It's Aegypt week at Strange Horizons, in honor of the publication of the final segment in John Crowley's monumental, 20 years in the making, series. My review of the first book, The Solitudes, appears today, and be sure to check in over the next three days to read Graham Sleight, Paul Kincaid and John Clute's takes on the rest of the series.
You can find some my other Crowley-related writing here, including reviews of his last novel, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, and of the short story collection Novelties & Souvenirs.
Showing posts with label john crowley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label john crowley. Show all posts
Monday, July 02, 2007
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land by John Crowley
In the acknowledgments page for Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, John Crowley refers to his ninth novel as an impertinence. He's referring, one assumes, to 
his own audacity in putting words--an entire novel's worth of them--in the mouth of the romantic poet Lord Byron, most famous for, well, being infamous--mad, bad, and dangerous to know (in her review of Crowley's novel, Elizabeth Hand cleverly points out that more people are familiar with this piece of wittiness--by Byron's former lover Caroline Lamb--than are acquainted with a line of his poetry). But the word, its with airy, frivolous connotations, seems also to capture the novel's tone--an atypical one, in Crowley's bibliography. His novels usually have a palpable heft--even his early forays into science fiction, svelte volumes clocking in at barely 200 pages, made for meaty, substantial reads. Lord Byron's Novel, in contrast, is positively lightweight.
The titular novel--composed, according to Crowley's alternate history, between 1816 and 1822, when a bitter divorce (occasioned at least in part by Byron's scandalous behavior, which included homosexual affairs and another with his half-sister) drove Byron into a self-imposed European exile from which he was never to return--takes up the bulk of Crowley's novel. It is as pitch-perfect a pastiche of a 19th century gothic romance as one could hope to encounter, complete with moonlit castles, evil fathers, secret siblings, unjust convictions, thwarted romances, zombies, and talking bears. Or would 'parody' be a more accurate description? My mother, when she talks about the Beatles' early films, likes to say that however silly and inconsequential the Fab Four's cinematic forays might have been, you could always tell that they'd had a great deal of fun making them. A similar sense of fun suffuses Crowley's (whose infatuation with Byron apparently goes back several decades) Byronic ventriloquism--we can tell that he had a blast inhabiting the poet's head and writing in his voice. Less obvious is whether we, in turn, are also intended to enjoy ourselves--to laugh with, or even at, the narrative's excesses. Are we meant to take The Evening Land at face value, as a straight-faced pastiche? If so, how are we to keep a straight face when confronted with the likes of this:
In interviews, Crowley has said that the genesis of the modern characters was in the need for someone to educate the readers about the facts of Byron's life, and the characters rarely seem to rise above their roles as providers of info-dumps. There's allegedly a great deal of tension between Smith and Lee--this is their first contact with each other since Lee fled from prosecution when Smith was only four years old (think Roman Polanski, although given the similarities between Lee's career track--literature professor turned documentary filmmaker--and Crowley's, I wonder whether Lee might not also be the closest the novel comes to offering us Crowley's unadulterated voice). Their interactions on the page, however, are largely benign--they are pleasant and courteous with each other, tentatively reaching out to one another and then... meeting. The middle act of their story seems to be missing--possibly it took place when Smith was a child, or perhaps there's too much missing from the relationship for it ever to come into existence (in one of the rare instances of biting emotion in the correspondence, Smith tells Lee that there were moments in her childhood in which she felt the need for his presence, and later admits that she lied--a childhood without a father seemed normal to her, and in her adulthood she makes up a story for Lee because she feels that she ought to have missed his presence, but didn't).
