Customer Reviews

Endless Things: A Part of Aegypt

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is the final volume of 4 in the Aegypt series written over the last 20 years. It weaves together the story of writer Pierce Moffett's search into the past and a battle in 1614 that changed our world into one in which Descartes' division of subject and object is preserved and magic is banished.

Endless Things can be read without the prior volumes but the reader's experience is greatly enriched if the books are read in order. Sections of Endless Things dealing with the present are quick and engaging. The historic chapters are dense, erudite and even more interesting. At bottom, the authors (Moffett, Crowley and Fellowes Kraft) are trying to figure out "why is everything the way it is and not some different way instead?" This leads to a more personal question asked by unsuccessful searcher Moffett: "Why was he what he was and not better?"

Along the way, we see an earlier world where alchemy and magic have as much claim to an unknown future as do science and reason. We hear Crowley's conclusion that gods are but stories and that every age must find the stories that correspond to its unique reality.

The author creates words which, according to the secret of the Cabala, can change the nature of things.

This all can be heavy going at times but Crowley is our best contemporary writer of the fabulous, making the unreal seem a solid basis for a far richer reality. It is worth the reader's effort as he finds how "the gods, angels, monsters, powers and principalities...began their retreat into the subsidiary realms where they reside today, harmless and unmoving, most of them anyway, for most of us, most of the time."

At least while you read Crowley, you can feel the sense of wonder you had as a child when possibility was almost endless. Those angels and monsters come briefly alive as the author fights for and embodies the transforming power of language.

Crowley ends his four-volume novel poignantly and satisfyingly. The theme of the entire book is our knowledge that life is different than it seems--a knowledge inspiring, in our great need, our gods, utopias, spirits, magics, conspiracies, true loves. The ultimate inadequacy of these dreams' every flicker, yet the final truth of the flame, is my flickering take on the message. But, fittingly, life is even more pervasive here than thoughts above life.

Much should be compared with his earlier masterpiece Little, Big, the end especially.

The fourth novel and dearly-anticipated conclusion to the Aegypt series, Endless Things finishes the saga of historian Pierce Moffitt, whose far-reaching theory that, at infrequent times, the essential nature of the world alters; for example, a world that is (and always has been) regulated by the laws of physics can suddenly and transform into a world that is (and retroactively, always has been) regulated by the laws of magic. Endless Things wraps up the many side effects of one such transformation that unfolded in the previous novels, yet Pierce's theory of cyclical historical change is ultimately a source of hope - since if the universe itself is capable of endless change, so too are the downtrodden individuals living within it. A multifaceted, humanizing, and magnificent sendoff to an epic saga.

First, Endless Things is the final novel in the Aegypt series (The Solitudes, Love and Sleep, Daemonomania). Do not read this novel if you have not read the preceding three. There are two kinds of book series -- those with connected but stand-alone novels (Roth's Zuckerman books, Updike's Rabbit novels) and those that, while published separately, are really one long novel (The Lord of the Rings). Although the Aegypt series falls between these extremes, it is much closer to being the latter type -- one immense novel. Reading Endless Things as a stand-alone is like starting Tolkien's epic with The Return of the King.

If you have read the other three, Endless Things may at first seem to be a bit of a let-down. It is not the climax of the series -- it is a coda. This is like a soft diminuendo after the sturm und drang that came before. After the soaring heights of the previous novels, Crowley brings us gently down to earth.

The five stars are for the complete Aegypt sequence -- Endless Things simply can not be evaluated alone.

So, here we have the final volume of the Aegypt Tetralogy, which it has taken Crowley twenty years of his life to compose. The third volume, Daemonomania, remains the masterwork of the tetrad, but a strong caveat, it won't seem to any reader like the chef d'oeuvre that it is unless one has read The Solitudes and Love & Sleep. Endless Things is a lilting away, a diminuendo after the crescendo of Daemonomania.

Here, at least in the first two sections - Regnum and Benefacta - you will find the same obsessions with Giordano Bruno, Gnostic arcana and multifarious occult literary allusions as you find in the other works. These sections - as I've written in my reviews of the other three works - are not really where Crowley shines. Rather, it is in his lilting, lyrical descriptions of the magic of the world around us.

