The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

Soon after moving to the secluded Norfolk village of Munding, Alex Darken has a disturbing encounter with the ageing poet Edward Nesbit and his young lover Laura. They are obsessively researching the lives of Sir Henry Agnew and his daughter Louisa who lived in Munding in the nineteenth century and were deeply engaged in alchemical practices.

By recovering the lost secret of the hermetic mysteries, Edward and Laura hope to find an alternative to the destructive materialism of the post-industrial world. Once drawn into their fervent quest for knowledge, Alex finds himself entangled in a passionate and intense intrigue that reaches across two centuries.

A beautifully written, ambitious and captivating novel, which takes a profound look at issues of nature, human existence and forgotten knowledge.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Magical Realism, Fantasy, Literature, Contemporary, 20th Century

543 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Lindsay Clarke is a British novelist. He was educated at Heath Grammar School in Halifax and at King's College Cambridge. He worked in education for many years, in Africa, America and the UK, before becoming a full-time writer. He currently lives in Somerset with his wife, Phoebe Clare, who is a ceramic artist. Clarke lectures in creative writing at Cardiff University, and teaches writing workshops in London and Bath. Four radio plays were broadcast by BBC Radio 4, and a number of his articles and reviews have been published in 'Resurgence' and 'The London Magazine.' Lindsay has one daughter from his first marriage.

His novel The Chymical Wedding, partly inspired by the life of Mary Anne Atwood, won the Whitbread Prize in 1989. Clarke's most recent novel is THE WATER THEATRE (published in September 2010 by Alma Booka), of which a review by Antonia Senior in THE TIMES of 28 August said "There is nothing small about this book. It is huge in scope, in energy, in heart...It is difficult to remember a recent book that is at once so beautiful and yet so thought provoking."

Reviews

[Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

read it twice - second time even better - Jungian psychology, fucked up victorian priests, ghosts, psychic american potters, a dodgy old poet, a medieval sculpture of a gaping vagina above a church doorway, alchemy, swans called Janet and Henry - what else do you need. A really marvelous piece of writing.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has been on my 'to read' list for a long time, and now I've been through it, I'm thinking about the tragedy of fulfilled ambition.
This is a frustrating book. It has some wonderful ideas, some richly evocative description, and succeeds where many later writers have failed in fusing a Victorian and current (i.e. late 1980s) narrative. The influences include John Fowles (especially 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', 'The Ebony Tower', and 'The Magus' - my Picador edition has a supportive cover blurb from the older novelist), John Cowper Powys, sundry commentators on Jung, and George Eliot (the dominant influence in the re-working of the Dorothea and Casaubon strand of 'Middlemarch' which makes up the Victorian strand of the novel). The use of the Hermetic Quest as a structuring device works well (on the whole), and the novel certainly gives a strong suggestion of magical strangeness, helped by a hot Norfolk landscape (I suspect a bit of a nod to 'The Go-Between' here).
Nevertheless, I didn't enjoy the book. I appreciated and at times admired it, but I was unmoved, especially by the trials and tribulations of its modern characters. One is a drippy young poet whose wife has left him for a close friend and taken the kids (they're well off out of it). Another is the sort of intense and 'troubled' young American woman who was always having flings with older men in late-1960s films. The third member of triumvirate is a lecherous old poet, a sort of father-figure cum all-purpose mythopoeic bore, who spends his time asking pretentious and pedantic questions which are treated with far more seriousness than they deserve to be. He's the sort of man who looks at a Polo mint and says 'Do you see the mint, or the hole? Wholeness is what we lack. Ah, the moon, hanging there like a silver toenail paring dangling from a bugle. Perhaps She can illuminate our contretemps.' In short, he's the sort of man who I want to see being lowered slowly into a trash compactor, his pleas for mercy ignored.
Another reason for my lack of sympathy was the fact that the characters are always stopping to lecture one another about things they ought to know already, e.g. Tarot symbolism, key writers on esotericism, the difference between alchemists and Gnostics (yes, it's that sort of book), and so on. There is a lot of laborious symbolism, notably in the extended description of the three modern protagonists firing a pottery kiln (as the Incredible String Band might have sung, 'Earth, Water, Fire and Air / Met together in a garden fair'), and a deeply regrettable tendency for narrators (first and third person) to spend a paragraph or two brooding on something that is either patently obvious or inclined to demonstrate their lack of spiritual vision. 'Looking at her, I found I couldn't see her. She was there yet not there, existing in a liminal state of Being and Not-being that left me confused and hurt.' Is that a genuine quotation, pastiche of Clarke, or a parody? You'll have to read the novel to find out.
In the end, everything is brought together with reasonable coherence. However, for a portrait of the intelligent occult encounter, I much preferred M. John Harrison's 'The Course of the Heart'.

