The Chymical Wedding by Lindsay Clarke

I am just left completely confused by this book. I was going to abandon it like twenty times, but I kept reading because it's very beautifully written. As to what is going on, I'm left with no idea. It's all about alchemy and finding the balance between two seemingly irreconcilable things. A lot of it is about finding the balance between the male and the female, which I think is just a bunch of rubbish, especially now that these categories are being destroyed anyways. It takes place in the late 1980s and in the 1840s (two parallel stories), and the writing is excellent, and the characters really enjoyable. I also quite liked the clever and often humorous dialogue. But when it gets into discussions of alchemy and/or scholarly debates, I just wasn't with it, I would get bored and my attention would drift. There's also a bunch of thought-reading and spiritual communication going on, which felt really fake and New Age-y to me. I would up really divided about this book, it seems to make no sense to me (I mean, there is the definite possibility that I'm too stupid for it), but I enjoyed the experience of reading it.