Product Description

Praise for the Aegypt sequence:

"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. . . . Aegypt bears many resemblances, incidental and substantive, to Thomas Pynchon's wonderful 1966 novel The 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 Aegypt 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 Aegypt 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.

John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine. His most recent novel is Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land. 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #310089 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 341 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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 traces of 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. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Bill Sheehan

John Crowley's Endless Things is the fourth and last installment in a vast, intricate series of novels collectively entitled "Aegypt." The series (which is really one long novel) began in 1987 with the publication of Aegypt (soon to be reissued as The Solitudes) and was followed by Love & Sleep (1994) and Daemonomania (2000). It was clear from the start that Crowley was on to something special, and the appearance of this final volume confirms that impression. In its entirety, "Aegypt" stands as one of the most distinctive accomplishments of recent decades. It is a work of great erudition and deep humanity that is as beautifully composed as any novel in my experience.

Endless Things concludes the story of Pierce Moffitt, a teacher and historian who leaves his painfully disordered city life for the pastoral solitude of the Faraway Hills. There, surrounded by friends, lovers and assorted castoffs from the '60s, Pierce embarks on a new, though no less complicated, life and begins writing a book based on a radical new theory of history. This theory posits that, at infrequent intervals, the nature of the world changes in fundamental ways. As one age ends, the world moves through a kind of passage time, settling finally into a new age dominated by new and different laws, laws that unfold retroactively into the past. Thus, a world that is -- and always has been -- governed by physics might give way to a world that is -- and always has been -- governed by magic. There is, Crowley tells us, "more than one history of the world."

This view of history receives some unexpected support when Pierce encounters an unfinished manuscript by the late historical novelist Ffellowes Kraft. Kraft's novel describes an alternate 16th century on the brink of its own passage time. At the center of the tale are a pair of actual historical figures: John Dee, the Elizabethan scholar/alchemist who spent much of his life attempting to communicate with angels, and Giordano Bruno, the Dominican monk who first conceived the idea of an infinite universe and whose "heresies" led to his death at the stake in 1600. Dee, Bruno and Pierce have one thing in common: They are all seekers after Meaning, and their intertwined stories reflect and illuminate each other in countless large and small ways.

By the time Endless Things begins, many of the narrative's central events have already occurred in earlier volumes. Dee, deserted by his angels, has settled into an old age marked by poverty and neglect. Bruno, after reaching the zenith of his notoriety, has fallen into the hands of the Inquisition. And Pierce, laboring away on a book he can never finish, has barely survived a lacerating love affair and has played a crucial role in rescuing a very important young girl from a predatory religious cult. In some respects, Endless Things becomes an extended aftermath, a valedictory that encompasses the end of one age and the beginning of the next. In the process, it offers a fresh, sometimes revisionist perspective on all that has gone before, brings back a gallery of familiar characters and adds a few new ones to the mix.

Familiar faces from earlier volumes include Brent Spofford, Vietnam vet turned shepherd; Rosie Rasmussen, Pierce's friend and occasional employer; Sam, Rosie's epileptic daughter; and Axel Moffitt, Pierce's wonderfully eccentric father. Also making a final, enigmatic appearance is one of my favorite characters, Frank Walker Barr, professor of history and author of "Time's Body," a book that doesn't exist in the world outside the novel, but should. Of the new characters, the most significant is Roo Corvino, a feisty female car dealer who provides Pierce with a gateway to the larger world -- the larger life -- that has always eluded him.

The search for a larger, more expansive way of living stands at the heart of this complex collection of nested narratives. John Dee dedicates his life to the search for angelic presences and magical transformations, while Bruno chooses to burn rather than accept the tiny, imprisoning universe of religious and scientific orthodoxy. Prison cells, real and symbolic, appear throughout the novel. Bruno spends the years before his death in one such cell. Pierce, adrift and imprisoned in another age, makes a pilgrimage to that same cell. For these men, the theory of cyclical historical change that Pierce uncovers becomes, in the end, a source of solace and hope, for if the universe is capable of endless change, then so are we.