[Saige · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a tough book to rate. On the one hand, I found a lot of its metaphors overly pretentious and oddly vague. Much of the discussion of alchemical processes was so shrouded in vague language that they were both frustrating and meaningless. Mystery gone too far simply became nonsense. On the other hand, however, I was captivated. The parallels between Louisa's story and Alex's began in an interesting way and only became more intriguing as the story went on. I found all the characters grounded and compelling, though Edward was the source of much insufferable pretention. The descriptions of Louisa were especially beautiful. She was written in such exquisite detail that I was sad I couldn't read the story of her entire life. So while the book may have been frustrating at times, I would still recommend it to anyone looking for a good, dense read.

[Iain Coggins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this last December and enjoyed it immensely. It had been recommended to me twenty years ago, and finally I have been able to get to it. I could easily give it five stars, but then I would be only thinking of myself. Truth is, Clarke is a bit verbose for some tastes. And though I prefer more minimalist, direct prose, and was not bothered by his syntactic style, I can see how others might be. There are also some sections, especially toward the denouement of the story where the characters wax too long in mystical ruminations. Yet the climax of the story is well worth the build up, a real mind-blower! That being said, my criticisms are minor and it is with reluctance that I give it four rather than five stars. If you enjoy somber, reflective Brit lit, and especially if you have an interest in pre-Christian Anglo-Celtic mythology and medieval alchemy (I fall into the middle category), then you'll appreciate The Chymical Wedding. Clarke has really done his homework in all of these areas and writes naturally of them without being cumbersome.

[Susan Howson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Have you ever read a book that was so gripping that you found yourself reading it in the car, at work, everywhere you could? Then go back in time and recommend that book to me instead of The Chymical Wedding. I avoided reading this every chance I got. It was so boring as to be ridiculous. Or maybe I just hate philosophy. Or maybe I just hate the characters. Or maybe I zzzzzzzzzzzzz. Even reviewing this bores me.

[Victoria (Eve's Alexandria) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard not to give this five stars, even if it had its challenges. The Hermetic allusions and Jungian references are a bit arcane at times, and Edward is downright annoying. But the writing is gorgeously involved and sensuous. And the characters (Edward aside) are very engaging in their determination to uncover and share the secret to the world's salvation by knowing themselves better. If you have ever felt even remotely mystical then you'll appreciate this.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magical, immersive extraordinary book

[Anya Gill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started off well but became a bit dull about 2/3 of the way through. I liked the writing though and particularly the way that the two parallel narratives were written in different styles.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

If there’s another novel that treats the topic of alchemy seriously and in depth, I don’t know of it. Alchemy is difficult to understand. Clarke does an admirable job of explaining it, aided by the well-drawn characters of the two parallel stories in this book. At times the language is flowery, a bit over the top, but it’s nevertheless a substantial achievement. No surprise at all that it won the Whitbread prize for fiction.

