Homage to John Clute as Reviewer

 

John Clute has spent a vast amount of creative energy devoted to reading and reviewing books of sf. He's a remarkable critic, as is on display here -

AEGYPT By John Crowley. 390 pp. New York: Bantam Books

BEGINNING ''Aegypt'' is not half the battle; it is very nearly the whole war. John Crowley's fifth book is much less a novel than a series of portals. Full of beginnings, plot spirals that return us to beginnings, and sudden vistas that signal a new myth of the universe, it does in fact literally begin several times - with an author's note that becomes part of the text, a ''Prologue in Heaven'' after Goethe's ''Faust,'' a ''Prologue on Earth'' to balance the first prologue, and more than one chapter of initiation. And each beginning - each portal - remains open. Nothing is resolved. The last pages of ''Aegypt'' close on nothing.

It is a dizzying experience, achieved with unerring security of technique, in a prose of serene and smiling gravitas. Mr. Crowley's history as a published writer -his first three novels were released as genre science fiction, and Bantam Books published ''Little, Big'' (winner of the 1982 World Fantasy Award) as a trade paperback - has not been of the sort to generate a wide reputation, and it will be of great interest to learn if he can reach a welcoming public with this daunting anomaly of a book, this gaping gateway that leaves us staring into a deeply strange world.

Just what this book is or will become - and the text makes it clear that three further volumes are planned - may be almost impossible to say. In conventional generic terms, the first volume is neither fish nor fowl, neither fantasy nor conventional novel, while at the same time it adroitly mixes both modes together. On the surface, ''Aegypt'' seems to be no more than the story of a young historian, Pierce Moffett, who loses both tenure and his lover and apparently by accident finds himself in upstate New York, where he begins to find a pattern of preternatural coincidences and meanings. In this rural setting, he begins to discover that the magical tales he read as a child are true and hint at a new understanding of the universe, in which he himself may be intimately involved. Into this narrative, the text weaves discourses with angels, the first traversings of the heavenly spheres by a Sagittarian figure approaching our sphere to transform it utterly, and other supernatural motifs in the form of passages from a series of children's books written by one Fellowes Kraft.

At the center of the book's vision is the figure of the Renaissance occult philosopher Giordano Bruno, whose heliocentrism points to the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, a mythical sage of pre-Christian Egypt, to whom the Renaissance mistakenly attributed a number of Continued on page 11 Greek Gnostic writings. Though it might seem impossibly intricate to the unlearned eye, Hermes' universe as Bruno interpreted it was a single living entity which, in all humility and love, could be understood. In his Theater of the World - an advanced version of the elaborate imaginary structures used to file facts for future recall in the medieval arts of memory - Bruno intended to create a neoplatonic representation of the entire universe itself. It was a universe in which nothing (as Fellowes Kraft and Pierce Moffett long to believe) was meaningless. PIERCE MOFFETT'S name reflects his nature, for he is both penetrant and woolly, rather like ''Aegypt'' itself. From childhood he has longed to inhabit a world he could recognize as being intended, pregnant with meaning, animate; and this longing, this sense of desiderium, informs his every moment. As an adult and a historian, he searches for a version of the world that might account for the nature of things, but in vain. Victim and master of a poignant yearning heterosexuality, he falls uncontrollably in love with several women, each time with a view to seeing the universe entire. Signs and portents of some imminent transformation multiply around him - or perhaps he breeds them, perhaps Pierce Moffett is a visitor to our sphere who will bring the world alive, as it essentially has always been.

The Manhattan Pierce inhabits for much of his life, like the Manhattan of ''Little, Big,'' of Jerome Charyn's numerous urban fables and of Mark Helprin's ''Winter's Tale,'' is very much a storied isle, drenched in significance, in the story of itself, as in a fount. It is not merely a city. It is the City, and one only leaves the City if one is in search of the Golden Age. When Pierce finally leaves Manhattan it is to write a book about the meaning of the world, which he hopes to call ''Aegypt''; and by this time in the story it is not surprising that in Blackbury Jambs, his new hometown somewhere upstate, he finds a world far more drenched with implication than the slightly anodyne pastoral it first seems to represent.

Moffett discovers that this part of rural New York has long been dominated by the Rasmussen family, whose charitable foundation owns the nearby home of the late Fellowes Kraft. Pierce soon meets Rosie Rasmussen, who, learning of his interest in Kraft, asks him to examine an unfinished manuscript left in the house. Pierce then finds that Kraft's unfinished tale of the meeting between John Dee (Queen Elizabeth I's astrologer) and Giordano Bruno was to have been called ''Aegypt,'' and in all essentials it was the book Pierce had hoped to write. But here the ingenious assemblage of beginnings stops, and the volume ends.

The portrait of Pierce Moffett, gangling, vulnerable, sharp and sheepish, is lovingly comprehensive (he is a kind of portmanteau version of Smoky Barnable and Auberon, the two main characters of ''Little, Big''). The inhabitants of Blackbury Jambs sing through their lives with the innocence of children, for that is their pastoral destiny; but at intervals they seem human, too. The narrative itself, which spirals through time and space rather like a maze that Pierce must penetrate, startles the reader again and again with the eloquent rightness of the web of coincidences that structure it. And in moments of sudden realization, when Pierce sees for the first time something he had always inwardly known, the universe of ''Aegypt'' seems to talk itself awake. But what this artful (and sometimes arch) opening of portals will amount to, we can only guess.

At times most movingly, at other times rather doggedly, ''Aegypt'' embodies the sense that it is itself meant ultimately to be read as a Theater of the World. The later volumes will undoubtedly weave Bruno and Pierce closer together; more interestingly, if Mr. Crowley follows the implications of John Dee's life, the text may well accompany the astrologer to Bohemia, where he attempted - reading the neoplatonic signs of the times - to bring about a new order, a realm of the sun. He failed. ''Aegypt'' is set about a decade ago; future volumes may well take us towards a new millenarian vision.