Customer Reviews

Aegypt

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Crowley's early books were definitely in the "SF" genre, but as time has gone by we more and more frequently find him in the "Literature" section of many bookstores.

If this is a compliment, it is one that is well-deserved. Crowley's writing has a magical quality that creates a unique atmosphere unlike almost any other (the nearest comparison might be Keith Roberts' "Pavane").

"Aegypt" appeared as an individual volume with virtually no clue to the fact that it had a sequel ("Love and Sleep") or that in fact these two books were the first of a four-volume set (the third, "Daemonomania", seems to have been delayed - it appeared in Books In Print in 1998 but has, according to Bantam, been "withdrawn").

The books are set in two worlds - a small-town, modern, north-east US environment and the world of Renaissance magicians like Dr John Dee. At the heart of the series is the idea that great changes of direction in human civilisation - such as the Renaissance or the advent of the Age of Reason - not only place culture on a different path into the future, but also, looking over our shoulders as it were, we see a different past. This is a concept that, in itself, has serious philosophical merit.

Thus the past of "Aegypt" is a magical, occult "alternate history of the world" with which modern materialist society has lost touch - or nearly so.

Crowley weaves the threads of both realities together in an astonishing and unique way that holds the reader in thrall, wishing it would never end.

All his books are worth reading, but this one - and its sequel(s) - especially so.

In Aegypt, John Crowley creates not one, but two solid, fleshly worlds: a late seventies small town, complex enough to hold both the foolishness of failed coke dealer, scholar and desperate monogamist Pierce Moffett, and the ordinary heroic strength of newly single mother and artist Rosie Rasmussen; and the world of John Dee, court magician to Queen Elizabeth. Crowley's virtousic realism renders Dee's conversations with the angels and alchemical searching as sturdy and believable as Rose and Pierce's grocery shopping, angst, and romantic turnarounds. Both worlds can be balanced in the same book because both worlds are there to tell the same story. What is that story? What did the angels tell to John Dee? Who can catch a falling star? For all its realism, this is a book about occult knowledge. This book is an initiation. John Crowley is attempting a direct transmission of gnosis through literature. Does he succeed?

Initially, Aegypt is an all-out barrage of images and information, in the midst of which it is difficult to assimilate the major themes that are developing. However, as you continue your journey along with Pierce Moffett, this mass of somewhat obscure imagery and information slowly begins to unravel. The miracle of Crowley's prose is that he guides the reader through a series of small revelations along with the main character that culminate in one entire running synchronistic metaphor. His brilliant excerpts from other sources, ie. his own fictional writer Fellowes Kraft, serve as slivers of allegory relating to Pierce and some of the other characters in the book's main story. Crowley patiently weaves a web of coincidences, of synchronicity, that serves as a sturdy metaphoric foundation to support all of the synapse-igniting ideas presented to the reader to be delineated and digested. This novel is so cleverly plotted, that I cannot help but wonder if it is somehow based on the ancient geometric principles that are discussed and reffered to throughout the book. This is not even to speak of the potential Jungian archetypes presented by the characters surrounding Pierce. Rosie as anima, Spofford animus, Pierce the ego, Fellowes Kraft the Shadow? Even these archetypes do not do the interconnectedness of the characters justice. In the Prologue in Heaven, when the skryer is looking into the stone, he sees an angel who holds another stone, in which there is a child with yet another stone, and within that stone the immense void, the eternal truth. Just as this ancient knowledge of Aegypt that Pierce is uncovering comes through himself, Kraft, Bruno, and so on. One more running metaphor to drive it all home is the reoccuring imagery of bouncing balls with stripes and stars, croquet balls colliding, and finally the dozens of hot air balloons filling the sky, again synchronicity. Crowley sets his sights high, and does not disappoint.

P.S. Pierce (Inverarity) Moffett, Rosie MUCHO. See The Crying of Lot 49. The horn from 49 and the ring symbol in Aegypt. Many similarities.