[Mark Edward Rasmussen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is often heralded as having a lot in common with the Magus. There are certainly similarities: a young but world-weary protagonist, a mercurial and enigmatic older man, a deep mystical and supernatural undercurrent. However, whereas I couldn't put the Magus down, reading this novel was like walking through a muddy field wearing iron boots. It could be said that the difficulties endured were not the fault of Lindsay Clarke, and arose as a result of my own limitations: I haven't been initiated into the hermetic teachings, and I'm a complete novice in the world of alchemy. Clarke's prose is sublime, and he clearly has a great depth of knowledge in the field of Jungian psychology, mythology, theology, Grail studies, alchemy, etc., it's just that for me the story itself fell flat and ploughing through this novel felt like a chore. Having said that I do respect what Clarke set out to achieve with this novel and the phrase "casting pearls before swine" could well apply here (and there are a lot of pearls to be found here if one has the motivation to sift for them). Self-flagellation aside, I read this novel expecting to be entertained and on that level it left a lot to be desired. Upon finishing felt a sense of relief akin to removing a tightly-fitting pair of shoes after a long walk.

[Jeremy James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wholly captivating piece of work. Whether you are in the slightest knowledgable about alchemy or the Hermetic tradition, you'll soon pick plenty up on your journey through this work, and journey it is. It is a work of erudition. It is by no means simple and I would advise anyone to keep a dictionary handy since the vocabulary is glorious, rich and to the point. The whole structure of the book is superbly composed, some of it sits on the very edge of understanding - you don't get to coast through this work. I can quite see why John Fowles said of it that it excited him enormously. It is an exciting book on many levels; it sets you thinking; it reveals how the lead of humanity can be transcended into gold - at a price: do you or do you not tell?
Is the Hermetic secret ever to remain a secret? It seems it is - unless you are prepared to go and do a lot more work yourself. Yes, I liked this book a lot. I admire its integrity. I admire the intellectual capacity of its author. I very much admire the way he pieced this together. We have a lot to learn from alchemy and this is not a bad dip into it. Not bad at all.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this back in '89 and I've never gotten it out of my mind. I'd really like to re-read this book. Somehow reminds me of The Magus by Fowles.

[Philip Kazan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alchemy, layers of past and present, an English village full of off-kilter inhabitants - a seminal book of its kind.

[Kaywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.75

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure why I am choosing this book to review, but it is an excellent Jungian novel that actually understands the nature of his pyschology and doesn't simply act glib and vaguely profound. There is a lot of emphasis on alchemy (a major preoccupation of Jung's) as well as pagan/pre-Christian imagery, a la John Fowles' "The Magus," which I'd also recommend. There are two parallel stories, one from the 20th century and one from the 18th, which fits well into the divided pysche typed themed that the book explores. I don't know what else to say, but it's an excellent book that no one I have ever recommended it to ever seems to have heard of, so there it is now. I'd compare it to Umberto Eco or John Fowles.

[David Grieve · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this several years ago and remembered enjoying it so i thought I'd give it another go. It did not have the same impact and although it is a good and imaginative story, most of the characters were too odious or irritating to aid enjoyment. Two of the main characters being poets also means that it borders on the pretentious in parts. The sub plot of nuclear tensions is very much of its time although the reactions to the situation seem a little over dramatized. Having said all that, the Victorian story is excellent and very well written.

[Kerith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was beautifully written but rather difficult to follow since I've studied or read about very little of the Hermetic mysteries. Parts of it were so flowery written that the actions were unclear. At times it frustrated me, and I never felt that it fulfilled itself, the story that is, or had a point.
My husband loved it and recommended it to me so I gave it my best shot!

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just terrible.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like The Magus, but a lot better somehow.

