The first volume in Crowley's Aegypt sequence, Aegypt (preferred title The Solitudes), appeared in 1987. The second book, Love & Sleep, given its allied high levels of artistry, was not notably dilatory, appearing in 1994. Daemonomania issued forth as the third in 2000. And now comes the long-anticipated conclusion. So, although no book was separated from its predecessor by more than seven years (a not unheard-of pacing in literary circles, with Crowley also producing others in that interval), the net effect was a sequence spanning a full 20 years, with roots in Crowley's imagination extending back even further. The complications of such a long genesis cannot be overlooked, both in the evolving character of the books themselves and in the area of readerly expectations.

It's impossible to summarize the vast historical and metaphysical canvas of the first three books here in this compact space. Readers might find a little help at the Wikipedia entry on Crowley's series. Additionally, the author speaks a little bit about his purposes in this excellent interview by Nick Gevers. But certainly newcomers will make little of the fourth book on its own and will need to get up to speed. I'll assume they've done so as I outline the events of the new book.

Pierce Moffett, our protagonist, a historian and scholar and would-be writer, has emerged from his tempestuous, neurotic, near-fatal love affair with Rose Ryder a broken man. His dream of producing a book that reveals the secret history of the world—how titanic unacknowledged paradigm shifts sweep over human consciousness at intervals—is on the rocks. So he picks up a second task. At the behest of Rosie Rasmussen, who governs a Foundation that controls the literary estate of one Fellowes Kraft, Pierce is sent to Europe to trace a famous voyage Kraft made, and hopefully learn enough to bring Kraft's final unfinished manuscript to completion. Oh, yes, Kraft might also have previously found the literal Holy Grail on his journey, and Pierce might bother to pick that up as well, should he chance upon it.

Meanwhile, a second track continues the career of Giordano Bruno, famous heretical mystic. (A third track involving wizardly John Dee concluded in Daemonomania, although Dee's apprentice Edward Kelly makes a brief appearance.) Put to death by flames, Bruno, we learn, actually survived by making a supernatural leap to another form. We follow Bruno's "posthumous" career and how it ties in with Pierce's own investigation.

In the end, however, Pierce's European odyssey merely shows him the futility of his quest—or rather the misperceived and Inapprehensible nature of it. He returns to America, to the pastoral Faraway Hills in New York State. There, with no expectations, he will encounter the startling and final life-altering events of his particular myth.

Journeys end in lovers meeting

Twenty years ago, John Crowley prefaced the first book in this chain of books—and chains of books are a motif in the quartet itself—with this observation: "More even than most books are, this is a book made out of other books." For the first half of Endless Things this observation holds acutely true. Pierce is alone, trammeled in the nets of history, despairing, confused. All the great characters we've come to love back in the Faraway Hills are offstage—perhaps not the savviest move on Crowley's part. This climax of Pierce's obsessive quest begins to get a little arid. True, there are some potent flashbacks to enjoy, about Bruno and Kraft. But basically it's Pierce conducting a bitter monologue about the nature of time, space, history and the cosmos. Like the works of Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon at their most recondite, this section demands intellectual concentration and a certain willingness to accommodate the author's love of pattern-making.

But then, with Pierce's return to the Faraway Hills, the novel bursts its iron bonds of history, leaps into new green vibrancy and resonantly and resolutely brings to a satisfying closure the life stories of all the characters. Introducing a new love into Pierce's life (and Crowley gets in a sly metafictional dig against such an authorial move when Pierce lambastes Kraft for doing the same), Crowley employs the startling disjunctive leaps of space and time he used so well in Little, Big (1981) to great good effect. The novel zooms from its baseline era of 1979 into the present, bringing with it the realization that Pierce's quest has been fulfilled—after a fashion and in a manner he never predicted.

When the first book in this cycle appeared in 1987, its milieu of 1979 seemed nearly contemporary. Twenty years later, Pierce's adventures have somehow taken on a nostalgic, retro feel, which Crowley plays off against cleverly.

Crowley's prose, on a sentence-by-sentence level, has never been stronger or lovelier. His epigrams and observations on the core nature of existence continue to be wise and, well, piercing, at once novel and, with a moment's reflection, undeniably primal. This is a book that conveys the uncanniness of the mundane, and the mundanity of the uncanny. Readers who have followed Pierce's travails for two decades will find that the ending of his story resonates as brightly as the Aeolian harp that is the book's final image.

In closing, I'd like to point out something I haven't seen yet observed about this series.

It's an homage to Thomas Wolfe the elder.

A big Southern boy with stars in his eyes, mazed in books and by sex? How could I not have seen the parallels till now? And if you don't believe me, consider the famous opening from Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and tell me if it couldn't have come straight from Crowley's book just as well.

... a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.