Love and Sleep (edition 1994)

Love & Sleep really shows off Crowley's love affair with language, if nothing else. His lyrical prose is sometimes the only thing that kept me going throughout the novel, though. I found the first book the most engaging and accesible, but as always the dissonance of shifting narration caused me some trouble. Nevertheless, a solid installment in Aegypt - though I wouldn't want to read this one first, or even alone. ( )

Love & Sleep, the 2nd part of the Aegypt Cycle, is a novel of ideas but also a book about love, death and the disturbing magic of childhood; its characters as real as fiction can be. In short the whole quartet is shaping up to be a classic not only of fantasy but also contemporary literature, up there with Midnight’s Children, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Gravity’s Rainbow.

It’s difficult to write a short review as the dense symbolism and complexity of this book would require multiple reads, hard study and at least an essay of a few thousand words to do it justice. It continues the story of Pierce Moffett; his retreat to a town in the country to write a book about the secret history of the world. The first section of the novel returns to Pierce’s Catholic but liberal upbringing in the Kentucky Hills; a beautiful portrayal of the naïve but magical experiences of childhood and his sexual awakening. Pierce’s concept of the world working in a different way in the past, the way of the elaborate occult theories of the Renaissance, originates here, in his immature but bright mind.

It’s the story of other characters: Rosie Rasmussen, a single parent going through a difficult divorce, who inherits the Rasmussen Foundation from her wealthy elderly relative, Boney. Boney Rasmussen himself, a man who fears approaching death and hopes the dead historical novelist and once close friend, Fellowes Kraft, has found the alchemical Elixir of Life. And John Dee and Giordano Bruno (real life magicians and scholars from the 16th Century) who feature as characters in Kraft’s final unpublished novel, seeming to confirm Pierce Moffett’s view of history; a story within a story but relating to the main narrative.

What we have here is a domestic novel of interrelating characters concerned with the major themes of human life-love and death; but also with the history of ideas. How one paradigm or our understanding of the world changes into another as time or history moves forward-magic and its corresponding universe existed as concrete reality but were literally erased by the coming scientific revolution. Magic used to work but now it doesn’t and like the half remembered but powerfully lit magical kingdom of childhood, you can never return to that world.

If you want a novel that will make you think but also move you deeply this is the one (but of course start with the first volume-The Solitudes.) If you have an interest in the esoteric arts and the occult, enjoy the writings of Umberto Eco (especially Foucault’s Pendulum) or Borges or admire great modern literature in general you will love this. But for fans of conventional fantasy that is strong on plot but weak in originality and writing talent, please keep away. ( )

Excellent science fiction and a very unique world and social order included in it. ( )

Whereas Aegypt introduced us to Pierce Moffett as an adult, Love and Sleep goes back in time to his childhood and transition into adulthood. As a child, Pierce had

"excavated an imaginary country that turned out not to have been imaginary at all, or not, at any rate, to have been imagined by him alone." (160)

This was Aegypt, and Pierce has now come to the conclusion that the world is on the verge of change; that anyone who understands the change or sees it coming has the power to reshape the world and construct its laws and meaning and that this new age will bring in powers that no one will be able to imagine." Pierce believes that he must convince people but to do that he must find some sort of evidence that has survived from the "former state of things." (167)

However, the more I thought about this book (impossible not to, really -- it's so convoluted that I spent a LOT of time unraveling the strings of questions in my head), the more I began to think about this in terms of something like the quest for the grail, but in a more spiritual sense. So it seems to me that while Pierce is considering what evidence is out there, the story takes on more of a tone of "spiritual alchemy," where the process to find the be all and end all "philosopher's stone" is the same but the alchemical laboratory is more of an internal phenomenon. So while Crowley shows Dr. Dee's experiment in Prague and the reckoning of time involved, in Pierce's case, it is more of what you might consider "a mode of perception...which goes far beyond being something which can be conceived of in linear terms, as having a forward or backward motion that could be modeled as occurring on an imaginary line." I took this idea from a website I found while searching the internet for "spiritual alchemy." Considering the end of this book, which I will not divulge, on the off chance that someone else besides myself here wants to read this book, this makes total sense because of a) how the story is configured and b)what Pierce discovers at the end of the novel.

This book is definitely way off the mainstream path, so it may not be appealing to all readers, but do, please start with Aegypt before attempting this one. ( )