[Ell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, profound. I don't know how much I would have got from this novel if I hadn't done a bit of reading on occultism and Jungian psychology already, but for my money it manages to impart some of the spiritual wisdom of the alchemists without preaching, packaged up in a very entertaining story. No mean feat. Alex Darken's voice as narrator is a particular highlight. There are many moments within it that have a genuine power and spiritual clarity; but Clarke, like his character Louisa, understands the power of the gesture of the secret—of not quite giving the game away. He leaves enough unsaid—and, as I say, if I hadn't read (most of) Man and His Symbols and Richard Cavendish's excellent The Tarot, if I didn't know what I was looking for, I might find this subtlety a bit frustrating. But that makes the book's many little revelations all the more rewarding.

I also think that The Chymical Wedding turned up at the right time for me. In the Eighties, Clarke and his protagonists had the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over them always; today, in 2020, we have climate change, the ultimate consequence of our atomised culture's love of matter and our species' troubled relationship with the world of which we are an inextricable part. Also, lockdown and other personal events have prompted a lot of soul searching, and so I felt a kinship with Alex and Louisa's spiritual crises in particular. Similar to how, when I recently did a Tarot spread, the meanings of the cards seemed eerily on the nose. Carl Jung would argue, of course, that to suggest a higher power arranged those cards, or launched the book into my life, is irrelevant; the appearance of a synchronicity is enough, is synchronicity itself. And then someone even more mystically inclined, like Alan Watts, would say that neither events in my life nor the existence of the book are discreet happenings; a sight requires a seer, and neither can be said to exist without the other.

So reading this was valuable for me. I kept writing down pearls of wisdom in my notebook as I read:

'However varied our dreams, they all have the same punchline. It is "Wake Up!" ... Dreams have a knack of undermining the ego's self-esteem. They out-trump its impoverished efforts at control at every preposterous trick. They offer nightly demonstrations of what malleable stuff reality is made ... they insist on the truth. On the whole truth.'

'Mankind had suffered a fall ... it was a critical moment in the great experiment of Nature. It was the very access of consciousness—life's arrival at the moment where it might contemplate and shape its own existence. But consciousness comes at a price, and the price is banishment from the Garden. When we wake it is to find ourselves alone and separate, trapped in the toils of matter.'

'...[I was] forgetting that it was not perfection that life required, but completeness.'

'A church consecrated solely to the father is but half a church.'

'I do not think I believe in lines. Look as I might, I find them nowhere save in constructions of the mind.'

'Love is not a fixed condition of the soul, but its motion; returned or not, it [is] a directed impulse outwards into life...'

From these quotes and my review, you might get a picture of the novel as pure philosophising dressed up as narrative, and while there is a lot of unabashed meditation on dreams, life, love and the spirit, it is a lot more than that. It's a historical fantasy that deals with very real and serious issues, rather than using magic or the past as an opiate to distract from those issues. It's tender, disturbing, funny, sad. If you have any interest in novels that try and tackle psychology and spirituality then this comes highly recommended, although you might want to read Jung's opening chapter for Man and His Symbols as a primer first.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this because I've been reading Clarke's Essays and he refers to why and how he wrote this book. But the idea or the need or the impulse don't guarantee the novel.
As other reviewers have pointed out the book has a disturbing sense of familiarity. John Fowles has been cited, and there are vague parallels with The Magus and some of his short stories. But there are also elements of M.R.james and the double time plot has been done often enough and perhaps done better sa few years later by Byatt's Possession. . Laura the artistic but damaged young American woman with a penchant for much older men and and random outdoor sexual encounters seems to have been a literary trope of the period, if not a sexual fantasy of English writers.
The characters also have the bad habit of discoursing at length, while often being hyper aware of the needs, moods and thoughts of who they are talking with. The characters aren't totally convincing. They seem too much like literary types. The bitter aging poet, the lost young acolyte, the American girl, the tormented priest with his callous wife. And I'm not sure if the alchemy delivers anything but plot structure and opportunities for discoursing.
Despite all this, it's a compulsive book which I will have to reread.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating read packed with put-your-thumb-in-the-page-put-the-book-down-and-just-reflect moments. Having known very little about alchemy and hermetics before reading, I often took to looking up references to round out the experience, which I think was worthwhile. The book is well structured and well paced, with well developed characters and interesting subject matter.