In Endless Things, Crowley finally allows his long-suffering characters to leave their respective prisons and enter the "limitless common day" that awaits them. Following their slow, uncertain progress through the course of four large volumes has been a deep -- and inexhaustible -- pleasure.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
There are three major plots and one minor one in the last of Crowley's four Aegypt novels, and developments regarding two secondary characters bulk so large that they almost become two more. Two of the major plots concern series protagonist Pierce Moffett. In one, 1990s Pierce is on a working retreat at a Trappist monastery; in the other, 1970s Pierce retraces historical novelist Fellowes Kraft's 1930s European journey researching the gnostic heretic Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). The third major plot is the tale of how Bruno's soul migrated from his about-to-be-burned-at-the-stake body into that of an ass and what transpired thereafter, a sort of Renaissance take on Apuleius' Golden Ass. That plotline is the one those unfamiliar with the other Aegypt books (The Solitudes, 1987; Love & Sleep, 1994; Daemonomania, 2000), uninterested in Pierce Moffett's woolgathering, and unimpressed by Crowley's anaphoric rhetorical flights will probably warm to most. Such Aegyptian neophytes may indeed be so bored by the rest of the book that they quit it before reaching its impressive and moving, homeyconclusion. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

"Endless" says it all
After I read "Little, Big" back in 1987, I thought I must be Crowley's biggest fan. I went back and read "Beasts" and "The Deep" and whatever else I could find of his. And I reread "Little, Big" and loved it even more the second time.

I read "Aegypt" when it first came out, and though I found it had many magnificent touches, I was a little puzzled by it, because I wasn't sure how the modern-day narrative connected with the parallel historical one about the doomed heretic Bruno. But I figured it would probably come together more clearly in the next book.

"Love and Sleep" I found even more puzzling some years later. Again, it had some great stuff, but the plot lines seemed to diverge even further rather than converge, and Pierce's descent (a word reflective of my own provincial value system, I know) into intense S & M and psycho witchy power games with Rose, and then finally driving her nuts and losing her and going partially nuts himself . . . I didn't recognize his character anymore. AND I didn't see the point of the story at all; that is, how it was relevant to what had come before.

"Daemonomania" also struck me as amorphous, if highly readable, though by then I had pretty much lost faith in finding any kind of thematic or storyline-related satisfaction that I would be able to relate to.

And then came "Endless Things."

Oh but in the meantime, there was "The Translator" which I found completely brilliant.

So since I had already read every Crowley novel I knew of (save "Lord Byron's Novel"), and since I'd already invested gosh knows how many hours in reading the first three books of the series, I felt I HAD to finish it up. It felt like part of my life's work as well as Crowley's! I felt literar-ily bonded to this man. Like we had been on this journey together through the years and I needed to complete it with him. And at the very least I figured I'd be moderately entertained, even if I wasn't clear what exactly was going on or why.

SO . . . I hereby dedicate this review to anyone else who may have strayed to this page, seen all the five-star reviews, plus the glowing words from the Washington Post, and scratched their heads and thought, "Wha . . .??"

Dear god. Can you spell B-O-R-I-N-G??? I mean, maybe I'm just not that smart. Maybe I'm too unsophisticated to grasp the genius of this work.

Then again, maybe the emperor has no clothes. This has NO plot tension whatsoever! Through the medium of Pierce's research and reading, Crowley has brought in *endlessly* MORE historical elements and personages and episodes (and arcane mythology and religious symbolism) to flesh out the "alternate history" motif . .. and how do they all bear on the narrative again?? IS there a central narrative? Are we really to be fascinated with the idea of a Y standing for crossroads in destiny, or . . . whatever?

I made it up to page 95 or so, only because Crowley was once such a massively important author in my life. I would never have suffered through so much erudite muck for any other mere mortal. But I admit defeat. I admit it! I am bored senseless!!

I mean, doesn't anybody else out there need a character or two to latch on to? Could we at least find out what's going on with Rose and the religious cult? (They were interesting at least, in a creepy way.) And how Sam's doing?

Well, Crowley must be up to something, but it's beyond me. Kudos to all of you who get it. Maybe I'm just no longer patient enough to hang in there with this kind of thing.

A multifaceted, humanizing, and magnificent sendoff to an epic saga.

The fourth novel and dearly-anticipated conclusion to the Aegypt series, Endless Things finishes the saga of historian Pierce Moffitt, whose far-reaching theory that, at infrequent times, the essential nature of the world alters; for example, a world that is (and always has been) regulated by the laws of physics can suddenly and transform into a world that is (and retroactively, always has been) regulated by the laws of magic. Endless Things wraps up the many side effects of one such transformation that unfolded in the previous novels, yet Pierce's theory of cyclical historical change is ultimately a source of hope - since if the universe itself is capable of endless change, so too are the downtrodden individuals living within it. A multifaceted, humanizing, and magnificent sendoff to an epic saga.

magik
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.