Daemonomania

Rating:
Summary: It's no "Little, Big"
Review: "Little, Big" being on my list of the 5 greatest sci-fi books of all time, and having waited patiently lo these many years for another masterwork by John Crowley, perhaps I judge him by a higher standard than other writers. But. . . I have to admit disappointment with Daemonomania. The imagery and insight of "Little, Big" are missing in Daemonomania, which also struck me as a bit obtuse and wrapped up in itself. I also found no characters to fall in love with in Daemonomania, unlike "Little, Big," whose characters haunt me to this day. Again, my judgment is probably too harsh and I may pick this book up again in 5 years and thoroughly enjoy it. This time around, though, it was a bit of a disappointment for me.

Rating:
Summary: At long last
Review: At last ... in the spot between Crichton (whose books don't sell well in the sci-fi/fantasy section) and DeLint (whose books don't sell well anywhere) was the Crowley novel I'd given up on ever finding. I'm very glad to say the book feels autumnal.

Rating:
Summary: What happened to the magic?
Review: Crowley has written some wonderful stuff. In Engine Summer, he gave us a fresh, magical retelling of the post-holocaust SF story; and in Little, Big, a fresh, magical retelling of the classic faery story. I even loved the first two books of this series beginning with Aegypt and continuing through Love and Sleep. Although these books were heavier, (Love and Sleep in particular) and the magic was more subdued, they still drew me in and utterly absorbed me with their alternating modern/17th century story lines, and in their richness of idea and expression. My sense of anticipation at reading the next chapter of the story has grown steadily through the last year as this new book was delayed.

Despite the long anticipation, however, this book falls utterly flat. Gone are the dark wonder and the Magik of Crowley's early works, and even the softer real-world, ordinary magic of Aegypt and Love and Sleep. Although there is a lot more sex in this one than in any of his other novels, absolutely nothing happens throughout the entire 480 pages. The few events that do take place (a long-awaited party; an abduction; a plague of what might be werewolves) do so almost entirely off stage. Occasional flashes of Crowley's mastery of the art of crafting sentences can be seen, but the book as a whole just never comes together.

I think that the most telling sign of trouble with this book is the utter lack of favorable blurbs on the back cover. Love and Sleep was reviewed (generally) favorably by Spin magazine, New York Newsday, the New York Times Book Review, and Kirkus Reviews. The blurbs on the jacket of Daemonomania are, for the most part, old snippets from reviews of past books telling us what a great writer Crowley is; not one of them even mentions Daemonomania.

Hard-core Crowley fans will probably not be able to keep themselves from buying this book, and some may even convince themselves that this is really a successor to Aegypt. But it would be hard for me to remember the last time I approached the end of a novel with such a sick sense of disapointment.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining and enlightening
Review: Daemonomania is a truly remarkable work. Although Mr. Crowley never surpasses the limits of the credible, he manages to present many instances of the uncanny in "ordinary" living. The book is both entertaining (at some moments quite a page-tuner) and enlightening.

Rating:
Summary: a delightful, dense and brilliant third part
Review: Daemonomania is the third of (presumably, hopefully) four novels, each containing a section dealing in some way with three astrological houses. Reader's new to this series, see below, are urged to scour the internet and find used copies of "Aegypt" and "Love & Sleep" so you can appreciate the magnitude and quality of this story.

Reading this book is like eating chocolate truffles, it's so rich dense and detailed that it must be savoured slowly.

Pierce Moffet, the imperfect Fool, Parsifal, the protagonist, has the discovered writings that suggest that the World jumps in quantums, that certain things, like Alchemy, were posible at some time in the past, but then the World (or History) changes, shifts gears, reaches another quanta, and Magical things once possible become only impossible stories. Pierce intuits that another World change is happening (maybe in book four), but he, The Doubting Thomas, is not sure if he really believes any of this. He is a historian, author, renaissance and occult scholar (much like Crowley himself). He has been hired to write a book which will prove/or and tie all these ideas together.

Then there is Beau Brachman, another character, the contemporary Magus.

There are two other story lines from the 1500's, those of John Dee and Giordano Bruno. These stories, woven into the other are even more fantastic, were it not for the fact that they are appearently "extracts from the dairies , works and letters of John Dee and are quoted more of less verbatim". Dee was astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, who, with Edward Kelly, claimed to have conversations with and Angel (or demon) Madimi who told him how to make gold, and gave him a wind to command, which he conjured and used to destroy the Spanish Armada! After he made gold!