The flatness of Smith and Lee's interactions is especially problematic because their circumstances are intended to mirror those of Byron and Ada--whose voice makes up the intermediate narrative level in Lord Byron's Novel. Byron last saw his daughter when she was only one month old, and in the years of his exile his attempts to contact her were rebuffed by his wife (who in Crowley's history--and apparently in real life as well--is painted as a domineering, holier-than-thou ghoul). It was to protect her father's novel from her mother (who in real life consigned the poet's memoirs to the fire), Crowley tells us, that Ada, dying of cervical cancer, encrypted the work, adding her own notes to each chapter. As pain and disease begin to take their toll on her, Ada's notes turn into ruminations about her life, her mathematical work, and her relationship with an absent, by then long-dead, father. In his review of Lord Byron's Novel, John Clute calls Ada's voice Kinbote-like, and although he is clearly correct to point out Crowley's debt to Nabokov, it strikes me that there is a significant difference between Ada and Pale Fire's pathetic, deluded annotator. Unlike Kinbote, who reads his own life into a poem wholly unrelated to him, Ada is clearly The Evening Land's intended audience--in many ways, its recipient. The Evening Land is a thinly veiled roman a clef whose protagonist, Ali, is an idealized version of Byron himself. His life story is intended to exculpate Byron from those charges he considers unjust, to apologize for the mistakes he did make, and finally, to offer himself and his daughter a wish-fulfillment fantasy, in which some version of Byron absconds with Ada's fictional counterpart, and the two take off to parts unknown. Ada's affectionate but clear-eyed response to this fantasy marks her out as the novel's most compelling and fully human character, and it is a great pity that we end up spending the least amount of time hearing her voice.
A few months ago, when I wrote about Julian Barnes's novel Arthur & George, I pointed out that Barnes was borrowing emotion from history--repeating the facts of a historical injustice, almost without comment, and expecting his audience to react with appropriate outrage. It's probably not entirely fair to accuse Crowley of doing something similar in Lord Byron's Novel, but it certainly seems to me that his primary motivation in writing the novel was to tell Byron and Ada's story, and to have a great deal of fun playing around with Byron's voice. Apart from the fantasy that makes up the novel's premise, there seems to be very little of John Crowley in the novel--by which I don't mean that I miss the author's voice, but rather the sense that he has something to add to a historical story that he clearly finds entirely fascinating. There's a fourth narrative level to Lord Byron's Novel that I haven't mentioned yet. The person who brings The Evening Land to Smith's attention (and who may also be the person who sells the manuscript to Ada in the mid 19th century) is called Roony J. Welch--an anagram of John Crowley. To be honest, I find this conceit unbearably twee and I'd prefer to simply ignore it, but it does raise some interesting questions about the novel's insularity. As I said earlier in this review, there's a very definite sense that Crowley had a great time writing in Byron's voice and writing about Byron, and this grinning self-insertion is perhaps intended to draw attention to his unabashed fascination with the poet and his life, to point out that we've been invited to John Crowley's playground. But doesn't it also suggest that, just as Lord Byron's novel was intended for a single reader, so was John Crowley's novel? To a certain extent, all authors should write the novel they'd love to read, but in Lord Byron's Novel it seems to me that Crowley may have taken this approach too far--that he may have turned himself into just another reader, which leaves the rest of us in a rudderless boat, listening to nothing more than a historical reenactment.
All this is not to say that Lord Byron's Novel makes for an unpleasant reading experience. It is, in fact, a smooth and elegant read which goes down like a glass of water, and is by no means unenjoyable. Whether we're meant to take it seriously or not, The Evening Land is a thoroughly entertaining romp, and for all their unrelenting niceness, Smith, Thea and Lee's emails are appealing. It just seems to me that for all the work that obviously went into it, for all the playful games with authorial voice, narrative levels and cryptography, there ought to have been a bit more substance to the novel--especially coming, as it does, from the pen of one of the most interesting and intelligent authors in the English language.
