In a series of dazzling sometimes bewildering explorations he traces back for example the experience of predictive dreaming to

In a series of dazzling, sometimes bewildering explorations, he traces back, for example, the experience of predictive dreaming to the “Answering Angel” of the Kabbalah, to Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition, Sufism and the Vedas, and on the way delivers a terrific cannonade against Freud, that arch-usurper of the dream’s residing power. When he turns to the modern, or even modish, epidemic of “near-death experience” he argues that the figure of light reported by so many people emerging from an operating theatre is the present heir of the “occult self” of shamanism, the “Man of Light” envisioned by the Sufis, the Hermetic “astral body”, the “resurrection body” of Origen, and so on.The most surprising strand of the book’s argument is the assertion that, for the last 200 years, American religion, even within the mainstream, has been gnostic in the sense that its belief is based not on faith but on “gnosis” (“knowing”), a private, individualised, elitist, intellectual process in which the self and a hidden, infinitely distant God acknowledge each other. There is also the provisional irony that America does not realise this It is gnostic without knowing that it knows. The new information technology, far from being opposed to this ancient spirituality, has cross- pollinated with it. Angels, microchips, and the individual American’s right to untrammelled liberty now form a powerful new matrix.To this strangely unaware congregation, Bloom, in the final and most peculiar part of the book, addresses what he candidly admits is a “gnostic sermon”. Piece by piece he constructs the essential gnosis for our age. To reduce his argument to its simplest form, as far as I understand it, he states that all the manifestations of the New Age – beings of light, alien spacemen, prophetic dreamers and so on – tended towards one image, in effect an immense, immortal figure, Anthropos, the true self within us, as opposed to the “soul” or psyche which has been foisted on us later.

This immense being is androgynous, was never born, is not to die, is co- eternal with God, never suffered the Fall and has no reason to worship the dark demiurge, the false Yahweh, foisted on us by a priestly class and surrounded by angels who almost all, it now turns out, are not our ministers but our prison warders.There is a magnificent scope to this conception – the spirit of man immortal, free at last, worthy of America Oddly enough, on closer examination, it doesn’t make sense It is not quite steady, even on its own terms. Bloom explicitly rejects the Creation-Fall of Genesis as a priestly lie, yet states we are living in anguish, in a world of cosmological emptiness and meaningless reproduction, a nightmare of death-in-life. How did we get there? In a clipped aside, he tells us we were thrown there by the psyche, or soul, the “shallow companion to the deeper self”. Yet he has already identified the psyche, correctly I think, as an “afterthought”. Where did it get its power to dominate us? There is no explanation. And suddenly the immense edifice of the gnostic self, androgynous, equal to God, begins to look shapeless and to rustle with emptiness, like the polythene wrapping round, say, Nelson’s Column.It is strange that Bloom, a Shakespeare scholar for 40 years, should reject the drama of the Fall and the Atonement in favour of a static giant to whom nothing – except inexplicable nightmares – has ever happened. Hubris is the failing of those who do not understand they are in a drama, where things will out: when the Hale-Boppers (several of whom had already been surgically castrated) spooned poison and apple sauce into themselves in their plan to join the Higher Level, their fault was hubristic – not too little devotion to the gnostic self which Bloom espouses, but too much.In the light of his final sermon, much of Bloom’s earlier argument becomes suspect.

Should he have glided so easily over the distinction between gnosis and the mysticism of the mainstream tradition? Is gnosis really to be compared only with faith, and not with a mixture of knowledge, wisdom, faith and love? Finally, are the angels, who have flocked through the art and letters of East and West for at least 2,000 years, really just the wardens of a vast prison house?Jacob wrestled with an angel and emerged with a limp and a brilliant, ambiguous new name. This author has attempted to wrestle with all the angels and to give them a new name, but they have declined the engagement. Bloom remains Professor Bloom, and the sweet, sophisticated smiles on, for example, the West Front of Rheims Cathedral remain in the air, out of reach above him.. IF ANNE MICHAELS were not already an accomplished poet who has scooped prizes in her native Canada, it would be all the more extraordinary that this powerful novel of history, loss, love and exile should be her first. Though its double structure is a tricky one – there are in effect two heroes, two life stories – and there are boggy bits that seem long, it is a book that demands to be read slowly, more like a vast poem than a prose narrative, for its passages of unshowy but virtuosic description and its oblique, piercing perceptions which cannot be taken at speed. Jakob Beer is the only one tiny enough to hide in the gap of the wall when the Nazi soldiers come for his family. The stuff of his nightmares, for decades, is that when he finally emerges he cannot get to the bodies of his parents “without stepping on their blood”, and that his sister, Bella, is nowhere to be seen.

The search for Bella overtakes one half of the “double reality” which Jakob later inhabits; years later, after he has married the boisterous Alex, “Every moment is two moments Alex’s hairbrush propped on the sink: Bella’s brush. Alex’s bobby pins: Bella’s hairclips turning up in strange places, as bookmarks, or holding music open on the piano …”
Only seven, Jakob wanders and starves in the devastated Polish city until he is rescued by an older man, a Greek geologist. Athos carries the boy, huddled inside his greatcoat, on the first of many journeys, across wartime Europe to the small Greek island of his home. Here, as whole Jewish populations are wiped from the islands, the two take tenuous refuge, and Jakob makes up for his confinement in the house with a growing passion for the rocks, fossils, plants, bones, maps and verses to be found in Athos’s library.There’s a second shift, across the sea to Canada, where Jakob has to learn yet another language, yet another set of cultural rules. The novel is clever, both deeply and more skittishly, about language (as it is about music). When Jakob meets Alex, words are games by which she is obsessed: puns and palindromes, rhyming slang and anagrams form the basis of her relation to the world. Despite this worked-at familiarity with the English language, the doubly dislocated Jakob feels he is “a breath apart, a touch-typist who holds his hands above the keys slightly in the wrong place” – but he also discovers that words with no associations, “an alphabet without memory”, can seal off some of the pain when he begins to write about the events of his childhood.The novel’s second part brings Ben, whose twin obsessions are the weather and biography, into the life of the much older Jakob, now married again to Michaela.