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Toward the end of this very strange and ingenious novel, the author reviews it himself. The hero, Pierce Moffett, has come across an unpublished manuscript by a deceased author, and it sounds very much like The Solitudes itself:

"For it wasn't a *good* book at all, Pierce supposed, considered as a book, a novel; it was a philosophical romance, remote and extravagant, without much of the tang of life as it really must have gone on in the world--as it really *had* gone on if you meant *this* world, this only one in which, metaphors aside, we all have really and solely lived in. The character were hungry ghosts. . .the actual incidents great and small in which they in fact participated, all reduced to a winter's tale by the springs their actions were imagined here to have: the birth-pangs and death-throes of world-ages, the agonies of potent magicians, the work of daemons, of Christ's tears, of the ordering stars."

In other words, if you're reading for character and verisimilitude, you'll find it only in occasional patches: this is an idea-driven book. But the ideas are so intriguing, and Crowley's writing so lyrical, and some scenes so eerie and gripping, that you're never bored -- though you might well be exasperated!