Pierce Moffett is a dispirited college professor trapped in Hesse's "sterile wasteland of mapped- out reality". He quits his job in disgust, with himself, his college, and his life. Halfway to an interview for a new job he discovers that there IS no new job. Stranded in upstate New York state he experiences a series of synchronous coincidences which reconnect him with his REAL life. He recollects his inspiration and discovers that the magical beliefs of his childhood and their mysterious correspondance to Renaissance Hermeticism are a truer reality map than his 50's-era Positivism . The divergence between Pierce's materialistic cynicism and the funky complexities of his reality underline the book's theme: "There is more than one history of the world".

The elegance and beauty of Crowley's prose is enough of a reason to read this book, but for me the real fascination is the beautifully portrayed internal struggle the central character endures between the cynical Positivism which had defeated the faith of his youth and a hopeful magical optimism that permits him to rediscover his source and to reinvent himself.

The novel is set in the early 70's, as the Aquarian tide of rebellious youth ebbs, leaving Determinism, though still the religion of the establishment, washed up. The book's locale, a funky hippieland called Blackbury Jams, is inhabited by a variety of people in the throes of life change, as well as the mysterious Beau Brachman, who may or may not be an angelic messenger. Great book!

John Crowley is both one of the most artistic of the scribes of the late twentieth century, and one of the most overlooked. This particular volume is a prime example of that dichotomy. Probably one of the ten best works of literature written in the last twenty years, it is (last I checked) no longer published.

Svelte and poised, this book conveys more in a few paragraphs than most authors do in their entire careers. While probably not the absolute best place to begin a love affair with Crowley's style (try: 'A Great Work of Time', 'Engine Summer' or the longer, but incomparably fine 'Little, Big'), this book is the culmination of Crowley's career, and the beginning of a cycle of books (2= Love&Sleep, 3=Daemonomania) which appears to be, at the rate Crowley writes, his final effort and Magnum Opus.

As the opening of such an effort, this book does not disappoint. It weaves incredible realism with a sense of the fantastic which matches some of Rushdie and Garcia Marquez's finest works. The elements of the fantastic are not just matter-of-fact, as in , say, Rusdhies 'Midnight's Children", but are awe inspiringly plausable and stunning, almost as if the reader shares revelations of a world hidden from view, which only Crowley can see.

Its a pitiable shame he cant share it more often, and with more people.

...is John Crowley's chosen title for the first volume of the Aegypt series, and will hopefully be restored when it's reprinted.

This volume is absolutely wonderful. It is almost ridiculously fun, informative, exhilarating. Parts of it (I'm thinking especially of Pierce's flashbacks to life in New York, scattered across the first half) seem to me to be as good as--or even better than--anything in his transcendent 1981 masterpiece, Little, Big.

The series centers on the Platonic/Gnostic notion that we're forgetting something, and that that something is our real life. It's not happening on another planet than this one: It flows through our own best, highest, most wakeful moments, and flows into the lives of others through incessant mystery. It's very easy to lose it again, to fall into routine or depression, to lose faith in ourselves and accept false external certainties, and this process is the heart of Aegypt's second and third volumes. But this first volume is one of discovery and rediscovery, of spring awakening, of following a trail of bread crumbs up the sky.

Bless Crowley for writing this book, the happy start of the ultimate romance for intelligent people.

Update:

Some relevant information:

1. This first volume of Aegypt is being put back into print in Oct. 2007 as The Solitudes, published by Overlook Press. This paperback contains revisions, and upcoming paperbacks of Love & Sleep and Daemonomania, the second and third volumes, will contain more extensive ones--undoing changes and additions Crowley had to make to conform with Bantam's absurd refusal to identify these books as parts of a single novel. The reprinting of Aegypt and Love & Sleep means you won't have to shell out 40, or 70 or 100 dollars to read these volumes.