The third, and last, section, Carcer, presents a few problems. The section titles, in Latin, are not such as one who has never as much as cracked a first year Latin book can't twig the meaning out of from the English derivatives. Carcer's primary meaning is easy enough: prison. And I think Crowley, here, with Pierce accepting his place in world, space, time, does mean this sense, the sense in which the Gnostics regarded the world, as a prison. But, having spent four years of my adolescence in an English boarding school, up to my ears in Latin, I happen to know that the word has many secondary and tertiary meanings. A carcer was also the gate at which horses were held back before the start of the race and thus came to mean the beginning of something. I think it would probably be the third or fourth definition of the word if one bothered to look it up in a lexicon. In any event, I think this definition, not precluding the first, is certainly more in keeping with the tone of this last section, which is, dare I say it: sweet and dulcet, a new start on an endless voyage. As Pierce contemplates towards the end:

"The world is only a cruel maze if you think you ought to be able to find a way from where you have been to where you want to be. He knew nothing of the sort.....So maybe he was, and had always been, a lucky man."

One could - as the title suggests - go on and on. My verdict on the book is that it was a bit of a letdown, perhaps intentionally, after Daemonomania. I thought too much of it was occupied with covering ground already exhaustively covered in the other three books, and to lesser effect. Nevertheless, I couldn't help fancying it. As with all of Crowley's work, one comes away, after turning the last page, feeling that one's own life is far richer and stranger than when one opened it.

This is a story that didnt really happen. I know what you're thinking: It's fiction, right? Of course it didnt really happen. Well... not so fast...

When the author first introduces the main character, he is literally "just a gleam in his Daddy's eye." He hasnt been conceived. His parents arent even married yet. The father has not come to terms with his homosexuality which, being the 1930's, is not surprising. This fact is artfully foreshadowed in the word's of his future brother-in-law, "He's not the marrying kind."

The fact that the author handled this with such aplomb, along with his subsequent descriptions of being raised by a single parent, coming to terms with a BDSM relationship, and a book which he doesnt want to write, made me think this book was a sleeper. In other words, it wasnt boring, but it wasnt grippingly interesting either. I kept going back and reading more, hoping that when the protagonist finally got moving, so would the narrative.

He had me right up until he met with a scientist/idol from his youth, and had a long conversation with her and her sister, punctuated by meaningful sideways glances and partially vocalized theories and epiphanies. Just then the author pulled the rug out from underneath me, in that it really and truly Didn't Really Happen. That's it. Done. "Fool me once..." and all that blather. I wont go back and finish the story.

NOTE: this is book four of a series and meaningless without reading the others first!
(I wrote the first part of the review after reading the marvellous first half of the book. Then I finished...)

What I have encountered so far: Magic(k). John Dee (The Official Magician and Astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I). The Brotherhood of the Rose-Cross. The Chymical Marriage. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel in Prague and The Golem. The Qaballa. Gemetria. The war in Heaven. Giordano Bruno re-spells himself and then the World. (You can't be reborn into the same world, so he changes it!) The ushering in of The New Age. The Patient Donkey (refered to by the traditional name, which Amazon won't let me write here). The shift in the direction of the World. The Holy Office - Army of the Catholic Church (Inquisition) seeks to show the rebellious the error of their ways, with force. The Golden City of Adocentyn. Hermes Thrice-great.
And there is "The invisible, inaudible Messenger, on great peacock-eyed wings,... whisper-crying into each ear [of the Brotherhood] just one word which causes this heart to turn in the right direction, go pack the needful things... and set out."

"Then, at last, would be the Great Instauration...a backward revolution, a backflip of wonder performed to turn the progress of the world around like a galleon and head it again for the Golden Age, which lies in the past,...but could now be sought for in the time to come, as Hermes Thrice-great in Aegypt so long ago predicted: "the restoration of all good things in the course of time by the will of God. Or by means of the gods"...

A grounding in Magic, Alchemy, Qaballa, Rosecrucianism and even Tarot are helpful.

And, as with all of John Crowley's novel's, high quality writing. It's been a long time coming. To make any sense of this last novel, you will have to read the previous three books in the Aegypt series.

As bizarre as the ideas in this book may appear, many of the events depicted in this series really happened, and the book has direct quotes lifted from the diaries of Dee and Bruno!
***********************************************

Well I finally finished!
There are three stories in this series, John Dee, Giordano Bruno and Pierce Moffett a contemporary author (who is John Crowley's age, height and weight, who also went to Czech Republic - see the stuff in back of book) working on completeing a Fellowes Kraft book about how the fabric of Time can shift and what was possible in one time becomes impossible and myths in the next era. And Moffett (or Crowley) was on the verge of uncovering a Magical paradigm shift happening now, involving Beau Brachman!

While completeing the book, Moffett (or Crowley) gets Writers Block, gets old and cynical and can't finish the book he started. For hundreds of pages at the end the formerly tight plot meanders, falls apart and Crowley brings in many new meaningless characters and boring events that don't enhance the plot. And he drops the contemporary plot he had previously established.