his own audacity in putting words--an entire novel's worth of them--in the mouth of the romantic poet Lord Byron, most famous for, well, being infamous--mad, bad, and dangerous to know (in her review of Crowley's novel, Elizabeth Hand cleverly points out that more people are familiar with this piece of wittiness--by Byron's former lover Caroline Lamb--than are acquainted with a line of his poetry). But the word, its with airy, frivolous connotations, seems also to capture the novel's tone--an atypical one, in Crowley's bibliography. His novels usually have a palpable heft--even his early forays into science fiction, svelte volumes clocking in at barely 200 pages, made for meaty, substantial reads. Lord Byron's Novel, in contrast, is positively lightweight.The titular novel--composed, according to Crowley's alternate history, between 1816 and 1822, when a bitter divorce (occasioned at least in part by Byron's scandalous behavior, which included homosexual affairs and another with his half-sister) drove Byron into a self-imposed European exile from which he was never to return--takes up the bulk of Crowley's novel. It is as pitch-perfect a pastiche of a 19th century gothic romance as one could hope to encounter, complete with moonlit castles, evil fathers, secret siblings, unjust convictions, thwarted romances, zombies, and talking bears. Or would 'parody' be a more accurate description? My mother, when she talks about the Beatles' early films, likes to say that however silly and inconsequential the Fab Four's cinematic forays might have been, you could always tell that they'd had a great deal of fun making them. A similar sense of fun suffuses Crowley's (whose infatuation with Byron apparently goes back several decades) Byronic ventriloquism--we can tell that he had a blast inhabiting the poet's head and writing in his voice. Less obvious is whether we, in turn, are also intended to enjoy ourselves--to laugh with, or even at, the narrative's excesses. Are we meant to take The Evening Land at face value, as a straight-faced pastiche? If so, how are we to keep a straight face when confronted with the likes of this:
'Have done!' cried Ali, thrusting him away. 'Have done, or I will--'In 2002, The Evening Land is discovered by Alexandra "Smith" Novak, an American historian researching the life of Ada Lovelace, Byron's only legitimate child, who achieved some small fame as a colleague of Charles Babbage and who is recognized today as the author of the world's first computer program. What Smith actually discovers, in a chest belonging to Ada's son, is the manuscript in encrypted form, and she enlists the aid of her mathematician girlfriend, Thea, in breaking the code, and of her father, Lee, a former Byron scholar, in authenticating the text and parsing it back into recognizable language. Crowley reproduces Smith, Thea and Lee's e-mails, which, in sharp contrast to the stylistic excesses of The Evening Land, are written in a perfunctory, utilitarian language (there's a spectrum of language skills here--Lee comes closest to writing good letters. Smith is at about high school level and uses 'like' a great deal too much. Thea refuses to use punctuation). The two styles complement each other nicely--just as we start to grow weary of the flowery, overwrought Byron segments, along come the modern characters with their spare directness, and just as we begin to long for some semblance of poetry, Crowley sends us back to Byron and his undeniable rhythms and cadences--but emotionally they leave us perpetually unsatisfied. If Byron's over-the-top melodrama elicits amusement more often than sympathy, then the modern segments don't seem to elicit any emotion at all.
'What shall you do? What shall you do? Have a care, Sir! Remember--all in a moment, and in defiance of consequence, I gave thee life--all in a moment I can take it away again. "The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away."'
'Devil!'
'Ah!' said Lord Sane. 'You know that exalted Being is said to have a knack for quoting Scripture to his own purposes. Here is another--"If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out"--therefore challenge me not, Sir, not though you be the apple of mine own!'
'I warn you, provoke me not further,' Ali said, lifting his balled fist before the great Lord's face, 'or indeed I know no what I may do. I have borne more than flesh can bear, and I am no more than flesh!'
'Raise not your hand against me,' said his father. ''Twould be a sin of dreadful note--moreover, 'twould be useless--for weapons can do nothing against me--no--I see you shudder to hear it, yet 'tis true--hanging would also be inefficacious--for, you see, I cannot die!'
