"Endless Things" ends Crowley's magical series

"Endless Things"

by John Crowley

Small Beer Press, 384 pp., $24

"Endless Things" is the long-awaited fourth book in John Crowley's epic magical realist "Aegypt" sequence. Despite the perpetualness its title might imply, it's the concluding volume of the series, which first began to charm and intrigue readers 20 years ago.

Crowley introduced the series' hero, a historian named Pierce Moffett with an unsettling theory about the instability of reality, in "Aegypt," published in 1987 by Bantam. Pierce was joined in the first volume by John Dee, Elizabethan alchemist, and Giordano Bruno, heretical Italian philosopher, both actual historical figures living in a world separated from our own by something more than the straightforward passage of centuries, according to this theory. A second and third volume followed: "Love & Sleep" in 1994, and "Daemonomania" in 2000.

A cunning tale about the nature of disenchantment, the "Aegypt" sequence encompasses the hills of Kentucky and the narrow streets of Renaissance Prague, the voyeurism of angels and the stoicism of werewolves. Pierce, Dee, Bruno and the books' many other characters constantly test the boundaries between natural and supernatural, between mundane and divine. Is it possible to change the past as well as the present and future? Has someone done so already? If they have, how would we know? The nature of reality and how to apprehend it are the sequence's main concerns.

Though he achieved the cycle's dramatic climax in "Daemonomania," in this book Crowley still sustains the series' astonishingly long thematic threads like the effortless-seeming vocalizations of an operatic singer. He delivers other pleasures as well. There's an alternate outcome to the 1620 Battle of White Mountain between King Frederick of Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire, which finishes in a description of the nonexistent world it has given rise to, with "animals whom in time our aeronauts will set out to visit, on winged ships ... great gems growing in our caves ... famous colleges and abbeys where no sort of wisdom is forbidden and no error punished except by laughter." Multiple versions of Pierce's exploits, scholarly and otherwise, are layered upon one another, creating a beautiful palimpsest as complex, mysterious and unreliable as human memory.