Crowley took 20 years to write this series. He had a wonderful idea through 3 1/2 books, which he ruins in the end. He is like a running back who breaks through the line, breaks through the secondary and gets free, running for the end zone, and fumbles the ball inside the 25 yard line!
When this series deals with Dee or Bruno it's wonderful. When it gets' to the end, Moffett (or Crowley) drops the ball.

I can't believe this is what Crowley had in mind, 20 years ago, when he started! A profound disappointment. What happened to Beau Brachman??
We should have know something was up when Crowley delayed writing this series and worked on "The Translator" and "Lord Byrons Novel" rather than finishing "Aegypt".

Seven years ago when the third volume in Aegypt "Daemonomania" (agrueably the best in the series) came out, one newspaper critic I read refused to give the series a rave, because it was not yet complete. At the time I thought he was wrong, now I think he was right.

as Crowley says, "Aegypt is as complete as it's ever going to be..".

I will add that it took me a week or so to breeze through the marvellous parts about Dee and Bruno, which I suspect were written long ago, and months to read the pointless, meandering ending chapters.

It occurs to me John Crowley could have a crackerjack fantasy book, an dynamite instant classic, by extracting the John Dee and Giordano Bruno sections of these four books and placing them in one seperate novel! Leave out Pierce Moffatt and the modern stuff altogether.
***

there are repeated references (no less than three) to Harpocartes, the God of Silence in the Hermetic tradition, in this last book of Aegypt. I wonder why?

After I read "Little, Big" back in 1987, I thought I must be Crowley's biggest fan. I went back and read "Beasts" and "The Deep" and whatever else I could find of his. And I reread "Little, Big" and loved it even more the second time.

I read "Aegypt" when it first came out, and though I found it had many magnificent touches, I was a little puzzled by it, because I wasn't sure how the modern-day narrative connected with the parallel historical one about the doomed heretic Bruno. But I figured it would probably come together more clearly in the next book.

"Love and Sleep" I found even more puzzling some years later. Again, it had some great stuff, but the plot lines seemed to diverge even further rather than converge, and Pierce's descent (a word reflective of my own provincial value system, I know) into intense S & M and psycho witchy power games with Rose, and then finally driving her nuts and losing her and going partially nuts himself . . . I didn't recognize his character anymore. AND I didn't see the point of the story at all; that is, how it was relevant to what had come before.

"Daemonomania" also struck me as amorphous, if highly readable, though by then I had pretty much lost faith in finding any kind of thematic or storyline-related satisfaction that I would be able to relate to.

And then came "Endless Things."

Oh but in the meantime, there was "The Translator" which I found completely brilliant.

So since I had already read every Crowley novel I knew of (save "Lord Byron's Novel"), and since I'd already invested gosh knows how many hours in reading the first three books of the series, I felt I HAD to finish it up. It felt like part of my life's work as well as Crowley's! I felt literar-ily bonded to this man. Like we had been on this journey together through the years and I needed to complete it with him. And at the very least I figured I'd be moderately entertained, even if I wasn't clear what exactly was going on or why.

SO . . . I hereby dedicate this review to anyone else who may have strayed to this page, seen all the five-star reviews, plus the glowing words from the Washington Post, and scratched their heads and thought, "Wha . . .??"

Dear god. Can you spell B-O-R-I-N-G??? I mean, maybe I'm just not that smart. Maybe I'm too unsophisticated to grasp the genius of this work.

Then again, maybe the emperor has no clothes. This has NO plot tension whatsoever! Through the medium of Pierce's research and reading, Crowley has brought in *endlessly* MORE historical elements and personages and episodes (and arcane mythology and religious symbolism) to flesh out the "alternate history" motif . .. and how do they all bear on the narrative again?? IS there a central narrative? Are we really to be fascinated with the idea of a Y standing for crossroads in destiny, or . . . whatever?

I made it up to page 95 or so, only because Crowley was once such a massively important author in my life. I would never have suffered through so much erudite muck for any other mere mortal. But I admit defeat. I admit it! I am bored senseless!!

I mean, doesn't anybody else out there need a character or two to latch on to? Could we at least find out what's going on with Rose and the religious cult? (They were interesting at least, in a creepy way.) And how Sam's doing?

Well, Crowley must be up to something, but it's beyond me. Kudos to all of you who get it. Maybe I'm just no longer patient enough to hang in there with this kind of thing.

If you haven't read Crowley, you really really need to. he will take you to magical places and you will feel perfectly at home there.