In interviews, Crowley has said that the genesis of the modern characters was in the need for someone to educate the readers about the facts of Byron's life, and the characters rarely seem to rise above their roles as providers of info-dumps. There's allegedly a great deal of tension between Smith and Lee--this is their first contact with each other since Lee fled from prosecution when Smith was only four years old (think Roman Polanski, although given the similarities between Lee's career track--literature professor turned documentary filmmaker--and Crowley's, I wonder whether Lee might not also be the closest the novel comes to offering us Crowley's unadulterated voice). Their interactions on the page, however, are largely benign--they are pleasant and courteous with each other, tentatively reaching out to one another and then... meeting. The middle act of their story seems to be missing--possibly it took place when Smith was a child, or perhaps there's too much missing from the relationship for it ever to come into existence (in one of the rare instances of biting emotion in the correspondence, Smith tells Lee that there were moments in her childhood in which she felt the need for his presence, and later admits that she lied--a childhood without a father seemed normal to her, and in her adulthood she makes up a story for Lee because she feels that she ought to have missed his presence, but didn't).
The flatness of Smith and Lee's interactions is especially problematic because their circumstances are intended to mirror those of Byron and Ada--whose voice makes up the intermediate narrative level in Lord Byron's Novel. Byron last saw his daughter when she was only one month old, and in the years of his exile his attempts to contact her were rebuffed by his wife (who in Crowley's history--and apparently in real life as well--is painted as a domineering, holier-than-thou ghoul). It was to protect her father's novel from her mother (who in real life consigned the poet's memoirs to the fire), Crowley tells us, that Ada, dying of cervical cancer, encrypted the work, adding her own notes to each chapter. As pain and disease begin to take their toll on her, Ada's notes turn into ruminations about her life, her mathematical work, and her relationship with an absent, by then long-dead, father. In his review of Lord Byron's Novel, John Clute calls Ada's voice Kinbote-like, and although he is clearly correct to point out Crowley's debt to Nabokov, it strikes me that there is a significant difference between Ada and Pale Fire's pathetic, deluded annotator. Unlike Kinbote, who reads his own life into a poem wholly unrelated to him, Ada is clearly The Evening Land's intended audience--in many ways, its recipient. The Evening Land is a thinly veiled roman a clef whose protagonist, Ali, is an idealized version of Byron himself. His life story is intended to exculpate Byron from those charges he considers unjust, to apologize for the mistakes he did make, and finally, to offer himself and his daughter a wish-fulfillment fantasy, in which some version of Byron absconds with Ada's fictional counterpart, and the two take off to parts unknown. Ada's affectionate but clear-eyed response to this fantasy marks her out as the novel's most compelling and fully human character, and it is a great pity that we end up spending the least amount of time hearing her voice.
A few months ago, when I wrote about Julian Barnes's novel Arthur & George, I pointed out that Barnes was borrowing emotion from history--repeating the facts of a historical injustice, almost without comment, and expecting his audience to react with appropriate outrage. It's probably not entirely fair to accuse Crowley of doing something similar in Lord Byron's Novel, but it certainly seems to me that his primary motivation in writing the novel was to tell Byron and Ada's story, and to have a great deal of fun playing around with Byron's voice. Apart from the fantasy that makes up the novel's premise, there seems to be very little of John Crowley in the novel--by which I don't mean that I miss the author's voice, but rather the sense that he has something to add to a historical story that he clearly finds entirely fascinating. There's a fourth narrative level to Lord Byron's Novel that I haven't mentioned yet. The person who brings The Evening Land to Smith's attention (and who may also be the person who sells the manuscript to Ada in the mid 19th century) is called Roony J. Welch--an anagram of John Crowley. To be honest, I find this conceit unbearably twee and I'd prefer to simply ignore it, but it does raise some interesting questions about the novel's insularity. As I said earlier in this review, there's a very definite sense that Crowley had a great time writing in Byron's voice and writing about Byron, and this grinning self-insertion is perhaps intended to draw attention to his unabashed fascination with the poet and his life, to point out that we've been invited to John Crowley's playground. But doesn't it also suggest that, just as Lord Byron's novel was intended for a single reader, so was John Crowley's novel? To a certain extent, all authors should write the novel they'd love to read, but in Lord Byron's Novel it seems to me that Crowley may have taken this approach too far--that he may have turned himself into just another reader, which leaves the rest of us in a rudderless boat, listening to nothing more than a historical reenactment.
