Endless Things: A Part of Aegypt

So, here we have the final volume of the Aegypt Tetralogy, which it has taken Crowley twenty years of his life to compose. The third volume, Daemonomania, remains the masterwork of the tetrad, but a strong caveat, it won't seem to any reader like the chef d'oeuvre that it is unless one has read The Solitudes and Love & Sleep. Endless Things is a lilting away, a diminuendo after the crescendo of Daemonomania.Here, at least in the first two sections - Regnum and Benefacta - you will find the same obsessions with Giordano Bruno, Gnostic arcana and multifarious occult literary allusions as you find in the other works. These sections - as I've written in my reviews of the other three works - are not really where Crowley shines. Rather, it is in his lilting, lyrical descriptions of the magic of the world around us.The third, and last, section, Carcer, presents a few problems. The section titles, in Latin, are not such as one who has never as much as cracked a first year Latin book can't twig the meaning out of from the English derivatives. Carcer's primary meaning is easy enough: prison. And I think Crowley, here, with Pierce accepting his place in world, space, time, does mean this sense, the sense in which the Gnostics regarded the world, as a prison. But, having spent four years of my adolescence in an English boarding school, up to my ears in Latin, I happen to know that the word has many secondary and tertiary meanings. A carcer was also the gate at which horses were held back before the start of the race and thus came to mean the beginning of something. I think it would probably be the third or fourth definition of the word if one bothered to look it up in a lexicon. In any event, I think this definition, not precluding the first, is certainly more in keeping with the tone of this last section, which is, dare I say it: sweet and dulcet, a new start on an endless voyage. As Pierce contemplates towards the end:"The world is only a cruel maze if you think you ought to be able to find a way from where you have been to where you want to be. He knew nothing of the sort.....So maybe he was, and had always been, a lucky man."One could - as the title suggests - go on and on. My verdict on the book is that it was a bit of a letdown, perhaps intentionally, after Daemonomania. I thought too much of it was occupied with covering ground already exhaustively covered in the other three books, and to lesser effect. Nevertheless, I couldn't help fancying it. As with all of Crowley's work, one comes away, after turning the last page, feeling that one's own life is far richer and stranger than when one opened it.

I put in a lot of time reading this entire series waiting for something. Senile ramblings is a perfect description of this series of books. Nothing happens, nothing is explained. It's impossible to follow. The too many side characters are too plain to keep track of.

All four of these books are sort of like one book - see my review of the first book - The Solitudes.

First, Endless Things is the final novel in the Aegypt series (The Solitudes, Love and Sleep, Daemonomania). Do not read this novel if you have not read the preceding three. There are two kinds of book series -- those with connected but stand-alone novels (Roth's Zuckerman books, Updike's Rabbit novels) and those that, while published separately, are really one long novel (The Lord of the Rings). Although the Aegypt series falls between these extremes, it is much closer to being the latter type -- one immense novel. Reading Endless Things as a stand-alone is like starting Tolkien's epic with The Return of the King.If you have read the other three, Endless Things may at first seem to be a bit of a let-down. It is not the climax of the series -- it is a coda. This is like a soft diminuendo after the sturm und drang that came before. After the soaring heights of the previous novels, Crowley brings us gently down to earth.The five stars are for the complete Aegypt sequence -- Endless Things simply can not be evaluated alone.

My favorite book of all time is Little Big. This series doesn't quite measure to that, but it is original, & I enjoyed it.

NOTE: this is book four of a series and meaningless without reading the others first!(I wrote the first part of the review after reading the marvellous first half of the book. Then I finished...) What I have encountered so far: Magic(k). John Dee (The Official Magician and Astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I). The Brotherhood of the Rose-Cross. The Chymical Marriage. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel in Prague and The Golem. The Qaballa. Gemetria. The war in Heaven. Giordano Bruno re-spells himself and then the World. (You can't be reborn into the same world, so he changes it!) The ushering in of The New Age. The Patient Donkey (refered to by the traditional name, which Amazon won't let me write here). The shift in the direction of the World. The Holy Office - Army of the Catholic Church (Inquisition) seeks to show the rebellious the error of their ways, with force. The Golden City of Adocentyn. Hermes Thrice-great.And there is "The invisible, inaudible Messenger, on great peacock-eyed wings,... whisper-crying into each ear [of the Brotherhood] just one word which causes this heart to turn in the right direction, go pack the needful things... and set out.""Then, at last, would be the Great Instauration...a backward revolution, a backflip of wonder performed to turn the progress of the world around like a galleon and head it again for the Golden Age, which lies in the past,...but could now be sought for in the time to come, as Hermes Thrice-great in Aegypt so long ago predicted: "the restoration of all good things in the course of time by the will of God. Or by means of the gods"...A grounding in Magic, Alchemy, Qaballa, Rosecrucianism and even Tarot are helpful.And, as with all of John Crowley's novel's, high quality writing. It's been a long time coming. To make any sense of this last novel, you will have to read the previous three books in the Aegypt series.As bizarre as the ideas in this book may appear, many of the events depicted in this series really happened, and the book has direct quotes lifted from the diaries of Dee and Bruno!***********************************************Well I finally finished!There are three stories in this series, John Dee, Giordano Bruno and Pierce Moffett a contemporary author (who is John Crowley's age, height and weight, who also went to Czech Republic - see the stuff in back of book) working on completeing a Fellowes Kraft book about how the fabric of Time can shift and what was possible in one time becomes impossible and myths in the next era. And Moffett (or Crowley) was on the verge of uncovering a Magical paradigm shift happening now, involving Beau Brachman!While completeing the book, Moffett (or Crowley) gets Writers Block, gets old and cynical and can't finish the book he started. For hundreds of pages at the end the formerly tight plot meanders, falls apart and Crowley brings in many new meaningless characters and boring events that don't enhance the plot. And he drops the contemporary plot he had previously established.Crowley took 20 years to write this series. He had a wonderful idea through 3 1/2 books, which he ruins in the end. He is like a running back who breaks through the line, breaks through the secondary and gets free, running for the end zone, and fumbles the ball inside the 25 yard line!When this series deals with Dee or Bruno it's wonderful. When it gets' to the end, Moffett (or Crowley) drops the ball.I can't believe this is what Crowley had in mind, 20 years ago, when he started! A profound disappointment. What happened to Beau Brachman??We should have know something was up when Crowley delayed writing this series and worked on "The Translator" and "Lord Byrons Novel" rather than finishing "Aegypt".Seven years ago when the third volume in Aegypt "Daemonomania" (agrueably the best in the series) came out, one newspaper critic I read refused to give the series a rave, because it was not yet complete. At the time I thought he was wrong, now I think he was right.as Crowley says, "Aegypt is as complete as it's ever going to be..".I will add that it took me a week or so to breeze through the marvellous parts about Dee and Bruno, which I suspect were written long ago, and months to read the pointless, meandering ending chapters.It occurs to me John Crowley could have a crackerjack fantasy book, an dynamite instant classic, by extracting the John Dee and Giordano Bruno sections of these four books and placing them in one seperate novel! Leave out Pierce Moffatt and the modern stuff altogether.***there are repeated references (no less than three) to Harpocartes, the God of Silence in the Hermetic tradition, in this last book of Aegypt. I wonder why?

Glad to get the ending of this series at last, wish Mr. Crowley had not taken so long to write this.

If you haven't read Crowley, you really really need to. he will take you to magical places and you will feel perfectly at home there.