Aleister Crowley once planned an epic poem in which he proposed to "celebrate everything in the world in detail" Mark Helprin's lengthy [Refiner's Fire] reveals something of the same aspiration….

[The] story takes on some of the lineaments of a bildungsroman and slips awkwardly from genre to genre as the hero moves from continent to continent and woman to woman. Mr Helprin takes this all very seriously. He has given his tale the classic ingredients of romance: a mysterious birth, a long-lost childhood sweetheart, military heroism and intimations of higher things. Marshall has a thing about light. He's very sensitive to it. So was his mother, whom we first see in the throes of a vision in an abandoned cathedral. The image of this God-struck Jewish woman is rather impressive, though he uses it to usher in a peculiarly uncomfortable metaphor ("she lay in painful intercourse with the...