All this is not to say that Lord Byron's Novel makes for an unpleasant reading experience. It is, in fact, a smooth and elegant read which goes down like a glass of water, and is by no means unenjoyable. Whether we're meant to take it seriously or not, The Evening Land is a thoroughly entertaining romp, and for all their unrelenting niceness, Smith, Thea and Lee's emails are appealing. It just seems to me that for all the work that obviously went into it, for all the playful games with authorial voice, narrative levels and cryptography, there ought to have been a bit more substance to the novel--especially coming, as it does, from the pen of one of the most interesting and intelligent authors in the English language.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Oh Goody, Time to Start Reading the Aegypt Books
Nick Antosca has a great interview with John Crowley, AKA the author you should all be reading (start with Little, Big). As one might expect from Crowley's Readerville visits and his posts on his new livejournal, all that's really required to get beautiful and evocative thoughts about his career in particular and life in general out of Crowley is giving him a platform from which to speak--I couldn't pick a pull-quote if I wanted to. He does, however, have good news about the fourth and final Aegypt novel:
I'm not able to make the official announcement yet – the publisher wants to prepare his/her own press release announcing this momentous thing – but the book is, three years after its completion, at last going to be published, late next spring, from a surprising source. More on my Internet Journal [see below] when this is closer to actuality.(Via Bookslut)
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
And, to Cap Off an Already Excellent Day...
...John Crowley has joined livejournal. He'd like some friends--why don't you go become one?
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Attention Hebrew Readers: You Now Have No Excuse
Spotted at the Dizzengoff 101 Steimatzki's: Odyssey Publication's Hebrew translation of Little, Big, with, admittedly, a front cover so ugly that it even makes my Fantasy Masterworks edition look good by comparison. But it's the inside that counts, and a brief examination yielded no translation malfunctions.
So, if you're Israeli and prefer reading fiction in Hebrew, or if you have friends who read exclusively in Hebrew, get thee (and them) to a bookstore and spread the word. This is one of the finest, loveliest, most haunting novels I've ever read, especially if you're interested in unconventional fantasy.
Oh, and ISFFA members: this year's Geffen award is taken. I just wanted to be clear on that point.
So, if you're Israeli and prefer reading fiction in Hebrew, or if you have friends who read exclusively in Hebrew, get thee (and them) to a bookstore and spread the word. This is one of the finest, loveliest, most haunting novels I've ever read, especially if you're interested in unconventional fantasy.
Oh, and ISFFA members: this year's Geffen award is taken. I just wanted to be clear on that point.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Novelties and Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction by John Crowley
John Crowley has had one of those hellacious careers that no writer, much less one as furiously talented as Crowley is, deserves. In the late 70s, Crowely wrote odd, lyrical science fiction that defied the genre's best attempts at categorization. In the early 80s, he switched to fantasy, but again so far out of the mainstream that even within the genre he was barely successful. His books went out of print, and it is only in the last few years, with Crowley having made a second genre switch to literary fiction and taken The Translator to the New York Times Bestseller List, that they've been reissued. Novelties and Souvenirs collects Crowley's short fiction--15 stories published over a period of 15 years (missing from the collection is the much-lauded "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines", which first appeared in the Peter Straub-edited anthology Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists, and is now available as a chapbook).
It's possible to roughly divide Novelties and Souvenirs into thirds. The first, which contains Crowley's earliest short fiction, rather obviously follows the writer as he tests his skill with words (and passes with flying colors). As exercises in style, the pieces collected here are as stunning as anything Crowley has written, but none of them amount to an actual story. In "The Reason for the Visit", the narrator describes an afternoon spent with the ghost of Virginia Woolf, who has appeared in his apartment for no discernible reason.
