From Publishers Weekly
With this impressive if flawed sequel to the magisterial AEgypt (1987), Crowley offers another taste of his deeply intellectual brand of contemporary fantasy. As a boy, historian and writer Pierce Moffett developed a fascination with the occult, devouring tomes of arcane lore. Now Pierce has become increasingly convinced that, several times in history, the world has undergone a great transformation whereby the nature of things--the systems that govern its operation--have changed; where once alchemy and magic worked, now they don't. Digging through the papers of a favorite childhood novelist, Pierce discovers an unpublished manuscript that, set in the 16th century and tracking two real-life men of knowledge, seems to bolster his supposition that things were indeed once different. Several people are affected by his discovery--the woman he comes to care for; an epileptic child; a dying man seeking the philosopher's stone. It's not in the plot that the relative strengths of Crowley's book lie. Rather, it's in the breathtaking language, the rolling seductive sentences and the precision with which he evokes the sense of everyday life spiced with hints of mystical secrets. The problem, though, is that there's no proper payoff to all the portent. Crowley tries mightily, but he just can't pull off the miracle of creating his own philosopher's stone here. Still, if what he ends up with isn't quite gold, it glitters enough to keep readers involved. Major ad/promo.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Crowley (Aegypt, 1987, etc.) struggles to recapture the smooth blending of straight narrative and speculative hermeticism that gave his best work, Little, Big (1981), the startling quality of metaphysical realism. It eludes him, unfortunately, here. Very much a book of levels, as the title's two primal forces indicate, this is the story of a writer named Pierce Moffett, who grew up with his mother and uncle and cousins in rural Kentucky (far removed from his homosexual father back in New York City). Pierce eventually turns into an upstate New York loner, an isolato equipped with paranormal gifts of magic and wisdom that set him more firmly in tune with the music of the spheres than with the lives of his neighbors. The book is a chronicle of Pierce's slow steps into this world (a fuller sex life, learning to drive) but also a charting of the introduction he unwittingly provides to others of a reality off, as it were, to one side of daily conscious life. Crowley adds historical focus in chapters about the struggles of two 16th-century psychic pioneers, the Italian metaphysician Giordano Bruno and the English mage John Dee. These historical sections, though graceful (Crowley is a deliciously elegant writer, sentence by sentence), are heavy dumplings; and though Crowley ultimately and quite strikingly turnbuckles the two levels into one at the end, it feels a lot less than natural and inevitable. The split-vision pretty much weighs down the spring of Pierce's pilgrim's progress into love and eroticism (women, but also a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old boy who is his illegitimate son, a pure Eros figure). In the end, the secret knowledge so sought after here comes to seem a burden the reader would rather shrug off than embrace. Disappointing. --
Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
by John Crowley
by John Crowley
by John Crowley
by John Crowley
by John Crowley
