Talking with the Dead about John Crowley's "The Deep"
Maybe it is just the autumnal mood coming over me as the calendar advances to Hallowe’en, but I find myself talking with Alice K. Turner about John Crowley’s first novel.
I recently re-read The Deep and “the mystery of the moons” stirred up memories. Alice wanted to solve the moons, and I said it was a bridge too far.
The situation is this: Crowley establishes that there are Seven Powers that seem sort of like the Seven Sins of the flat world. These seven are named, and their traits are given. The Seven become more important when we learn that off-world androids sent to cause change on the flat world are each based upon one of the Seven (the given case is that the first Neither-nor, who founded the assassin cult of the Just, was “Chalah,” the one of Lust). Crowley also has seven “Wanderers,” planet-like objects that are really moons, since they orbit the flat world. While described by their colors, these moons are never named, yet in a passage or two they seem to have some sort of influence upon the people.
It is probably this “unnamed yet important” detail (similar to the novel’s biggest mystery, “What is the name of Leviathan’s brother?”) that drove Alice to attempt pinning down the powers to the moons.
And here I go.
As risky as it is, I will apply orbital science. The “sun” orbits the flat world in 24 hours. The moons are said to be between sun and earth, so they are of shorter orbits. I claimed they were unnamed, but back at the beginning of the novel, one of the Endwives “looked up to where the Morning Star shone steadily. The home of the borning, as the Evening Star was of the dead” (hardcover, 3).
You see, this is why I refused. Crowley is such a trickster, and here he is openly playing on the inherent mixing of “star” and “planet.” Today I am locking down that they are moons that do not transit across the sky: one rises and sets in the east, the other rises and sets in the west. They do not orbit the flat world, each orbits a different geosync point in space.
Crowley is clever enough to know that the minds of the ancients expect such oddities as Morning and Evening Stars, and he brushes aside our modern understanding of such phenomena to assign “home of borning” to one and “home of the dead” to the other.
So then, we have these “bookend” moons, one at east, one at west, and five moons that transit the sky. The text gives an ordered list of the Seven Powers, starting with the one for Lust and ending with the one for Death. Death again. Yes, it seems to form up into something like Birth, the Five Ages of Man, and Death.
But Alice wants to know which of the Seven Powers invests our hero, the android Visitor. I think the text is Crowley-clear that the Visitor is the avatar of Death.
For Alice
“Bang! Zoom! You’re Going to the Moon!”
I recently re-read The Deep and “the mystery of the moons” stirred up memories. Alice wanted to solve the moons, and I said it was a bridge too far.
The situation is this: Crowley establishes that there are Seven Powers that seem sort of like the Seven Sins of the flat world. These seven are named, and their traits are given. The Seven become more important when we learn that off-world androids sent to cause change on the flat world are each based upon one of the Seven (the given case is that the first Neither-nor, who founded the assassin cult of the Just, was “Chalah,” the one of Lust). Crowley also has seven “Wanderers,” planet-like objects that are really moons, since they orbit the flat world. While described by their colors, these moons are never named, yet in a passage or two they seem to have some sort of influence upon the people.
It is probably this “unnamed yet important” detail (similar to the novel’s biggest mystery, “What is the name of Leviathan’s brother?”) that drove Alice to attempt pinning down the powers to the moons.
And here I go.
As risky as it is, I will apply orbital science. The “sun” orbits the flat world in 24 hours. The moons are said to be between sun and earth, so they are of shorter orbits. I claimed they were unnamed, but back at the beginning of the novel, one of the Endwives “looked up to where the Morning Star shone steadily. The home of the borning, as the Evening Star was of the dead” (hardcover, 3).
You see, this is why I refused. Crowley is such a trickster, and here he is openly playing on the inherent mixing of “star” and “planet.” Today I am locking down that they are moons that do not transit across the sky: one rises and sets in the east, the other rises and sets in the west. They do not orbit the flat world, each orbits a different geosync point in space.
Crowley is clever enough to know that the minds of the ancients expect such oddities as Morning and Evening Stars, and he brushes aside our modern understanding of such phenomena to assign “home of borning” to one and “home of the dead” to the other.
So then, we have these “bookend” moons, one at east, one at west, and five moons that transit the sky. The text gives an ordered list of the Seven Powers, starting with the one for Lust and ending with the one for Death. Death again. Yes, it seems to form up into something like Birth, the Five Ages of Man, and Death.
But Alice wants to know which of the Seven Powers invests our hero, the android Visitor. I think the text is Crowley-clear that the Visitor is the avatar of Death.
For Alice
“Bang! Zoom! You’re Going to the Moon!”
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