Novelties and Souvenirs starts coming alive with "Novelty", originally published in Interzone magazine in 1983. Its narrator, a middle aged author of moderately successful populist fare and decidedly unsuccessful literary fiction, is sitting in a bar when the theme of his next novel pops into his head--"the contrary pull men feel between Novelty and Security. Between boredom and adventure, between safety and dislocation, between the snug and the wild." Before long, the author himself is embodying this dilemma as he struggles with the possibility of actually putting pen to paper.
Crowley goes back to the origin of the question of novelty with "The Nightingale Sings at Night", a retelling of the myth of the fall of Adam and Eve. In Crowley's version of this myth, the original sin doesn't lie in the discovery of carnal knowledge but in the discovery of the possibility of death. Man and Woman live an eternal existence in Dame Kind's forest, until the moon introduces them to the concept of change. From change, the two begin to understand time, and time leads them to conclude the existence of death. Having thought of these concepts, Man and Woman bring them into being, and end their idyllic and timeless existence.
The novella "Great Work of Time" is the finest piece in Novelties and Souvenirs, and probably one of the best time travel stories ever written. It's a deliciously circular story, a clever reworking of that hoary cliché of time travel fiction, the grandfather paradox. In 1983, Caspar Last invents time travel, and promptly sells his invention to The Otherhood, a secret society established in 1893 by the will of the infamous imperialist Cecil Rhodes, with the purpose of acting to preserve the Empire and to keep peace in the world. The Otherhood's members set out to remake the 20th century, smoothing out its rough edges: all those terrible events that have transformed the world and carried away the Empire in their wake. With each successive change, they come closer to their ideal of a genteel, comfortable, changeless existence--a quieter world, but also one that is less advanced and perhaps, less egalitarian.
The Otherhood's members are that cliché of conspiracy theories--a group of middle aged men meeting in smoke-filled, wood-paneled rooms to decide the fate of the world--but the secret to "Great Work of Time"'s success is that Crowley paints them as sympathetic, intelligent, and well-meaning.
"In Blue", the final and least successful story in the quartet, takes place in the far future. In a world that is probably post-apocalyptic and possibly post-industrial, a new kind of people's revolution is taking place. Guided by 'act-field theory' and 'social calculus', this revolution seeks not to force society into new forms but to follow the nearly undetectable currents of existence in such a way as to minimize pain and suffering. In other words, instead of imperialist forcefulness, changing the world through decisive action, the guiding conspiracy takes an almost zen approach, moving with change instead of acting against it. The conspiracy itself, the 'cadre' who wear blue to distinguish themselves, see themselves as servants to the people, and may actually be capable of making good on this platitude.
"In Blue" fails firstly because its premise too benign to be believable and secondly because the story through which we glimpse this new shape of society--the life of a lonely Blue operative who begins to doubt himself--fails to spark interest. Nevertheless, it offers a thought-provoking conclusion to the arc begun in "Novelty", and a welcome balm after "Great Work of Time"'s tragic ending.
The remaining stories in Novelties and Souvenirs show us Crowley as he begins to approach mainstream notions of genre shorts. "Lost and Abandoned" is a curious retelling of the tale of Hansel and Grettel, with a distinctive Crowley twist ("My own son, at the point in the story when the two lost children understood that the new protector they had found intended them not good but mortal harm, had cried out It's their mother! Which seemed to me to be an act of literary criticism of the highest order"). In "Gone", the earth is visited by an alien vessel, whose inhabitants knock on doors and offer to mow the lawn or clean the windows. "Missolonghi 1824" is a peek into the life of Lord Byron, probably a precursor to Crowley's longer entanglement with the poet, his most recent novel, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land. Although none of them approach the heights of "Great Work of Time" or even the other Novelty stories, they remain a satisfying combination of beautiful writing, keen intelligence, and (finally) good plots.
