Book Review: Endless Things: A Part of Aegypt by John Crowley

Endless Things is the fourth and final part of John Crowley's Aegypt sequence. I wrote in my review of Daemonomania (the third novel in the sequence) that a short review can never do justice to this breathtakingly complex series of novels. At one level it's a domestic drama set in the Faraway Hills, a rural area of north eastern America, at another a metaphysical interpretation of history, humanity and the universe, combining theological speculation and Gnostic philosophy, and at an even more subtle level an occultist fantasy-so subtle in fact it's difficult to label the sequence as fantasy. Endless Things is an epilogue (it's shorter then the previous novels) and a tying up of ends; we uncover the fate of the emotionally tormented main character-Pierce Moffett, taking the reader by surprise and the significance of Fellowes Kraft's unpublished and supposedly unfinished novel-the book within a book at the centre of the Aegypt sequence.



The first half of Endless Things is fiendishly complex as the dispirited historian Pierce Moffett travels to Europe following in the footsteps of Fellowes Kraft, who journeyed to the region in 1968. It's interspersed with the last section of Kraft's 'unfinished' historical novel concerning early 17th century philosopher and heretic Giordano Bruno and the origins of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, an influential occult society. Dense with magical symbolism and Gnostic metaphysics as well as humour, this first part of the novel merges into the more realistic second half as the unexpected future of our forlorn hero is revealed. Pierce experiences a spiritual epiphany outside a roadhouse strip-club.



He stopped, in the cold spring air of the parking lot, with his car keys in his hand, in the chartreuse light of the Paradise Lounge girl.

And yet there is a realm outside.

There is a realm outside.

It wasn't a thought or a notion arising in his heart or head, it was as though presented to or inserted within him, something that wasn't of or from himself at all. He had never felt even the possibility of it before, and yet he knew it now with absolute plain certainty. It wasn't even a surprise.

There is an enveloping realm, beyond everything that is and everything that might be or can be imagined to be. It was so.

Not Heaven, where the Logus lives, where everything is made of meaning, or better say, where meanings are the only things. That realm, of any, is deep deep within. But beyond the realms of meaning; beyond even any possible author of all this, if there was one, which there was not; outside or beyond even Bruno's infinities, outside of which there could be nothing; outside all possibility, lay the realm in which all is contained.

It was so. He knew it, without any wonderment. he knew it by its total usefulness.

It answered.

This is not the finale. The novel ends on the summit of a small mountain in the Faraway Hills over a decade after the events encountered in the previous books, with most of the main characters present. It's a wonderful ending, one of the best I've read. The Aegypt sequence as a whole is a masterpiece that you can read over and over again, enabling you to discover new resonances. All lovers of visionary literature should check out these novels as they celebrate the alchemy of the imagination itself; a sacred spring gushing between the covers of all great books.

Dystopia Now: The Only Hope is Resistance From Below

I began Underground Man last year when the banking system was in meltdown. Since then Neoliberalism and market orthodoxy have emerged unscathed from its most serious crisis since the Wall Street Crash, arguably strengthened. Because of the recession and a national debt that beggars believe, an excuse with a very rational seeming underpinning has now been found to launch more attacks on what remains of the ailing post WWII top down social democratic model-NHS, welfare state, worker and employer co-operation et al. All mainstream parties (and let's face it these are the only ones that matter) in this country are calling for massive spending cuts-it's clearly a choice between a quick death with the Tories or a slow one with NuLabour. The blame has shifted from the greedy bankers to the public sector, while the City and big business grows ever more hopeful of larger profits and a smaller but more disciplined work force, cowled into an acceptance of reduced pay, stressful working conditions and longer hours by fear of unemployment. Correspondingly over the decades local and municipal institutions from independent shops, through to trade union branches to community organisations, which people felt part of and contributed too, have mostly disappeared, replaced by a shopping mall culture constantly watched by the steely gaze of the CCTV camera. A sense of powerlessness in most people is almost palpable.


There is a very good case to be made that the dystopian visions of science fiction are not waiting to happen in the future but exist in the here and now. Our present is not the austere Stalinist/Fascist nightmare of Orwell's 1984 but close to the gaudy hyper-capitalism and corporation dominated LA of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Franz Kafka's surreal faceless bureaucracies. Never before in the developed world have we been so inundated with consumer choice. There is no real limit to freedom of speech either; on the net we can read the obscure writings of the anarchists and the ultra left and at the same time the rantings of the extreme right and the insane ramblings of religious fanatics. We can vote once every four or five years for a government of our choice (the party that wins is always the one that most closely obeys the logic of capitalism) and we can say, write and get anything that money can buy. But at the most basic level no one has power or control over their lives or the real world outside the TV or computer screen.

