Never afraid to be the odd one out, but I for one appreciate Kaczynski's attention to detail even though others seem to hate it or find it a bore. But why? Well consider this. How many times can the same abreviated outline character sketch be published? How many times can the same Crowley story be told? You can present the known material in different ways and with a different bias, but there's only so many times you can sell old rope for new money. The horizons of Crowley's life were big, but at some point you have to delve into the minutiae if you want to add to what has already been said by others. A good example is the new biography by Churton. It was a very "entertaining" read, but there was very little in it that I didn't already know. Unless someone is sitting on a cache of extra information that we've never seen before, I don't see how anything new can be added to the story unless it be greater detail and focus on existing material.
But that's the point I think; There is presumably new material about Crowley in Perdurabo but there's infinitely
more new material about those who came into his orbit invariably briefly. Of course all knowledge is useful knowledge (I guess) but the most important thing for me in a biography - and which is a feature of all great biographies from Boswell's Dr Johnson onwards - is that you truly get a sense of the person from them, a sense of the presence and the mind. I do not get this from Perdurabo. I do not get a sense of Crowley the man at all. Maybe I am an inept reader but throughout my life (and as a huge fan of the genre of biography) many biographies have made a huge impression on me, and many of them have been of Crowley's contemporaries; Pound, Woolf, Ottoline Morrell, Strachey, Eliot, but this one feels curiously dead. I so want to get a sense of Crowley the man, and knowing about Loveday's battalion or somebody's banker husband (and similar stuff in excess) doesn't help me. The figure of Crowley does not feel
central to the book. And - yes - that's an odd thing to say but it's true. Can't put my finger on it but AC doesn't feel like the
core here.
I admit that of course all this extra stuff is *useful* simply because I don't want to appear as someone who rejects all learning but it's an exhausting read which I press on with dutifully.
(I am surprised how all Crowley biographies seem to give relatively short shrift to the Thoth deck. I always think it should be a large proportion of his later life but then I'm biased and think it should be at least a quarter of the book!
)
ETA; up to page 387!