Crowley's Apprentice - Gerald Suster

 Israel Regardie (1907-85) was secretary, pupil and sometimes friend of Aleister Crowley, The Great Beast 666.   Gerald Suster (1951-2001) was pupil, friend and ultimately memoirist of Israel Regardie.  Regardie broke with Crowley before World War II and after the war qualified as a doctor of psychology and licenced chiropractor, settling in the USA.  Suster visited him there as a very young man and stayed with him in California and Arizona on many occasions.

This memoir therefore, is one notorious occultist (Suster got money out of News International when they defamed him in one of their scandal rags) writing about another.  Regardie had become notorious during the height of Crowley's time as self-described Wickedest Man in the World, and had been banned from entering England even though, like Suster, he was born in London.

In occult circles Regardie was praised and despised in equal measure because he was the one who wrote it all down and made the secret rituals of the Golden Dawn available and comprehensible to outsiders.  It was his writing, of course, that initially attracted Suster.

Crowley's Apprentice is interesting in many ways.  For the generalist it offers valuable insights into the rebirth of magic around 1900 and leads to other sources.

Slade House - David Mitchell

Slade House is a traditional English haunted house story disassembled, dissected, twisted and tweaked by a master of literary tropes. Mitchell favours multi-viewpoint narratives and has made Slade House the perfect vehicle for the technique. Every nine years, over five cycles from 1979 to 2015, innocents and/or investigators are enticed to the suburban mansion that was once Slade House. Some are linked, others independent. On every occasion we and they have to try and disentangle what is real and what is not. Piecemeal throughout the novel suggestions are offered regarding the origin of the 'orison'; only at the end is the full story revealed.

Mitchell has previously been drawn to the epic format. Here, the shorter form (only 230 pages) suits his purpose better. For Mitchell, it seems to me, form and structure matter more than elegant wordplay. His words are well-chosen, his sentences polished, but he leaves the complexities to ideas which are by their nature labyrinthine. The orison, for example, is a concept Mitchell developed in his earlier novel Cloud Atlas, a sort of spiritual or supra-natural version of virtual reality. Here he traces the idea from various esoteric belief systems. Whether there is any basis for this in real world religious practice is immaterial. It reads as plausible, even authoritative, and thus the reader accepts it.

For all the structural bias, Mitchell creates characters who hold our interest for as long as they need to. The guileless son of a pretentious single mother, a libidinous copper, a chubby fresher from the local university, her sister the online reporter and, ultimately, the kick-ass doctor of psychiatry. The interdependency of the Grayer twins, whose career unites the episodic narrative, is especially well handled.

I liked this novel a great deal. I commend it to all.