Giordano Bruno, who Dee meets repeatedly and quarrels with, said that sun was the center of the solar system, the earth revolved around it and the the universe was full of other stars, like our sun, with inhabited planets. He got burned at the stake for his views by the Catholic Church.

But this, 400 odd years ago, was the Last World shift, the end of Dee's Universe, the begining of Bruno's (and ours!)

So, will Pierce Moffat be the patient donkey who ushures in the New World? What will happen? Tune in for book four! Crowleys book is brillant in places, complex, rewarding and confusing. I found myself thinking I might understand what he meant but never quite sure. It's chock full of Latin, alchemical, occult and astrological symbolism. He descibes unusual moods states of mind which are, well, extremely introspective. He writes of the intersection of the mundane world with a fantastic one as he did in "Little/Big". Things seen out of the corner of the eye which disappear when you look directly at them. Dreams, fugues, fits, imaginings, memories, maybe-they-were-maybe-they-weren't.

However, it must be stated that John Crowley has killed off his most interesting characters Dee, Edward Kelly, and Bruno in this, book three. Does Crowley have enough plot left for another book? Let's hope the concluding book four comes soon. But writing of this quality can't be rushed, I guess.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful addition to AEgypt series
Review: Daemonomania was worth the wait. I have enough faith in Crowley's craftmanship to believe that the multiple threads initiated in Aegypt and sustained through Love and Sleep and the present book will be resolved effectively in the final novel (if we all live so long, he to write, I to read it). The pacing of the plot and character development are paradoxical -- leisurely, and as always with Crowley revealed in minute details of language and juxtaposition, yet the total effect of these tiny strokes is a tremendous force of urgency. I reread the previous two novels just before reading this one (it has after all been some years since Love and Sleep), and the sense of flow was quite powerful. The lapidary writing, and the wonderful Crowley dialogue provide a lot of pleasure to the reader who loves great prose. Few resolutions are provided, and I suppose that this novel, of the three so far, will be least effective as a stand-alone, but then I think that Crowley has clearly commited himself to the tetralogy project, and the extended plotting that this implies. The construction of a multi-volume work can take various forms. In the mode used by Robertson Davies and Joyce Cary, members of the core cast of characters take turns as protagonist or supporting actor(s). In the approach taken by Crowley ( as with, for example, Tolkien and Tolstoy), there is one long story -- there is internal structure, to be sure, and demarcations and episodes -- but all the elements weave a complete fabric. I have to note that over the course of these novels, I have found myself changing my attitudes about almost all the characters at one time or another, as the narrative reveals more of them, in their concerns and actions, and in relationship to the other players in the drama. I don't know if Crowley planned this kaleidescopic effect, or if it's an epiphenomenon, but either way this is a remarkable work of art.

Rating:
Summary: Autumn's Tale
Review: Daemonomania, third installment in the eventual quartet begun in Aegypt and continued in Love and Sleep, covers the autumn of the numinous 1979 John Crowley has been so carefully chronicling since 1985 or so. It's nearly Halloween in Faraway Hills, and we pick up with Pierce Moffat & company, John Dee & Giordano Bruno included, right where we left them.

Daemonomania is very much of a piece with its equally allusive and mysterious predecessors. It certainly contains all the strengths and weaknesses of the previous books -- if you loved them, you will love this; if you exited Love & Sleep angry about the lack of narrative progress, well, matters have not greatly improved.

But these books are almost a genre to themselves; dense, mythic, intricately detailed and stunningly beautiful, steeped in occult learning and emotional wisdom. Proceeding synchronistically rather than literally to make emotional sense of magic (in every sense of the word), they seem me among the most ambitious and rewarding novels of the past two decades.

Reviews below draw comparisons to Eco's Foucalt's Pendulum, but I think the more apt parallel is to a novel I often think my favorite -- Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale. Like Winter's Tale, Crowley's opus defiantly rejects a reasonable "what just happened?/where is this going?" query at every turn, yet renders the question moot with gorgeous, transcendent writing and abundant good humor. Though Crowley's tone is as adult and intellectual as Helprin's is child-like and matter of fact, the books share an exceedingly rare literary magic.

