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Praise for the Ægypt sequence: "WithLittle, Big, Crowley established himself as America''s greatest living writer of fantasy. Ægypt confirms that he is one of our finest living writers, period." --Michael Dirda "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. . . .Ægyptbears many resemblances, incidental and substantive, to Thomas Pynchon''s wonderful 1966 novelThe 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 Ægypt 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 Ægypt 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. "It is a work of great erudition and deep humanity that is as beautifully composed as any novel in my experience." --Washington Post Book World "An unpredictable, free-flowing, sui generis novel." --Los Angeles Times "WithEndless Things and the completion of the Ægypt cycle, Crowley has constructed one of the finest, most welcoming tales contemporary fiction has to offer us." --Book Forum "Crowley''s peculiar kind of fantasy: a conscious substitute for the magic in which you don''t quite believe any more." --London Review of Books "A beautiful palimpsest as complex, mysterious and unreliable as human memory." --Seattle Times "This year, while millions of Harry Potter fans celebrated and mourned the end of their favorite series, a much smaller but no less devoted group of readers marked another literary milestone: the publication of the last book in John Crowley''s Ægypt Cycle." --Matt Ruff "Crowley''s eloquent and captivating conclusion to his Ægypt tetralogy finds scholar Pierce Moffet still searching for the mythical Ægypt, an alternate reality of magic and marvels that have been encoded in our own world''s myths, legends and superstitions. Pierce first intuited the realm''s existence from the work of cult novelist Fellowes Kraft. Using Kraft''s unfinished final novel as his Baedeker, Pierce travels to Europe, where he spies tantalizing tracesof Ægypt''s mysteries in the Gnostic teachings of the Rosicrucians, the mysticism of John Dee, the progressive thoughts of heretical priest Giordano Bruno and the "chemical wedding" of two 17th-century monarchs in Prague. Like Pierce''s travels, the final destination for this modern fantasy epic is almost incidental to its telling. With astonishing dexterity, Crowley (Lord Byron''s Novel) parallels multiple story lines spread across centuries and unobtrusively deploys recurring symbols and motifs to convey a sense of organic wholeness. Even as Pierce''s quest ends on a fulfilling personal note, this marvelous tale comes full circle to reinforce its timeless themes of transformation, re-creation and immortality." --Publishers Weekly Locus Award finalist John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine. His most recent novel isFour Freedoms. 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.… (more)
User reviews
Crowley's prose is gorgeous as always, and littered with wonderful observations. The scholars of esotericism who have so informed the writing of the three previous books actually begin to intrude as characters in this one; the brief appearances of Frances Yates and Gilles Quispel were special treats for those who are familiar with the academic underpinnings of Aegypt. And protagonist Pierce's gnostic attainment in the antepenultimate chapter is a very wise and beautiful passage.
But it's not a happy ending--not as I reckon them anyhow. How can you expect a happy ending from a work with an explicit structure that works its way through the astrological houses from Birth to the Prison? Crowley metafictionally tips his hand in describing a manuscript within the novel that does not provide linear or cyclic resolution, nor even the sense of a completed part of an adumbrated whole: "It was without end but it was finished." Finishing Aegypt involves a great deal of calculated disenchantment that can feel like betrayal to those of us who have been so under the spell of the earlier volumes. Once or twice too often for my taste, the numinous is reduced to the neurotic.
At a couple of points in Endless Things, Crowley seems to intimate that genuine, world-transforming magic was only possible during the 1970s. Perhaps that was really true for him, although it would be a genuine shame if so. After reading the exercise in disenchantment of Endless Things, on behalf of 21st-century magicians, conventicled and unconventicled, I feel I may--in all readerly friendliness--rebuke him as a splitter.
I was hoping that this volume would make sense of the previous three books, and tie together their rambling and desperate plot-lines into a more unified whole. It doesn't, but I don't think I'm disappointed by that. Crowley's writing is such a delight to read: he uses simple vocabulary and simple sentences, and yet he can pack more meaning and emotion into a simple turn of phrase than any other author I know. Over four volumes, he has managed to tell us so much about Pierce and the other characters, and to make them so real: it is like getting to know a really close friend and learning their entire life history. I found the whole series incredibly enjoyable, even if I wasn't sure what (if anything) Crowley was trying to say.
I think, like all of Crowley's books, I need to re-read these over the years. I think I will uncover more and more layers of complexity the more I revisit them.