Before
Aegypt, the only contact I'd had with John Crowley's work consisted of a few short stories, expertly crafted gems I've thoroughly enjoyed. His short fiction is excellent, but if
Aegypt is any indication of his other novels, Crowley is a writer whose ideas are simply gigantic.
Aegypt (which is actually a four-book series, the first of which has been renamed
The Solitudes) is a big novel, not so much in pages, but in ideas and implications. I'll try to explain, but the largeness of the work truly overwhelms me.
Traveling to an interview for a college teaching position, history professor Pierce Moffett gets sidetracked among the Faraway Hills of New York, stumbling across Brent Spofford, a former student he hasn't seen in years. While staying with Spofford, Moffett abandons the possibility of the teaching position in order to write a work of historical fiction, a work that weaves the lives of 16th-Century philosopher/poet Giordano Bruno, Renaissance mathematician John Dee and spirit medium Edward Kelley.
Shift to another major character, Rosie Rasmussen. Rosie and her young daughter have left Rosie's husband for greener pastures – literally: Faraway Hills. Rosie, who already knows Spofford, discovers that she's had an estate placed in her care, the estate of another Faraway Hills resident, Fellowes Kraft, whose final unfinished novel features both Bruno and Dee.
Now things get a bit challenging.
From his reading of Kraft, Pierce begins to suspect that the known history of the world is just
one history of the world. Apparently all of our intellectual, cultural, scientific, philosophical and religious ideas come not from Egypt, but Aegypt, a sort of alternate world (or country). Crowley places stories inside stories inside stories, sometimes with little or no warning. You could be reading about Pierce Moffett's thoughts on the origins of gypsies, when suddenly you're in the middle of a scene involving the apprenticeship of William Shakespeare. Such scenes weave in and out of history and time, past and present, real and imaginary, often at a dizzying pace.
This is complex, sometimes confusing, but always beautiful writing. I was amazed at how Crowley handles all these different stories and centuries with such an elegant, graceful hand. I don't even pretend to understand it all (The book certainly demands another read, at least for me), and sometimes I stopped to take a few deep breaths, trying to wrap my head around parts of the novel as they developed.
But what an amazing trip. Crowley doesn't just explore ideas, he runs rampant in and out of them, showing us things, ideas, concepts we didn't know existed. Not everything is clear, but Crowley has three other books in the series for us.
One thing that
is clear is the necessity of reading those remaining three books. After finishing
The Solitudes, readers are faced with the inescapable fact that, as big as the novel is, there's something even bigger awaiting. And that's pretty scary. But something to look forward to.
The Solitudes will be re-released in trade paperback from
Overlook on October 2, 2007. The remaining novels in the Aegypt sequence will be released as follows:
Love and Sleep - December 18, 2007
Daemonomania - TBA
Endless Things (published in hardcover from
Small Beer Press in May 2007) - TBA
