I have to confess that I was stumped by this one.Coming to Crowley as I have through Little, Big and Engine Summer, I was expecting some blissfully ambiguous fantasy to emerge when the main character Pierce Moffett stepped off a bus, abandoned the track of the life that he knew, and followed an old friend into a green mountain town.Don't let the Arthur C. Clarke and World Fantasy Award nominations fool you: this is not a work of fantasy, not really.On it's surface, it's a very low temperature, small-town drama about a young man who has lost his way in the city and is coming to find himself again among former hippies and horoscope-reading mystics gone to seed in upstate New York.Set within that, however, is a meditation on the nature of history and reality. Pierce is putting together a novel on an imagined history, based on the novels written by a fellow named Fellowes Kraft, whose work features a fictionalized version of Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, whose own work is based on a fictionalized version of Hermes Trismegistus. And of course, the attentive reader will note that what we are actually reading above all is John Crowley's fictionalized account.Those sort of metafictional winks at the reader are probably what I enjoyed most of the novel. See, for instance, Pierce Moffett's review of Fellowes Kraft's unpublished novel:"For it wasn't a *good* book at all, Pierce supposed, considered as a book, a novel; it was a philosophical romance, remote and extravagant, without much of the tang of life as it really must have gone on in the world--as it really *had* gone on if you meant *this* world, this only one in which, metaphors aside, we all have really and solely lived in. The character were hungry ghosts... the actual incidents great and small in which they in fact participated, all reduced to a winter's tale by the springs their actions were imagined here to have: the birth-pangs and death-throes of world-ages, the agonies of potent magicians, the work of daemons, of Christ's tears, of the ordering stars."Indeed.Much of The Solitudes is rough-hewn. The novels within the novel make the whole disjointed. You can never settle comfortably into a narrative before it is taken away. And the novel features ambiguities which, while they probably make sense when looking at the series as a whole, are frustrating when you're mired in the first book. The deliberate conflation of the two characters named Rose, for instance, sets one's teeth on edge.For such a pastoral book, it frustrated me more than it should have. But given Crowley's other achievements, I imagine I will follow him through to the end of The Aegypt Cycle -- albeit eventually.
Finished on May, 1st, 2007. 5 stars. Reading againFinished again on Oct 24, 2014 - still 5 starssome quotes I particularly liked:"He began to abandon--by degrees, and without ever quite admitting it to himself--the attempt to construct an account, a vademecum for his kids on their pilgrimage; anyway that account had grown suddenly too huge to be squeezed into the compass of an ordinary daylit history course, it needed a course no a college of its own. He went on teaching, but his path had forked; he followed Bruno, and was led down long avenues under emblematic arches, past columned temples; he lost his way amid the suburbs pf a baroque city both unfinished and ruined; found a geometric pleasureground; entered a dark and endless topiary maze." - pg 107"He knew why it was that people believe Gypsies can tell fortunes; he knew why that pyramid and that mystic eye appear on every dollar bill, and from what country the New Order of the Ages issues. It was the same country as the country from which Gypsies came, and it was not Egypt. Not Egypt but AEgypt: for there is more than one history of the world." - pg 107"Qui non intellegit, aut taceat aut discat. Which would actually mean, let's see, Let [him] who does not understand [this], either be silent [about it] or learn." pg 294"Once, the world was not as it has since become. It once worked in a different way than it does now; it had a different history and a different future. Its very flesh and bones, the physical laws that governed it, were other than the ones we know. Whenever the world turns from what it has been into what it will be, and thus earns a different past and a different future, there is a brief moment when every possible kind of universe, all possible extensions of Being in space and time, and poised on the threshold of becoming, before all but one pass into nonexistence again; and the world is as it is and not as it was, and everyone in it forgets that it could ever be or has ever been other than the way it is now. And just as the world id thus turning from the what-has-been into the what-is-to-be, and all possibilities are just for a moment alight and one has not yet been chosen, then all the other similar dis junctures in time (for there have been several), can become visible too: like the switchbacks on a rising mountain road suddenly becoming visible to a climber just at the moment when his car swings far out on the apex of the turn he is taking, and he sees where he has come from: and sees a blue sedan far down there climbing too." - pg 312
What do You think about Aegypt (1987)?
UPDATE May 23th, 2015:Just re-read this one, almost exactly a year since the first time. Still excellent. My favorite quote:The last wish: the only wish, in fact. That things could be, not as they are, but in some way different instead. Not better, really, or not better in all ways; a little larger maybe, more full of this and that, but mostly just different. New. That I, Pierce Moffett, could know that it had once been as it was and is that way no longer, that I could know it to have once been remade and so able to be remade again, all new, all other. Then perhaps this grief would at last be lifted from my heart. ORIGINAL REVIEW: May 18th, 2014:Both a profound meditation on the nature of history and a moving personal story. A balance that is almost impossible to get right. Usually, you like the ideas enough that the crappy story doesn't matter, or vice versa. But Crowley delivers both in equal measure. A rare treat.I wholeheartedly, unreservedly and (a little too) insistently recommend this book to any of my friends who are currently professors in subjects related to the history of ideas. There are one or two of you. ;) NB It's much more about the late medieval/early modern period than anything resembling the Egypt the title suggests. Regardless of your particular area of interest, you'll get a lot out of it. I pinky swear.I'm going to post some choice quotes in my tumblr shortly: http://untravel.tumblr.com
—Ralph
Curiouser and curiouser..... ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE by: Walt Whitman (1819-1892) On the beach at night alone, As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song, As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future. A vast similitude interlocks all, All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, All distances of place however wide, All distances of time, all inanimate forms, All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds, All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes, All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe, All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future, This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann'd, And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
—Rochelle
Toward the end of this very strange and ingenious novel, the author reviews it himself. The hero, Pierce Moffett, has come across an unpublished manuscript by a deceased author, and it sounds very much like The Solitudes itself:"For it wasn't a *good* book at all, Pierce supposed, considered as a book, a novel; it was a philosophical romance, remote and extravagant, without much of the tang of life as it really must have gone on in the world--as it really *had* gone on if you meant *this* world, this only one in which, metaphors aside, we all have really and solely lived in. The character were hungry ghosts. . .the actual incidents great and small in which they in fact participated, all reduced to a winter's tale by the springs their actions were imagined here to have: the birth-pangs and death-throes of world-ages, the agonies of potent magicians, the work of daemons, of Christ's tears, of the ordering stars."In other words, if you're reading for character and verisimilitude, you'll find it only in occasional patches: this is an idea-driven book. But the ideas are so intriguing, and Crowley's writing so lyrical, and some scenes so eerie and gripping, that you're never bored -- though you might well be exasperated!
—Vicky
