Customer Reviews

The Solitudes (The Aegypt Cycle)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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 John Crowley's 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.

Very few modern authors can both engage your intellect and stir your soul; even fewer can unleash your imagination. But perhaps only one writer alive today can do all that in prose that is truly awe-inspiring: John Crowley. I'd been waiting for years for Aegypt to be reissued--it says something that used copies of the first editions were going for hundreds of dollars. Finally I got my copy of Solitudes and marveled at Crowley's ability to cast a spell in only a few pages. This book takes concentration and commitment to fully appreciate, you'll also probably want to check on some other sources on topics like Hermes Trismegistus and John Dee (thank god for Wikipedia). The 1970s setting is also a bit unfortunate, as it's recent enough to carry some baggage but not recent enough for this Gen X reader to really relate to. But this book will move and transport you like nothing else out there. Find a quiet place and give it a chance.

It seems John Crowely's true work will always be largely a secret kept by the extremely passionate and relatively few readers who are his very devoted fans. Crowley insists that you climb outside the neatly kept vehicle of your world view and take a look at the scenery you can't see from inside.

As was made clear in one such reader's comment, the original title, "Aegypt", was forced on the write by the publisher, as was the ridiculous decision to take a single (if lengthy) novel and split it into four separate books, each of which was marketed without reference to the fact that it is the continuation of a single story! "The Solitudes" was Crowley's original name for this first section of his awesome tale of alternate possibilities and love in a time of Idiocy. Which is the cue for saying the person who thought this book is "the most poorly written, pathetic attempt at a story that I've come across in years" probably wouldn't know great writing if it front ended her on an expressway. Crowley is an alchemist with words and his vocabulary is rather larger than your typical pulp romance writer, which may have been the issue with that reader. In "Little, Big" he demonstrated his capacity for thinking in a limitless way about our perplexing existence in this universe and a mind-boggling talent for crafting a complex world and breathtaking sentences from such thinking.

This book does get off to a slow start, but when you realize it is the exposition of a novel that must be, in reality, 2,000 pages long, the complex exposition makes perfect sense. Crowley writes fantasy of unprecedented scope and articulacy, it is fantasy for the thinking person. The "fantasy" pigeonhole is, anyway, misleading. A person who can fully imagine and articulate an alternate way of illuminating our existence is usually called a philosopher. But that label does nothing for Crowley, either.

This book is not for everyone, especially in our short attention span culture. But I think those who are captivated by the vivid, hallucinatory thought and language in this book will be compelled to travel on to the end. If you generally read on a level above vampire stories and torrid romances, please get this book and discover an alternate reality that is the product of one of the most original and eloquent thinker/writers of our time.

I thought about waiting to review this after I had read the entire series - but not for long. I knew I would get the details mixed up as to what happened where and to whom and with what weapon. It is rare that I read a multi-part story straight through. I don't want to not have one to savor later. For the same reason that I'm going to review them as read, I'm afraid too many details would be forgotten before I got to the next parts.

I can also tell after volume one (and peeking at the descriptions of the other volumes) that this is not a series that has four episodes. Rather, it is one very large book split into four pieces.

Have your brain in good working condition before you tackle Solitudes. This isn't a case of thinking outside the box. There is no box. The book's setting is the universe and the time line stretches from the earliest yesterday to the furthest tomorrow. The characters walk a step or two off the beaten path, when there is a path.

Crowley mixes mysticism with metafiction (or meta-metaficiton?) to produce a book that will exercise your imagination. I stopped trying to figure out where the story was going so I could make sure I knew where it had been.

Simply stated, Crowley knows how to write well. I hope the other three volumes, Love & Sleep, Damonomania and Endless Things are as well done.

This book seems a rather polarising one to review. Indeed, if one peruses the other six reviews here it is clear that this is more than a bit of an understatement. It was polarising for me as a reader as well. I thought parts of it lovely and wonderful, while other parts seemed arcane to the point of inanity. But, here are my thoughts and impressions, for whatever they're worth to "Crowleyites" and others:

The best part of the book is Crowley's gentle, poetic prose. It manages to make the least deeds of the characters seem caught up in something grand that is just out of sight - much as, as another reviewer has mentioned, Proust does. Here is an example:

"In the mountains above Rosie's station wagon, deer walked, fattening on the apples of the old orchards; down on the river, fallen leaves floated south, gathering in colored rugs at eddies and backwaters and on the shore of the little pleasure-ground that Spofford owned. At nightfall, a flock of migrating starlings returning to the towers of Butterman's made a banner in the air above the castle that snapped, as though in the wind, before the birds settled to rest." P.228

These sorts of passages are what made the world conveyed here an enchantment for me.

