Alembic is an unsettling novel about madness and alchemy, epistemology and rock and roll, magic and perversion. Thomas Graves, a young antiquarian, works for ALEMBIC, a British government office investigating the contemporary applications of the secrets of alchemy. The strange world of alchemy, however, is as eerie as the rock and roll world of Thomas's friend Nicholas Spark, leader of a Led Zeppelin-like band called Celestial Praylin. Moving between these worlds, colorfully conveyed in d'Arch Smith's sonorous prose - at times elegant, at times comic - Thomas Graves feels his grip on reality constantly imperilled; his attraction to the fourteen-year-old daughter of one of his colleagues complicates his existence further. A dramatic turn of events brings all of his fears and fancies out in the open, suggesting finally that the world is as mad as Thomas thought himself to be.
Alembic is itself an alembic, a vessel that allows things to disintegrate and be transformed into new, refined substances. Set largely in the early 1980s, Alembic ends in the early years of the twenty-first century as alchemy engineers a new world order of darkness and perfection, destruction and eternal life, concluding a novel of great originality and ill-boding.
Industry Reviews
Recondite fiction by a London antiquarian and bibliophile who seems to have figured Pynchon's voice without grasping his depth. Thomas Graves, the antiquarian narrator, is not nearly as epicene as his prose: fresh from a stint in the army, he spends moat of his time backstage with rock groups or in pursuit of underage girls. During the day he deciphers ancient texts of alchemy for ALEMBIC, a secret committee established by the British Crown for murky and probably nefarious purposes. One might say that Graves approaches his task with an unhealthy dose of cynicism, since (as a result of his army hitch) he has little faith in either the beneficence of Her Majesty's Government or the decency of the British Establishment. He is simply happy to find himself employed for good wages at an amusing job, and doesn't really piece together the bizarre ramifications of his project until close to the end - which is quite strange in light of his tendency to ruminate at great length on practically every other subject that crosses his mind. Meanwhile, d'Arch Smith buries every incident or perception under so great a sea of verbiage that the novel ultimately seems little more than a loosely connected string of digressions. One typical sentence describes the audience of a rock concert: "As a gloomy accompaniment to the music, muffled echoes, screams, one assumed, of pleasure or terror, issued at intervals from the gang's inky black recesses, upon the surface of which occasionally broke a head or a stockinged foot betraying as feminine the otherwise unidentifiable mass of partially clad flesh that seethed in more or less regular undulations as though, at a cannibals' feast, the girls, undissected, were being cooked up alive." Even the esoterica - the only thing that might have carried the reader along - gets washed away in this tide. (Kirkus Reviews)