Novelties and Souvenirs is probably not a good place to start reading Crowley (although some of the better stories in the collection might prove effective in tempting readers reluctant to give his super-sized masterpiece, Little, Big, a try), but it does offer a tantalizing peek into his mind and the themes that have informed his entire career. The question of novelty and security has permeated, in one form or another, all of Crowley's fiction, as does a fascination with all things English, and with the long-lost empire. The Crowley that emerges from this collection is a dreamer, but a realistic one. He knows how cruel and disappointing the world can be, and yet he can't help but believe that in the end, through hard work and careful thought and a great deal of love, we can bring it to a happy ending.
It's possible to roughly divide Novelties and Souvenirs into thirds. The first, which contains Crowley's earliest short fiction, rather obviously follows the writer as he tests his skill with words (and passes with flying colors). As exercises in style, the pieces collected here are as stunning as anything Crowley has written, but none of them amount to an actual story. In "The Reason for the Visit", the narrator describes an afternoon spent with the ghost of Virginia Woolf, who has appeared in his apartment for no discernible reason.
I explained about iced tea. I couldn't tell if the expression of fascinated surprise she wore was assumed, to fend off genuine shock, or was genuine shock. I saw her surprise when the little light went on in the refrigerator, and when I squeezed lemon juice into the tea from a plastic lemon. The plastic lemon she found enormously witty. For a moment I felt a profound and inappropriate pity for her. I made mayonnaise sandwiches with Pepperidge Farm bread. "What an extraordinary number of things you take out of jars and bottles," she said.We can see here Crowley's facility with mood and atmosphere, and his ability to capture tiny details that tell us everything about the characters. It seems right, somehow, that Virginia Woolf should be entertained by a plastic lemon. And yet there's no narrative to "The Reason for the Visit"--Woolf drinks her tea, talks to the narrator about modern existence, and leaves. Most of the early stories in Novelties and Souvenirs follow the same approach--vignettes and mood pieces rather than stories--and it is a testament to Crowley's skill as a writer that they are nevertheless compelling.
Novelties and Souvenirs starts coming alive with "Novelty", originally published in Interzone magazine in 1983. Its narrator, a middle aged author of moderately successful populist fare and decidedly unsuccessful literary fiction, is sitting in a bar when the theme of his next novel pops into his head--"the contrary pull men feel between Novelty and Security. Between boredom and adventure, between safety and dislocation, between the snug and the wild." Before long, the author himself is embodying this dilemma as he struggles with the possibility of actually putting pen to paper.
In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent--not especially--but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void.The question, in other words, is the question of change, without which no accomplishment would be possible, but which carries with it the possibility of failure and the certainty of death. In 1989, Crowley published "Novelty" in a collection of the same name, adding to it three other pieces. Between them, they form a panoramic exploration of the question of Novelty and Security. From the deep past to the stormy present to the far future, in various styles, genres, and voices, they examine it from every possible direction, and if the result isn't quite a novel in stories, it is certainly a thesis in stories.
Crowley goes back to the origin of the question of novelty with "The Nightingale Sings at Night", a retelling of the myth of the fall of Adam and Eve. In Crowley's version of this myth, the original sin doesn't lie in the discovery of carnal knowledge but in the discovery of the possibility of death. Man and Woman live an eternal existence in Dame Kind's forest, until the moon introduces them to the concept of change. From change, the two begin to understand time, and time leads them to conclude the existence of death. Having thought of these concepts, Man and Woman bring them into being, and end their idyllic and timeless existence.
The novella "Great Work of Time" is the finest piece in Novelties and Souvenirs, and probably one of the best time travel stories ever written. It's a deliciously circular story, a clever reworking of that hoary cliché of time travel fiction, the grandfather paradox. In 1983, Caspar Last invents time travel, and promptly sells his invention to The Otherhood, a secret society established in 1893 by the will of the infamous imperialist Cecil Rhodes, with the purpose of acting to preserve the Empire and to keep peace in the world. The Otherhood's members set out to remake the 20th century, smoothing out its rough edges: all those terrible events that have transformed the world and carried away the Empire in their wake. With each successive change, they come closer to their ideal of a genteel, comfortable, changeless existence--a quieter world, but also one that is less advanced and perhaps, less egalitarian.