I was recommended The Chymical Wedding after telling a bookseller that I had enjoyed Fowles's The Magus. The two are discernibly similar, but I did find that reading TCW was less exciting. I expect that this was intentional on the part of the author because though The Magus is thrilling, it is less relatable while TCW is far more ... human? Sure, TCW's characters are infallibly eloquent sophisticates but there is something much more inhabitable about them, which was nice, though perhaps at the expense of being substantially less thrilling.

[Bogusmoon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick review:
Beautifully written. Often moving.
Feels like dark fantasy, only "realistic."
Recommended for mystics interested in self-transformation, dreams, alchemy, or Jungian-style active imagination.


Plot:
When a writer discovers that his wife has been unfaithful, he recedes into the English countryside to hammer out his writer's block and take some time away from the world. Instead, he is suddenly brought together with his former idol (a notoriously difficult poet) and his lovely companion. The three engage in a project to uncover a mystery that occurred in that small English town 100 years ago.

Personal Thoughts:
This book continuously unearthed hidden wounds within my own psyche and soul. Just reading it felt at times like a true alchemical labor! For those working through deep issues, perhaps add this book to your healing journey.
I'm not big on romance, and this book has some, but because the romantic scenes are framed as more symbolic I did not mind them.

[Lorna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Struggling writer Alex Darken is offered the use of a cottage on a country estate in Norfolk as a bolthole when his marriage collapses. He meets the elderly and somewhat faded poet Edward Nesbit and his young American lover Laura. They are researching two of the present lord's nineteenth century ancestors, Sir Henry Agnew and his daughter Louisa, who were devoted to the study of alchemy.

The story shifts between the 1840s and the 1980s, entwining the two sets of characters along with the new rector Edwin Frere and his wife whose arrival in the Victorian village sets off a chain of events which no-one could have predicted.

A challenging read at 550+ pages, but a memorable one nonetheless.

[F J Gilbert · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half is brilliant but the finale is shockingly misogynistic. Definitely a book of its time. Clarke's evocation of an ageing poet's search for mystical meaning in old manuscripts and the English countryside is compelling, but the pretty young female protagonist is under drawn and unpersuasive. The narrator is a male, failed divorced writer who is drawn into the old poet's world and lusts after the poet's attractive lover. The love triangle is suspenseful but as I said the resolution quite disturbing.

[P.J. Mordant · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's gotta be a five from me. Subtle, yet deep and the tragic dynamic between father and daughter stays with me still. Reminded me much of the Casaubon marriage in Middlemarch: the socially repressed female outstripping the male, though here it is more nuanced and analytical.

But its the mysticism that lingers; and within here lies a deep well of it. Not a quick or easy read, but an intelligent one.

[Dennis Weeks · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Sheela na Gig relief on the side of a church helps tie a contemporary trio of researchers to a 19th century trio of an alchemist's daughter, a devout rector and his manipulative wife. Some beautifully written passages and some interesting dips into the world of archetypes and mysticism almost make the book rewarding. But if ever a book cried to heaven for a good editor this is it.

[Ruth Brumby · Rating 1 out of 5]

I very much disliked almost everything about this book. It was excessively verbose and long winded use sought after semi archaic words, without the prose being attractive or a pleasure to read. it was just tedious.
The characters were unbelievable and difficult to distinguish.
The arguments about duality and gender divide and spirituality were completely contrary to my views of the world.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this strange book, with its alchemical theme, alternating chapters from the mid-1800s and the present (books was written in 1989, something around that time). I'll probably read it again at some time.

[Pollymoore3 · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A gesture of his hand took in the lake, both shores, the stars. 'Don't we live in an alchemical palace?''
An original, beautiful book, whether or not you care about alchemy (or the Tarot).
It 's a cheering and invigorating thought: we live in an alchemical palace....