Don't worry so much about the plot -- just read.

Rating:
Summary: Dripping with language, endless foreplay but scant climax
Review: Having not read any of Crowley's previous works, I picked up Daemonomania without any preconceived notions of what it should have been like. I was immediately attracted to the level of language used and the "Thomas-Hardy-on-crystal-meth" style of description. Daemonomania is indeed a feast for the linguaphile.

The soaring descriptions, the intricate character development, the seamless weave of the present, the past, and the alter-present, however, never quite seem to come to a climax, leaving the reader feeling teased and somewhat exhausted. One almost wishes for an Anne Rice-esque climactic ... power, lust, and blood, reminiscent of the concluding pages of "The Witching Hour", but then remembers that this is Crowley, not the Queen of the Damned. Crowley builds so much tension, though, that the reader years in vain for some sort of release. When it comes, however, it is no more satisfying than a rice cake and some diet Coke after having won the Iditerrod.

I'll read it again, probably more than once, if for no other reasons than to enjoy Crowley's thick, lush, and intriciately woven prose; and to resist the temptation of using such a thick, lush, and weighty book as a doorstop/paperweight/cheese press. It deserves reading... but if you want to really sate your desire for supernatural, demonic storytelling, subject yourself to a rereading of "The Witching Hour".

Rating:
Summary: Erudite, Stylish, Literary Fantasy, But...
Review: Having read the comments of several earlier reviewers it is now obvious that much of the problems I encountered reading this novel stem from the fact that it is not meant as a stand-alone, part of a larger series and preceded by two earlier books, "Aegypt" and "Love and Sleep" which inform much of the narrative here taking place. No wonder, then, at some of my confusion over certain elements, at certain passages and episodes that seemed unnecessarily abstruse and recondite. This is not a work to approach singly or lightly. When I find time I will try to seek out the now out-of-print initial book to this series, Aegypt, published in 1987, to see if I can ferret out the sense of this series.

However, how quickly I shall do this remains to be seen. As another reviewer has noted, this work shares certain qualities in common with Umberto Ecco's "Foucault's Pendulum," a work I read many years ago, and which I found edifying, though I cannot say particularly pleasurable. Like Ecco's labyrinthine library in "The Name of the Rose," "Foucault's Pendulum" was a complex knot of metaphor, arcane symbolism, and self-conscious riddling of esoteric historical and literary references, an intentional mental conundrum whose intended value seemed as much rooted in its powers to test the reader's mental agility as to convey its multifaceted messages or story. In reading "Pendulum" one had the sense that the author was directing his writing to a rather rarified and narrow audience whose educational background and delight in metal exercises qualified them for the intellectual gymnastics the narrative demanded. While there are rewards to be found in working through this approach to the writing of fiction, one that has become popular among certain authors of the last several decades, Ecco only one among many that include such luminaries as Thomas Pynchon, personally I have wearied of the mental hoops I am asked to leap through in order to appreciate this approach to narrative fiction, writing that seems as much, if not more, about the author's display of literary and intellectual skills as conveying or communicating with the reader. And I question the inherent elitism and literary self-reference such work implies, begging the question of whom such work serves.

"Daemonomania" appears to fall into this category of fiction. Though written with consummate style and skill, obviously the work of a brilliant mind, its intentions more literary than fantasy, and certain to garner the attention of critics (it already has) and intellectuals alike, its appeal is nonetheless limited and likely to attract only an audience of similarly minded individuals, those that revel in intellectual riddles and conundrums, finding this type of mental exercise a value in itself. I however, do not number myself among them, nor, I suspect, will the majority of readers.

An earlier reviewer mentions his uncertainty over his full comprehension of this novel. Years ago I read Joyce's "Ulysses" and Finnegan's Wake:" While I could appreciate and respect the brilliance represented by the author's writing, unlike certain academics I was unwilling to devote ten years or more of my life studying the author's novels in order to reach a more complete explication or understanding. In Crowley's case I am uncertain I am willing to expend even the reading of another book. Obviously, this is a matter of personal taste, aesthetics and values. Those that like this sort of thing will in all likelihood be delighted.

Rating:
Summary: Where's the fourth book?
Review: I loved the Aegypt series. Does anybody know if the book called "The Translator," available in March of 2002,is the fourth book in the series? Is it by the same John Crowley?