Review of Love & Sleep by John Crowley

Some time back, I wrote areview of The Solitudes, the first part of John Crowley's Ӕgypt Cycle.  Last year, I read the second, Love & Sleep, and I thought I'd update the review.

Love & Sleep is in most ways a continuation of a single work, and therefore possesses much the same qualities: the blend of rural life, intense academia and historical drama, as historian Pierce Moffatt seeks to show that the world not only changes at crucial stages of history, but changes retrospectively, so that what was once true no longer is.

However, this book doesn't simply pick up where the last broke off.  For about the first third (this, like The Solitudes, is divided into sections corresponding to three of the twelve Houses of the Moon) Crowley examines Pierce's childhood, which was only hinted at in the first book.  We see him growing up with his cousins, reading arcane works of mythology and mysticism, and developing his obsession with Ӕgypt (not to be confused with Egypt) and the Invisible College.  This was a name given to the Rosicrucians, but Pierce forms a gang of the name with his cousins, dedicated to the concept that they're the last survivors of the lost, ancient world.

We also see his relationship with a wild mountain girl called, of all things, Bobby Shaftoe ("And the girl had some sort of nursery rhyme name...") with whom Pierce experiences his first, child's stirrings of sexual desire.  We also, though, see something of Bobby's grandfather, who appears to have mystical, out-of-body experiences (unless, of course, they're just vivid dreams) which tie in with some of the occult themes of the sixteenth century episodes.

These continue the stories of John Dee (left) and Giordano Bruno (below), historical scientists and magicians, though concentrating this time rather more on Dee, taking them from Oxford to Prague, where Dee is commissioned by the Emperor Rudolph to turn lead into gold.  Crowley makes it clear that this much-misunderstood alchemical ideal was not primarily, if at all, for avarice, but meant to aid the mystical aim of creating "philosophical gold".

Dee and his assistant Kelley (pictured togethered below left) are guided by a spirit called Madimi, an intriguing figure who — if not actually a figment of their imagination — may be an angel or something more sinister.  Growing in the course of the book from apparently a seven-year-old girl into apparently a woman, Madimi guides their steps, promising the dawn of a new age.

Meanwhile, the book also explores further Pierce's new life in the Faraway Mountains, in particular his relationships with Rosie Rasmussen and Rose Ryder — two women he originally confused.  We discover a lot more about Rosie through her own POV, almost equal to Pierce's in these sections, and something more about Rose through Pierce's POV, though she remains an enigma for now.  It can hardly be a coincidence that both names reflect the rose at the centre of the symbolism of the Rosicrucians — or the Invisible College.

In among this, Pierce pursues his studies, seeking to understand his mystical theory of history and therefore prepare for the change which, he's convinced, is already underway.  He seeks for the one thing — hidden in plain sight, he believes — which has survived from the former age in which different laws of nature held sway, and magic works.  And, by the end of the book, he's convinced he's found it.  But you'll have to read the book to find out what it is.

The book ends (preparing for its transition into the third volume and the seventh House) with a vast wind storming through both the sixteenth century and the twentieth, perhaps heralding the coming of the new age in both.  And winds blow throughout the book.  In a passage which clearly expresses Pierce's idiosyncratic view of history, there's a discussion of the strange phenomenon of the wind that scattered the Spanish Armada — a wind for which, Crowley claims, there were no reports whatsoever at the time:

Perhaps there was a wind, and it somehow left no trace in the primary records of the time...Or perhaps there really was no wind — until the awesome fortunate power which commentators attributed to it belatedly conjures it up.  Only when the myth of the big wind...settles firmly on the humps of historian's {sic} pens does it begin to blow backward from the later time to the earlier, where kings, popes, and ambassadors can feel it, though sailors and ships do not.

Perhaps...  Crowley constantly teases the reader as whether or not there actually is any magic in the book.  Perhaps Bobby's grandfather just had vivid dreams.  Perhaps Dr Dee's angel was really a trick by his assistant.  Perhaps all Pierce's discoveries are really just an overactive imagination fed by a yearning for the mystical.  And perhaps, Crowley seems to imply, it doesn't greatly matter.  A principle of Renaissance magic was that there's a parallel between the macrocosm (the universe) and the microcosm (the human), and if Pierce's quest is merely one of self-discovery, that doesn't invalidate it.

