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To grasp the truth of stories patently false
To recover the dream-logic of history

ÆGYPT is an erudite and gorgeously written fantasy that has nothing whatsoever to do with the genre of fantasy. Fantastic yet completely realistic, static in setting and plotting yet spanning centuries and dozens of characters, it's like no other book I've ever read. It plods occasionally in its real-world moments, but soars delightfully when it gets back to its ecstatic flights of fancy. It's an incredible intellectual journey that has you in awe at its many-layered construction.

Based entirely in the real world (1976 New York), on the surface the book is about a historian conceptualizing a book he wants to write. Over the course of his research, the story begins to unfold on another level parallel to reality, and his descriptions of concepts and figures transform into meandering meditations on the nature of history and storytelling, that seem to bleed back into his reality and create echoes everywhere you look. This shadow narrative evokes wonder without ever describing anything but things that, at one time or another through history, were actually taught and believed, but which, over the course of the gradual accrual of scientific knowledge during the ensuing centuries, we left behind, one by one, and which consequently now strike we the living as wildly fanciful - sheer, utter, preposterous fantasy.

Rather than fantasy, then, this is Fantastic History: the history of our perception of reality, which has changed from age to age. An homage to the incredible bodies of arcane knowledge - Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Lullism, Neoplatonism - that mages and scholars now forgotten - names like Proclus, Iamblichus, Paracelsus, Horapollo - built up with painstaking care, learned scholars in century after century passing the torch of ever-evolving arcana, which comes down to us today in only fragments, and corrupted into contemptible new-age beliefs, which the book doesn't fail to poke fun at. The difference, the protagonist notes, between his book and the sort of new-agey books his publisher wants him to write instead (poke at the publishing industry), is that the protagonist knows the subject matter is false. He simply finds it incredibly fascinating.

Lamenting the state of affairs that has led us to completely forget where we came from, protagonist historian Pierce Moffett proposes to write a book that will bring to light the lost patrimony of this vast body of interconnected, defunct knowledge, this vanished history. Over the course of the book, he gradually re-discovers and connects the many and varied and truly incredible threads of philosophy and science and magic of the past, which were essentially all one and the same - as if an alternate history existed in which these things were real.

Alongside and beneath this green England there lay another country, made of time.

Much of the book's sheer, hedonistic pleasure comes from bathing in the cascade of esoteric philosophies and thinkers and concepts and metaphors that rain down on us from every page of this journey - the moirai, picatrix, Heimarmene, semhamaphore, Origen, Rosicrucianism, Zoroastrianism, Jewish Kabala, alchemy, talismans, horoscopi, the Monas Heiroglyphicae of John Dee, Plato's theory of forms, the concept of gates of horn and ivory... the list goes on...

Everything is interconnected, and has its parallels. The book's structure is based on the 12 signs of the zodiac, which parallels the concept of the celestial spheres that had dominated for centuries to be supplanted by the heliocentric model, partly with the help of Giordano Bruno, who parallels the book's historian protagonist, who moves from the city to the countryside to participate in the transhumance, which parallels the soul's journey outward through the spheres, which parallels Bruno's journey over the mountains out of Italy into Switzerland during his exile, which parallels the last chapter where the real-life characters go in hot-air balloons... etc.

A book by a writer who has obviously studied history, told from the point of view of a historian, who in the process of conceptualizing his book, discovers a book of historical fiction that seems to do exactly what he has been attempting with his own...

"Organize the book according to the twelve houses," he wrote, "each house a chapter or segment. Somewhere tell story of how 12 houses came to be, how changed meaning over time, but save this till late; let reader ponder, Vita? Lucrum? What's up, etc." ...so writes the protagonist, of the protagonist's book on page 328 of Crowley's book, 100 pages before the end.

A book within a book, storytellers telling of storytellers, spheres within spheres, cycles of ages repeating. The sheer intellectual bravado of the massively complicated web of interconnections he creates sends shivers down my spine. This was a tremendously interesting read, if a little unconventional in its narrative stasis. Everything that makes the novel great is essentially the protagonist thinking about the book he wants to write. And yet this is a delightful, beautiful book. It's impressive to pull off such a feat.

The book is the first of four, and although I think I need a break (my first thought upon finishing was: "Whew. Heady stuff."), I would like to get to them eventually, less for the usual mundane reasons of wanting to know how the story ends ("unlike histories, stories need endings") than simply to savor more of John Crowley's incredible scholarship and writing chops, and to bathe again in the glow of his dazzling reconstruction of our civilization's alternate history.