Any form of dissent that's not the virtual, both political and cultural, peaceful or not, is safely controlled or hindered and if that fails legislated out of existence-see what happened to something as innocuous as the Big Green Gathering. Working class power residing in wildcat strikes, mass picketing and secondary action was the first to go, then the anarchic free festival and rave scene in the 80's and 90's. A burst of innovative anti-capitalist direct action in the mid and late 90's has faded after the police caught on to their tactics and began kettling demonstrators. As shopping malls and private corporate run spaces spread even the once ubiquitous left wing and single-issue campaigning stalls and leaflet drops are thinning out. Add on new anti-terrorist laws and health and safety regulations, and any semblance of popular participation or people power that does not have the approval of the authorities is made impossible without breaking some kind of law.

Clearly the idea of 'western democracy' cherished by so many is in crisis. You don't have to be an anarchist to see that voting does not work-go back to the euphoria of Tony Blair's victory in 97' and look around at the political and economic ruins surrounding us now. These days it does not take too much of a leap into the radical imagination to see that the concept of 'liberal western democracy' and the almost ritualised fetish for voting in parliamentary elections is an ideological construct keeping us chained to capitalism and neo-liberalism, making sure the complex machine ticks over nicely. Social Democracy (Old Labour, New Deals, green or otherwise) is as unrealistically Utopian as the most outrageous leftism in the brave new world of hyper-capitalism.

Rather naively I have always voted in general elections-I believed I was contributing to keeping the Tories out and just maybe as a result we would get some mild reforms in return. I had never grasped the anarchist insistence on non-voting-after all it does not take too much time or energy to put a cross on a piece of paper and scrawling some anarcho slogan on your ballet paper was to me mere gesture politics, to be read only by some bored counter of votes. At the end of the day voting did not stop you engaging in the real meaningful struggle taking place at the grass roots. But now due to the financial crisis and its fall-out, complete disillusionment even with this limited criteria for voting has set in.

Is there an alternative? I think so-the more non-voters , the more apathy there is, the clearer the message of disengagement and alienation. Negative most certainly, but all social movements and revolts start from the bed rock of disenchantment, even despair at political and economic realities. More positively we must be thinking about the coming resistance after the election as building blocks for a new left libertarian politics, one based on horizontal networks of struggle. If the cuts in the public sector (meaning also attacks on the working class in general, the unemployed and the poor, who rely on the public sector in some form to make life even marginally decent) are as bad as everyone says there going to be, resistance is guaranteed. What form or direction it will take of course cannot come with a guarantee.

But what about voting for left wing parties, Respect or Socialist Labour Party, etc or The Green Party? My views on Respect, et al can be read here. There might be a case to be made for voting for the Green Party as a protest vote, (this is academic in my case, I doubt if a Green Party candidate will be standing in my area) but for complex reasons concerning Parliamentary power and the forces of day to day conventional politics, reasons I have no time to go into in this posting, the Green Party are not a real solution purely on its own. One occupied work place or community action group are worth a thousand Green Party votes.

Book Review: The User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews by J.G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard also wrote reviews and articles for newspapers and magazines and the User's Guide to the Millennium is a varied collection of these non-fiction works from the 60's up the mid 90's. They display J.G's wide interests, covering everything from Hollywood to Science Fiction, making manifest his completely original take on the world. Many of the reviews run at a tangent from the subject discussed, drawing from his own reflections and ideas and in no way pretending to be objective, but this does not matter in the slightest as J.G. Ballard is my definition of a genius-totally unique. The best writing for me is mostly from New Worlds magazine in the 1960's, when he was at his most 'cutting edge' and literary respectability (Empire of the Sun) a long way off. Here he defines his own unigue type of science fiction stories against the classic space fiction of conventional SF, looks at the surrealist painters and their influence on him, discusses the importance of William Burroughs for literature and how Hitler and the Nazi's would not be out of place in the garish media landscape of the swinging sixties.

Ballardian Ground Zero: J.G. Ballard's House in Shepperton

Above is J.G. Ballard's semi (on the right) in Shepperton, where he lived since 1960 nearly up to his death in April, 2009. Here he brought up his three children as a single parent (his wife died in 1964) and of course wrote most of his short stories and all of his novels. Here in the everyday suburbs, his middle class neighbours probably oblivious to his literary importance, lived an author who has been compared to such masters of visionary writing as Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and H.G. Wells. Ballard is like the 18th Century poet and artist William Blake, who lived an obscure domestic life in London but saw angels in the trees of Poplar.

I took these photographs in late July nearly four months after J.G's death, (I live nearby across the Thames in Walton-see my blog postings here and here) and except for the lawn being cut and the net curtains on the top floor drawn back, the house has not changed; his car is still in the drive, nor has the house been put up for sale. As far as I know it's still the same as I write this in September-my brother went past on one of his runs a couple of weeks ago. It was sad (even rather ghostly) standing here for a moment, gazing at this abode of the accumulated imagination, now a mere shell, albeit with its surface details still intact, with its guiding light flown forever.

