you take it for what it is? great book.
April 18, 2023
The writing isn't bad, but I still wish I'd never started this series. It added very little to my life for how fucking long it was.
March 14, 2024
This was a difficult read for me. I needed help with the storyline. I had to return to find out where I was in the story.
January 19, 2009
I understand the grievance many people had with this book - in the previous three novels Crowley seems to promise a return to an age of wonder, or something like that - but instead it all just sort of dissolves into a disappointingly quotidian reality. Upon stumbling across these paragraphs from Aegypt,though - I realize there is really no other way he could have concluded it:
Another nice, significant detail I missed in Endless Things - after re-reading the first chapter - is that it's obvious that it's the character of Pierce Moffett that is telling the story. Of course the parallel between his work in the story and the structure of the book itself are made quite plain by Crowley, but I had somehow missed all the first person references that are here.
Did he really intend to suggest in his book that once-upon-a-time the useless procedures of magic had had effects, the lead had turned to gold, the dead had risen; but that then the world ("the world") had passed through some sort of cosmic turnstile and come out the other side different, so that now not only are the old magics inefficacious but now they always were? Was he going to say that?
He guessed he was. Certainly he was going to hint at it, utter it, assemble ambiguous evidence for the proof of it, hold his readers in suspense with a search through history for the proof of it, the one thing–event, artifact, place, word–that is still, indisputably, what it once was in the past age, as nothing else any longer is. Whatever it might be.
He was going to entertain the notion; oh more, he was going to fête it, he was going to wine and dine it; he was going to have his way with it amid the spilled cups and crushed fruit of an uproarious banquet. And he was going to father on it a notion more powerful than itself, a notion which would only be given birth to in his concluding pages: only if we treat the past in this way, as though it was different in kind from the present, can we form any idea of how different from the present the future will be.
Another nice, significant detail I missed in Endless Things - after re-reading the first chapter - is that it's obvious that it's the character of Pierce Moffett that is telling the story. Of course the parallel between his work in the story and the structure of the book itself are made quite plain by Crowley, but I had somehow missed all the first person references that are here.
July 21, 2008
30 years in the making-- 20 years in the producing. My love for Crowley's work is known to pretty obvious from my reviews, but I was hesitant when I read the fist two novels in this series. Twenty years ago I was not very well-versed in history or literature-- themes that run deep through this series. But, like a good teacher, Crowley leads the reader to understand on a human level the significance of times and places alien to us. I'm sure there are some little gems hidden away for the literati-- but they'll still be there to discover another time.
This final novel in the series is very successful in tying everything up that the author wants tied up. Not everything gets tied up, of course-- a deliberate choice on the part of the author to make the book more lifelike. The main themes get capped off in a satisfying way that doesn't rely on gimmicks or sudden twists. One might argue that there is a kind of deus ex machina toward the end; but its appearance is revealed to be completely reasonable by the time the book solidifies its conclusion.
If you have only read the first books of this series, I encourage you to finish it (or possibly re-read the first two in their newly-edited editions). If you've never picked up the series, I highly recommend it. The first novel-- either its original title Ægypt, or its renamed and re-edited twin The Solitudes-- through Love and Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things.
This final novel in the series is very successful in tying everything up that the author wants tied up. Not everything gets tied up, of course-- a deliberate choice on the part of the author to make the book more lifelike. The main themes get capped off in a satisfying way that doesn't rely on gimmicks or sudden twists. One might argue that there is a kind of deus ex machina toward the end; but its appearance is revealed to be completely reasonable by the time the book solidifies its conclusion.
If you have only read the first books of this series, I encourage you to finish it (or possibly re-read the first two in their newly-edited editions). If you've never picked up the series, I highly recommend it. The first novel-- either its original title Ægypt, or its renamed and re-edited twin The Solitudes-- through Love and Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things.
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