Aegypt

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 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 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.

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.

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.