Like the first book, Love & Sleep is an absorbing but not easy read.  The prose is often dense and the vocabulary send me many times to the dictionary (the word semhamaphore defeated even the uncut Oxford English Dictionary) and Crowley breaks grammatical rules with gay abandon, though only for carefully calculated effect.  Though I suspect the example in the quote above is an honest-to-goodness typo.

Nevertheless, it's a book well worth sticking with, and I'm looking forward to reading the third book, Dӕmonomania.  After a suitable rest.

The Solitudes (The Ægypt Cycle, Part 1) by John Crowley

A few years ago, I read John Crowley’s fantasy novel Little, Big and was blown away by it.  It was a book which, as Ursula Le Guin put it, “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy”, incorporating as it did family saga, fairyland, historical figures and modern urban life.  And wonderful characters.  And beautiful prose.

I hadn’t heard of any other books by Crowley before, recently, I picked up a copy of Ægypt, since retitled The Solitudes  when the former became the overall title of the tetralogy it begins.  Having just finished it, I’m happy to report that Crowley’s very far from being a one-book wonder.

It is, Crowley says in his introduction, “a book made out of other books”, and it centres around an unconventional historian, Pierce Moffett, setting out to write a book about a different kind of history:

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, are poised on the threshold of becoming, before all but one pass into nonexistence again...then all the other similar disjunctures in time (for there have been several) can become visible too...

The particular “disjuncture” Pierce is most interested in revolves around Giordano Bruno and John Dee, sixteenth century Hermetic philosophers, astrologers and magicians, and around his obsession with the concept of Ægypt, a mystical realm with only a passing connection to the mundane land of Egypt.

This is not an easy book to read, containing as it does extended passages of metaphysical thought, along with entire chapters from the work of a fictional author of historical novels, Fellowes Kraft, whose spiritual journey seems to mirror Pierce’s own.  Kraft writes about Bruno, Dee and even a young Will Shakespeare, moving gradually from lively historical romance to an examination of the clash between the old world and the new (which is also the even older) in the sixteenth century.

In the historical sections, we see Dee and his assistant communicating with angels and Bruno being guided by a young man who might be Hermes, but there’s very little overt fantasy in the contemporary chapters.  Most of this concerns Pierce’s life, first in New York City, then in a rural region called the Faraway Mountains (I assume these to be fictional, though I’d be fascinated to be proved wrong) where he interacts with a rich array of local characters, some of whom have their own point-of-view scenes.  In some ways, the books would work almost entirely as a blend of country life and academia.

Nevertheless, this is unmistakably a fantasy novel, and magic permeates it, even if it’s mostly hidden just under the surface, just as it is for much of Little, Big.  Along with Pierce’s lovers and colleagues, along with the inhabitants of the Faraways, The Solitudes is peopled by the scattered inhabitants of Ægypt, the signs of the zodiac, the spirits of the planets, the decans of Hermetic lore, angels, gods and dæmons, and the story’s progress is controlled by the twelve houses of the Moon.

The book’s obsessions remind me a little of Mary Gentle, one of my favourite authors, in particular the Hermetic lore (which features especially in Rats & Gargoyles) and the concept of history’s mutability (the central theme of Ash: A Secret History).  The two authors’ approaches, though, are radically different, Gentle incorporating the themes completely into speculative stories, whereas Crowley takes a more academic slant.  If I were really pushed to choose one approach over the other, I’d probably go for Gentle, but I’d rather not choose.  There’s nothing wrong with loving both apples and oranges.

The Solitudes isn’t a book for light reading: it requires willingness to invest time and thought, to immerse yourself in his characters, his settings, his magic, his gorgeous prose, and not emerge for some time.  It also pays to have a dictionary at hand if, like me, you’re the kind of reader who joyfully welcomes the opportunity to expand your vocabulary.

There are three more books in the Ægypt Cycle, and I’m looking forward to losing myself in each one of them, as well as anything else I can find by John Crowley.

I don't have the means to award star ratings here, but it would be the maximum, whatever that is.