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I don't think it is fair to have to rate a book before reviewing it - this is my second read through of this book and I positively dislike it.
I suspect I am as shallow and vapid as most of the characters in this God awful book because I tried really hard to read it again after a glowing review in The American Scholar which said that this is THE book for any serious reader to read. I consider myself a serious reader and so I decided to tackle it. I even bought all four volumes at once. For future reference when any glowing review contains the following phrases " summarizing the plot is near impossible", "the book is less about plot than about the internal workings of its main characters", " the reader has to do most of the work", put down your digital device and run in the opposite direction.
Aegypt is about Pierce Moffett, a shallow and self obsessed academic licking his wounds after a failed love affair. His bus breaks down on his way to a job interview in a all village called Blackburn Jambs chock full of the sort of hippies that gave the eighties a bad name. There's even a thinly veiled bacchanalian revel that leads to some casual nudity. Everyone speaks in lazy sentences that leave their endings hanging and you wonder if Crowley himself used a liberal amount of pot while writing the opening chapters.
Crowley is an amazing wordsmith. With emphasis on wordsmith. He is brilliant at evoking images and wordplay but his characters are not people you want to spend time with and his paragraphs and chapters tend to swell and bloat until you realize that the difference between the ideas in his head and what he puts to paper is the difference between a supermodel and his/her body after fishing it out of a river.
And for those who think I haven't gotten the underlying allegories and symbolism - I got a lot of it and I am sure I missed a lot more - still I found none of it enriching my experience of reading this book. Beau and Spofford are both compared to the Christ. Beau is compared to Pan. The number three crops up a million times. And so on and so forth. Yes Mr. Crowley, you are very clever. But cleverness without a point or direction is nothing more than shallow egotism.
Those who are looking for some answers or even a partial resolution by the end of this book - let me be very frank (and this is not a spoiler) nothing happens. Even if something does happen I don't care. Pierce, Rose and Rosie can all collect digital dust in the unopened sequels on my Kindle.