The Solitudes

by John Crowley

The novel begins, like Goethe's Faust, with a "Prologue in Heaven", depicting John Dee and his scryer Edward Kelley–who Dee as yet only knows as Edward Talbot–watching Angels in a crystal. Suddenly, to their dread, the angels scatter and a child appears in the glass, "holding a space" Doctor Dee knows to be absolutely immense, into which both feel their souls being drawn. During a "Prologue on Earth" immediately following, a young Pierce Moffett, preparing to serve as an altar boy reads a novel about Giordano Bruno (later revealed to be by Fellowes Kraft), the sixteenth century Dominican Friar, and finds himself sharply identifying with the narrator.

The novel proper begins under the sign of Vita, with Pierce now in middle age, taking a bus to apply for a job at Peter Ramus College. Along the way he is reading a new translation of Las Soledades of Luis de Góngora. The bus stops in the Faraway Hills, where Pierce meets Spofford, a previous student of his. Impulsively, Pierce decides to forget the interview and leave with Spofford for the town of Blackberry Jambs nearby.

While there, Pierce comes to conceive of a novel combining his vast knowledge of history along with speculations about Hermetic philosophy, his interest in Giordano Bruno, as well as local author's Fellowes Kraft's unfinished series of novels involving Bruno and John Dee. In the meantime, he is drawn closer to Rosie Mucho. At the same time Rosie moves the painful first steps of divorcing her husband Mike. Interspersed throughout the novel are scenes from Kraft's novels, involving John Dee's first experiments with the occult, and his first meetings with other figures including William Shakespeare and Edward Kelley, as well as a second novel, featuring Giordano Bruno's education, rise to fame, and ultimately to his wandering years under the threat of death from the Church.