[This review first published in
Tangent Magazine, Spring 1995]
Near the end of
Aegypt (1987) - the award-winning novel to which
Love & Sleep is the sequel - John Crowley reveals to us a secret, a key to how meaning is conveyed in "legendary narratives": " ... not logical development as much as thematic repetition, the same ideas or events or even the same objects recurring in different circumstances, or different objects contained in similar circumstances ... the pattern continues until a kind of certainty arises, a satisfaction that the story has been told often enough to seem at last to have been really told … logical completion belongs to a later, more sophisticated kind of literature" (pp. 360-361).
By these criteria, the narrative thus far comprised of
Aegypt and
Love & Sleep is eminently legendary, though one may quibble with whether it tells its story often enough, or perhaps too often for that "kind of certainty" to have arisen; indeed, one is left to wonder whether the real secret behind the secret is that certainty of any kind is simply inaccessible in a story of this kind. We have, on the one hand, a writing style so superb that I often couldn't get through a page without pausing three or four times to contemplate a cascade of ramifications; we have, on the other hand, a story so unstructured, so thin, inherent, inexplicit most of the time, that I often felt I held in my hands a tour-de-force of writing in search of a story. But of that I may be no more certain than I am of the plot of the story.
The premise, presented clearly enough in
Aegypt and
Love & Sleep, is that our world, our universe, may once have run not on atoms and their insensate reactions but on the sensibilities of angels. We find traces of the angelic regime in cherubs that adorn our places of worship and Valentine cards, caricaturistic icons of beings who once quite literally took an active hand in human affairs, and could be appealed to by knowledgeable people to intercede on their behalf. Our soupçon of knowledge about this 'Aegyptian' realm in contrast to the Egyptian, which is the realm we know via our scientific history, comes to us in the first novel primarily through the spiritual pilgrimage of Pierce Moffett, a professor on the edge of burnout who escapes from New York to trees and rivers and quaint seedy rest havens on the other side of the Hudson. There he finds not only fresh air and quiet, but entry to a foundation devoted in part to cataloguing the work of one Fellows Kraft, a fictitious writer loved by Moffett as a boy, and whose interest in Giordano Bruno (the monk who in real history was burned at the stake in 1600 for his assertion that the stars in the sky were actually suns around which planets might revolve) turns out to coincide with Moffett's interest in the end of the angelic era en Earth. This dawn of the 17th century was indeed a pivotal time in history (McLuhan sees it as the coming of age of the first series of impacts of the printing press in Western Europe), peopled not only by Bruno but Shakespeare and the Elizabethan metaphysician John Dee, and Crowley provides delicious peeks at what they might have said and done, via his own voice and Kraft's. But the locus of the story is Moffett, a hero instantly lovable to authors if only because he believes he can make a difference in the world by writing a book, and if the end of
Aegypt leaves him involved in some way with two women named Rose, or maybe they're the same, and only fractionally if at all closer to grasping what the realm of angels is/was all about, well, as Crowley himself might say, Well…
Love & Sleep, to be sure, never promised us a more trimmed rose garden nor anything in the way of resolution - how could it, given Crowley's take on pre-modern narration - and yet, and yet (another favorite Crowley locution: and yet, and yet...), I guess hope for some kind of closure does spring eternal in the 20th-century-conditioned heart. Plot-wise, the book is actually prequel and sequel to
Aegypt, in the same way that
The Godfather, Part II was to
The Godfather. Thus, the first part of
Love & Sleep brings us to Appalachia, and Moffett's boyhood there with his mother (who'd left his father in New York), uncle, and cousins. There's a gritty Dickensian quality to the writing here replete with arresting images on every other page, a nun who moves like "a dark frigate under sail," books as "gratifying and unrememberable as his dreams," Moffett's attraction "to the losing armies in historical struggles" (I've always found them more fascinating than the winners, myself) - but the story line from
Aegypt doesn't resurface until page 142, and it has before then only the sparest smattering of magical realism (in the form of a nun who cures her stomach cancer via faith and a miner who runs with demons in the night). Back with Moffett now in the present, we find the book he was writing in
Aegypt (about the world the way it once was) isn't going well; he's writing "less and less more and more slowly" (a choice phrase that will undoubtedly ring true and chilling to every writer). We thus find ourselves lapsing once again into Moffett's reading of a new, unpublished work of the late Kraft about Elizabethan Europe - let's face it, one of the recurrent joys and frustrations in this whole affair is that Crowley's two books, Kraft's half a dozen or more books, and Moffett's fledgling book-in-progress are all the same book - in which Bruno goes to England and meets Dee, and debates some dim bulbs at Oxford (I couldn't agree more with Crowley's take on the academic establishment, by the way), Dee goes to Europe and sees some real angels, brings forth gold from a baser metal in one of the most powerful passages in the book, and werewolves and witches abound on a portentous trans-temporal night. All of this is written, mind you, with a sure brilliance that puts Crowley at the very top of his craft. He tosses off lines like "angels make things things, and not chaos," speaks of "the satisfaction of the watered root," observes "nothing more soothing and hopeful than summer light" on the spines of books (he's at his best when he writes about books and writing, isn't he) everywhere you turn. But as to the story in this book Well… And yet, and yet... Back (again) with Moffett in the present, our story moves glacially, providing just the faintest draft of what could be. The two Roses are more or less differentiated, and Moffett finally beds one of them; the head of the foundation that supports Moffett in his research on Kraft dies (in one of the most tellingly rendered sections in all of these books); and Moffett concludes that the object of his soul's obsession, the thesis of his book, of this book, will be best pursued by a visit in the flesh to Central Europe. And thus this legendary sage takes his leave of us, perhaps forever, more likely for just a few years.
And what is it that Crowley has both Moffett and his readers pursue without seeming end? Not angels. Obviously not the science fictional goal of humans grappling with the world via reason and technology. But not even the fantastical ideal of humans making a mark in the world via the powers of faith, pure imagination, invocation of spirits invisible to all but the eyes of true believers. For with all its talk
about angels for atoms, about a world that once
Love & Sleep like
Aegypt before it is really about something quite else.
In a story in which words find their targets with such ease as to redefine the standards of good writing, in which repetition and non-plot arc elevated to art forms, the best words that are most repeated are about: writing itself. Moffett takes a "weird satisfaction in the taste of his awn prose," Dee takes a "book from the shelf, holding back with a hand the fellows who tried to follow it,"
Rose moves her hand over a case of books, "touching their spines with her fingertips, making him [Moffett] think of a diver examining a coral reef or sunken ship " - these and the many interludes like them are far more memorable in this narrative than any fingertips caressing breasts or crystal balls in which angels play. For the only story here to have "been told often enough to seem at last to have been really told," the only story to at all provide that "satisfaction," is the story of story-telling. That is why Crowley has been aptly acclaimed as an author's author, why these works are catnip to serious critics: their protagonist is the written word itself, packaged in musty, exhilarating books, enmeshed in a story indeed never ending, a realm of all centers and no margins, like the surly mapping of the physical universe by Bruno and the virtual universe by McLuhan. Yes, angels, who like electronic data can be everywhere at once, have a place here. But read this book for the story,
that story, the story of story -- not its angels
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