This complex, ambitious novel, which centers on the life of the Elizabethan magus John Dee, intertwines past and present, dreams and visions, myth and reality into a world of the occult, culminating in the transmutation of physical reality into a higher spiritual existence. John Dee, through his twentieth-century descendant, is led by the Green Angel to the "Other Side of the Mirror." From the erotically alluring Assja (in all her incarnations), the pliant Jane, and the mischievous Queen Elizabeth I, to the earless charlatan Kelley, the grotesque Bartlett Greene, and the sinister Emperor Rudolph II, John Dee heads a cast of characters that linger in the mind long after the novel has been concluded.