2. Endless Things, the fourth and final volume, was published a few months ago and is available fairly cheaply on Amazon; its paperback will complete Overlook's reprint, presumably by Summer 2008. The 25-year novel is finished, there's no more reason to delay reading it. Michael Dirda of the Washington Post, who calls the four-part novel (pub. '87, '94, '00, '07) his favorite among recent books, is writing a long review to explain why you NEED to read it. Harold Bloom's long Foreword to the 25th Anniversary edition of Little, Big, coming out this September, will allegedly do much the same thing.

Read this book! It's finally finished, revised, affordable, and it's always been sublimely wonderful and, for the right people, the happiest possible addiction.

Carried by a fanciful play between fact and fiction, Aegypt soars as one of the best novels I've ever read. Using history as a jumping point, Crowley guides the reader through lives lived in regret, hope, fear, and the awe of realization, finally landing in a world made magical only by the minds experiencing it. Crowley also has a knack for laying out patterns, looping from character to character, as well as from author to reader. Despite the book's sometimes questionable veracity, the feelings it describes and the insights about the human condition are almost always dead on. Read this book (and make sure to look up the names you read about, a lot of them are real).

With the publication of "Daemonomania",the third part of a projected four part series,it is possible to renavigate the strange ocean of images and themes that is "Aegypt" (the first in the sequence). The coherence of the interpenetrating mosiac of narratives becomes vivid with careful rereading. Crowley's intent is nothing less than a hermetic reenchanting of the modern world, in which the givens of consensual reality are called into question by a great "what if?". What if the old magics of the preScientific Age had actually worked due to our conscious assent...would the forces set in motion by Renaissance mages such as John Dee still reverberate in the present, in rural upstate New York ? Do we then have choices between "realities",both personal and public , that influence the way the world is and will be ? "Aegypt" begins Crowley's examination of the deep implications of this possibility.With deft skill he draws the reader into a familiar yet arcane World in which symbol and substance fuse together.The impact is visceral and engrossing. The historian Pierce Moffett ,presented with the same existential dilemma as the antihero in Sartre's "Nausea", is impelled to construct or ,perhaps, rediscover the World.Akin to an allegorical tableaux of the High Renaissance, "Aegypt" has the capacity to amaze and educate, enrich and renew. Taken together, the series may eventually redefine Magic Realism in the same way that "Little,Big" by Crowley redefined (Le Guin's term) Fantasy. A casket of rare wonders.

This has been released in 10/07 as the Solitudes. It is an edition revised by the author. It is cheaper than the used copies of the original Aegypt. Supposedly the other 3 in the Aegypt Cycle will be redone as well.

John Crowley (1942) is not a very prolific sci-fi and fantasy writer, only twelve novels between 1975 and 2007, but all his books have a very distinctive style. A very special and rich "taste" I risk to say.

"Aegypt" is his most ambitious opus. It is planned as a tetralogy, so the author has enough space to develop each character at its maximum.

The story is many layered, dwell on present time and on the past.
In the present the main character is Pierce Moffett. He is a university teacher traversing a deep existential crisis.
Fate made his bus stop at a small village in Pennsylvania where he comes across an old ex-student. Immediately he cancels his travel and starts another journey in search of his soul.
In the past there are two main historical characters one is Doctor John Dee, notable physician, astrologer and alchemist searching to get in touch with angels thru a medium.
The other one is Giordano Bruno a peasant, who becomes a humble monk first, then a memory prodigy and finally a persecuted heretic.


Crowley blends these three main lines into a coherent and magical structure with innumerable side characters that enriches the story.
I was first intrigued and the astounded to find out that both Doctor Dee and Friar Bruno were real characters and even more Crowley's story is deployed over real facts.

I really love Crowley's writing style, showing a deep connection with existentialism, hippie movement and mysticism.

Enjoy this astounding opus; it is more than mere fantasy!
Reviewed by Max Yofre.