John Crowley, Endless Things (Small Beer Press, 2007)
As someone who is part of the generation which grew up after the political and cultural revolutions of the 1960s, the songs and stories of that time often come to me accompanied by a certain sense of wistfulness and the impression of having arrived too late. Many readers are familiar with this nostalgia for a half-imagined past -- or, in the case of science fiction readers, nostalgia for a half-imagined future -- for it is symptomatic of that gentle madness that infects bibliophiles, a madness documented in the stories of such fictional readers as Don Quixote and Catherine Morland. One reason that such works remain classics is that they explore the ways in which stories from the past are constantly recycled and reimagined in order to shape our current thoughts and attitudes, and even influence our ideas about the future. In Endless Things, John Crowley has produced a work which explores our own recent but romanticized past, that idealized 1960s where magic seemed to be in the air and hopes and dreams of utopian futures were as bright and real as the pictures embroidered upon a pair of old and faded jeans. At the same time, through the complex and poetic nature of his prose and the heartbreakingly romantic character of Pierce Moffett, his protagonist, Crowley has created a story which itself explores the relationship between books and readers, a story which is part romance, part dream vision.
Endless Things, the fourth and final book in the AEgypt tetrology, continues the story of Pierce Moffett, first introduced to readers twenty years ago in The Solitudes (a book which later came to be known by the title AEgypt). Pierce is a former history professor and would-be writer, who, having reached his own middle ages, is trying to make sense of his past and his future while pursuing research to substantiate his thesis that, at some point in history, the world changed from what it was supposed to be into the world we now live in, a world without magic.
He'd thought that if you went back, went back through the centuries far enough, at a certain point the way to Egypt-to the Egypt of archaeology, the long-lived culture of the dead, the hard-headed small brown people with their revolting rituals of mummification and their gods ever-multiplying as in a children's game -- that way would part from the way that led to a land he called AEgypt: a name he'd found in that Dictionary of the old or other world, the alphabetic world within the world. AEgypt: dream country of philosophers and healers, speaking statues, teachers of Plato and Pythagoras. But what if . . . it had all always been one country, and only divided in two as it came close to the present, and you could reach it again by going back. . . ?
It, the real country. Not AEgypt but Egypt.
Maybe there was indeed something of Egypt -- the place where actual men and women had lived and died and prayed and thought for centuries -preserved in the conversazione of Florentine Platonists, in the rituals and costumes of Freemasons. Not all that they -- thought there was, of course, but more than the scholars he'd been reading would allow. The real arcana of the real priests of Thoth and Asclaepius might have lived on, a slight slim thread but never broken, tangled up in Hermes, passing down to Bruno and to Mozart and George Washington and the French Revolution, down to the Thursday night rituals in the halls of Midwestern cities, the bankers and businessmen with their trowels and embroidered aprons, their eyeglasses and dentures.
While Pierce's mad thesis seems to hint that the story will uncover an alternate reality or a secret history where magic is possible, Pierce's quixotic pursuit of magic, alchemy, and other Gnostic systems of knowledge is less concerned with acquiring supernatural abilities and more preoccupied with a very natural longing for a lost romanticism, a philosophy of hope which will instill meaning and significance into Pierce's own great work, a palimpsest of half-forgotten memories and half-remembered stories.
Pierce, whose name could be interpreted as one who seeks to pierce the veil of mystery but also contains a faint echo of Parsifal, the foolish and untrained boy who set out to become a true and perfect knight, also bears more than a passing resemblance to the Fool of the tarot, whose gaze is always focused on the horizon, completely missing the abyss which is opening up at his feet. Indeed, Pierce's obliviousness to the practicalities of the everyday world and his preoccupation with the arcane knowledge of past ages is in danger of becoming predictable and irritating after some chapters, except that these traits are also part of Pierce's strength, his ability to reimagine stories in ways which lend them new and startling significance. It becomes apparent that Pierce's tendency to wander from the straight and narrow and well-marked path is related to the chivalric concept of aventure, the idea that the knight must leave the Round Table behind and wander the world before he can return to Camelot, a kind of spiritual and social wandering which is also at the root of the word "pilgrim." Pierce's obsession with the past is not about dead civilizations and alchemists long turned to dust, though, for the obsession arises from Pierce's desire to control the future, to create a better world than the one which he sees around him. Indeed, modes of predicting or controlling the future are densely woven into Pierce's story, which contains references to tarot cards, astrology, and the cabala, in addition to a profusion of texts which address the ways in which we imagine future worlds, from Renaissance Utopian texts to the World Fair to religious sects obsessed with using Biblical passages to predict the end of the world.
Crowley's complex but poetic prose creates connections and metaphors that weave a number of complex threads into the tapestry of the narrative. One of these threads -- reminiscent of Tom Stoppard's play, "Arcadia" -- is that nothing is ever lost, that rather than living in a world of fragmentation and disintegration, we exist in a constant state of rediscovery and reintegration. Crowley's metaphor of The "chain of books" used as both modes of preserving past knowledge and as physical objects which link the past with the future is one of the narrative sleight-of-hands that help create the multilayered texture of this novel as a book composed of many other books. The complexity of such metaphors in combination with the enigmatic nature of Crowley's prose style lends a mystical aspect to the story, which often unfolds only to reveal more sophisticated interpretations, like one of those Renaissance dream poems which seem to be about love, but might also be about alchemy, or metaphysics, or even political intrigue.
Endless Things is the perfect ending to a true master work which offers a densely detailed exploration of the connections between story and history, the fictions which inspire our imagination and the desires which inspire our visions of the future. At its heart, however, Endless Things is a love story about books and readers, and such is a treasure trove for any reader who wishes to delve into the timeless mysteries of books and stories.