Now to what another reviewer calls the "Neoplatonic/Gnostic" stuff. I've read almost all of Plato, all of Plotinus's Enneads and The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas (to whom Crowley mentions his indebtedness in the "To The Reader" section at the beginning here), so I'm not at all unfamiliar with the drawn-out rambling passages in re Bruno and Doctor Dee and Hermes Trismegistus, but they load the book down with unwieldy and, frankly, tiresome baggage. More to the point, they present a danger. The danger is that this book, and the rest of the Aegypt Cycle, will be taken as a sort of substitute for Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" for the erudite, readers who know Latin and Ancient theology, highbrow conspiracy theorists. That would be a pity indeed. For what The Solitudes seems to me most concerned with is mankind's perennial search for home. As the enigmatic character, Beau, tells Pierce:

"So you don't belong here....You only seem to. You can never say This is where I belong. The best you can say is This is like it. This day, this place. This is like the place where I belong." P.319

This book will strike a chord with many and is recommended to all those for whom poetic writing and a search for a spiritual home carry weight. Just, please, don't get too carried away with the hermetic learning described herein. That way confusion lies and, as Crowley would put it, et hoc genus omne.

This entire series of the Aegypt cycle is fantastic. The writing is effortless. The plot is very complex but mesmerizing. The ideas remain with me over a year after finishing the fourth book. Painfully beautiful.

I read this book because of the supposed relationship to the Tool album/song Aenima (the band denies it). I was very pleased with Crowley's excellent writing style. It was a little boring in a few places where he described some unusual details, specifically the way a character's mind worked and how they remembered history. That aside, the suggestion that the way the world and the universe works is continually changing is a fascinating concept. The book also jumped between a group of characters and times which added an extra dimension of interest to the story. A good read and I would recommend it to any one who is interested.

John Crowley is one of the best writers of our time. His work is complex, intellectually challenging and emotionally resonant. The Aegypt cycle is more difficult but ultimately even more satisfying than his wonderful novel Little, Big.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. An epic fantasy novel series written as high literature? Hermeticism, parallel universes, alternate histories? It sounds too good to be true. And it is a bit too good to be true.

There were two looming negatives I encountered. The first is that the plot is relatively dull. Perhaps it picks up in later volumes, but it limps along. Now, a good plot is hardly essential for a literary novel, particularly a modern novel. But this novel does attempt to rely on plot as part of its structure, and there isn't much to rely on. Very little "happens."

The second negative has been noted by another reviewer -- this is a surprisingly generation-bound book. It is written about a scenario in the 1970s by an author who clearly takes that time period as sort of a watershed in human existence. For those like myself, a Gen Xer, or later, it is difficult to stomach Crowley's attitude towards the 60s/70s. "Age of Aquarius" just makes us roll our eyes and snicker, but this book is predicated on taking such a generational attitude seriously. Perhaps you could fault the reader here, but great fantasy easily transcends its historical context -- see, e.g., Tolkien. The parallel that Crowley attempts to strike between the explosion of "spiritual energy" in the 1960s/70s and the Renaissance will, I think, strike most of us in later generations as rather comic (and even a bit nauseating). And for that reason, I suspect his cycle's appeal rapidly decreases for readers at Gen X and beyond -- who would much rather pick up a copy of Marquez.

In short, having read this through to the end, I wish I'd rather just read Giordano Bruno directly and skipped this attempt to express neoplatonic/gnostic ideas through a novel about a relatively tiresome crew of characters in an unappealing setting. So why do I still give it four stars overall? Well, Crowley's skill as a writer is undeniable, and the entire project was an audaciously brilliant one. I did enjoy reading it. Credit must be given. I simply did not feel he pulled it off in an especially moving, entertaining, or (for me) memorable way. It did not live up to the hype.

On book 2 of 3

This story tends to jump around even more than the first. It jumps from place to place, from past to future and back and a solid timeline for whats taking place is very difficult. I don't mind working my mind a little but I also don't want it to be a dreaded chore.

I expected more forming up of the overall plot of the trilogy and some goals for the hero are discussed, but fizzle. This felt more like filler than an actual book and with Mr. Crowleys writing style, rambling prose can start to seem like babbling.