At the end of J.G's road is the M3 motorway, constructed in the early 70's. At the same time in the house above he was writing Crash. J.G. Ballard mapped out (almost as if sprung from his own imagination) the disturbing and ambiguous terrain we were creating all around us, to the point where we now live in a Ballardian world.

DVD's from my Collection: Five Films Recently Watched

Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy Box Set: Directed by Peter Jackson (2001, 2002, 2003)

The early 21st century and northern European equivalent of the 'sand and sandal' widescreen epics of the 1950's-Ben Hur, Spartacus and the Ray Harryhausen monster pic-just what cinema was invented for.

Sunset Boulevard: Directed by Billy Wilder (1950)

1950's Hollywood artifice seen through a gothic lens. A huge influence on David Lynch and the Coen Brothers-a film noir about faded glory, entrapment and insanity.

Exterminating Angel: Directed by Luis Bunuel (1962)

Guests at a bourgeois dinner party inexplicably find themselves unable to leave and 'civilized' values and upper class mores begin to crumble. Luis Bunuel's surrealist film is a sort of science fiction disaster movie confined within one room with no explanation of causes.

Eraserhead: Directed by David Lynch (1977)

A darkly humorous nightmare about parenthood and other things. Calling this film weird is an understatement.

The Shining: Directed by Stanley Kubrick (1980)

My favourite horror film starring my favourite male actor, Jack Nicholson. From the opening helicopter shot of the Torrance family car moving along the mountain roads, overlaid with brilliantly eerie music, to Nicholson's unhinged performance as axe wielding writer Jack Torrance, this is atmospheric horror at its best.

Book Review: High-Rise by J.G. Ballard

The first J.G. Ballard book I read as a teenager and the one I would recommend to those curious enough to want to start reading his works. The themes of High-Rise resonate through nearly all of his later novels-the real logic behind the isolated enclaves of late capitalist consumer society (gated communities, luxury holiday resorts, shopping malls) brought to the surface; their brightly lit but soulless affluence reduced to dystopias of violence and perversity. Like his earlier SF disaster novels it's apocalyptic but the societal collapse is contained within the microcosm of a 40 story high-rise of the very near future not on the planetary level; but the novel is still SF, a speculation about the negative possibilities of the future. The book has violence aplenty but lacks the obsessively explicit or deliberately repetitive feel of Crash. Unlike The Atrocity Exhibition it's structured conventionally with a plotted beginning and end and solid characters, although a hallmark of Ballard's style is that idea and image comes before in-depth character study.



The setting is of course a newly developed high-rise complex for the professional middle classes, a 'vertical city' situated in London's Docklands. All amenities are self-contained within the block with a shopping centre, a bank, restaurants and swimming pools-nobody need leave the building except to attend their workplaces. Minor irritations and infractions (noisy parties, the absurd resentments of the tenants, power cuts, etc) escalate gradually into brutal gang warfare between the different floors, remorselessly leading to a complete breakdown of any form of structured society, amongst the graffiti strewn corridors and staircases, broken escalators, piles of garbage and smashed furniture. Three characters dominate the novel: Dr Robert Laing, who works in a nearby medical school, who withdraws into his own private world of survival, like all the inhabitants of the building, quite happy existing as a lone hunter-gatherer: The macho Richard Wilder, ex-rugby player and TV journalist from the lower floors attempting to make a documentary about the high-rise, that ends in a quest to reach the 40th floor, his persona reduced to that of masculine savage, his useless cine-camera clutched like a shamanic totem. Anthony Royal, the architect of the whole complex, living in the top-most penthouse, regarding the high-rise as a social laboratory, but like Dr Frankenstein becoming a victim of his own experiment.

Some more literal minded readers may quibble that the scenario of High-Rise is an impossibility; eventually the outside world would become aware of the breakdown of law and order and the police sent in. (Maybe eventually they do but long after the events accounted in the novel) But this is missing the point as the book should be read as speculative fiction not social realism; an ambiguous warning about the negative possibilities latent in our commodified, technologically dominated society. It's real concern lies with the psychological affect of the building itself.

A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake...people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed...By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses. It was precisely in these areas that the most important and most interesting aspects of their lives would take place. Secure with in the shell of the high-rise like passengers on board an automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find. In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly 'free' psychopathology.

Published in 1975 the above passage from High-Rise is even more relevant in the early 21st century and highlights his genius. We now truly live in the strange and disturbing world J.G. Ballard began to map out in his fictions of the 1960's and 70's.

Websites for J.G. Ballard Fans:

Ballardian

Rick Mcgrath's J.G. Ballard website

Book Cover of J.G. Ballard's Crash

Due to technical problems I was unable to upload the book cover of my 1995 edition of J.G. Ballard's Crash into the review. Here it is instead in a separate posting.