The Chymical Wedding

About this book

It is the early 1980s. Alex Darken devastated by a broken marriage has retreated to a remote village in the bleak flatlands of eastern England. On the Easterness Estate he meets the volatile aging poet Edward Nesbit and his vibrant psychic young American lover Laura. Slowly he is drawn into a strange relationship with them as they piece together the lost studies of two of the present lords ancestors. In 1849 Sir Henry Agnew and his elegant brilliant daughter Louisa were about to penetrate the last secrets of the mystical art of alchemy. They like the researches a century and a half later see in the "chemical wedding" of opposites -- sulphur and quicksilver spirit and matter male and female reality and imagination -- a key to spiritual rebirth. As Edward Laura and Alex mirror the Agnew story dreams and symbols erotic ecstasy and philosophical argument climax in a vision which like those before them they can grasp only as they skirt insanity and tragedy . . . . "Engrossing . . . By the time we start wanting to resist it is too late. The book already has drawn us too deeply into its six intriguing main characters and its rich gothic folds of plot." -- Chicago Tribune