The Otherhood's members are that cliché of conspiracy theories--a group of middle aged men meeting in smoke-filled, wood-paneled rooms to decide the fate of the world--but the secret to "Great Work of Time"'s success is that Crowley paints them as sympathetic, intelligent, and well-meaning.
At the First Battle of the Somme wave after wave of British soldiers were sent against German machine guns, to be mown down like grain. There were a quarter of a million casualties in that battle. And yet the generals went on ordering massed attacks against machine guns for the four long years of the war.With their knowledge of the 20th century's horrors to galvanize them, The Otherhood's members poke and prod the fabric of time, unraveling and re-knitting it to suit their purposes. But when one of their members travels into the 21st century, he discovers that he and fellows have made the classic error of the 19th century imperialist--they have assumed, in their pride, that they could see the ends of all their actions. They acted forcefully and with hubris, failing to recognize that time is a chaotic system, and that grand gestures will have unforeseeable consequences. In remaking the world, The Otherhood's members have contributed to its unmaking, and eventually to the cessation of all life and all change.
"But they knew," Denys could not help saying. "They did know. Machine guns had been used against massed native armies for years, all over the Empire. In Afghanistan. In the Sudan. Africa. They knew."
"Yes," Huntington said. "They knew. And yet, in the Original Situation, they paid no attention. They went blindly on and made their dreadful mistakes. Why? How could they be so stupid, those generals and statesmen who in the world you knew behaved so wisely and so well? For one reason only: they lacked the help and knowledge of a group of men and women who had seen all those mistakes made, who could act in secret on what they knew, and who had the ear and the confidence of one of the governments--not the least stupid of them, either, mind you. And with all our help it was still a close-run thing."
"In Blue", the final and least successful story in the quartet, takes place in the far future. In a world that is probably post-apocalyptic and possibly post-industrial, a new kind of people's revolution is taking place. Guided by 'act-field theory' and 'social calculus', this revolution seeks not to force society into new forms but to follow the nearly undetectable currents of existence in such a way as to minimize pain and suffering. In other words, instead of imperialist forcefulness, changing the world through decisive action, the guiding conspiracy takes an almost zen approach, moving with change instead of acting against it. The conspiracy itself, the 'cadre' who wear blue to distinguish themselves, see themselves as servants to the people, and may actually be capable of making good on this platitude.
"In Blue" fails firstly because its premise too benign to be believable and secondly because the story through which we glimpse this new shape of society--the life of a lonely Blue operative who begins to doubt himself--fails to spark interest. Nevertheless, it offers a thought-provoking conclusion to the arc begun in "Novelty", and a welcome balm after "Great Work of Time"'s tragic ending.
The remaining stories in Novelties and Souvenirs show us Crowley as he begins to approach mainstream notions of genre shorts. "Lost and Abandoned" is a curious retelling of the tale of Hansel and Grettel, with a distinctive Crowley twist ("My own son, at the point in the story when the two lost children understood that the new protector they had found intended them not good but mortal harm, had cried out It's their mother! Which seemed to me to be an act of literary criticism of the highest order"). In "Gone", the earth is visited by an alien vessel, whose inhabitants knock on doors and offer to mow the lawn or clean the windows. "Missolonghi 1824" is a peek into the life of Lord Byron, probably a precursor to Crowley's longer entanglement with the poet, his most recent novel, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land. Although none of them approach the heights of "Great Work of Time" or even the other Novelty stories, they remain a satisfying combination of beautiful writing, keen intelligence, and (finally) good plots.
Novelties and Souvenirs is probably not a good place to start reading Crowley (although some of the better stories in the collection might prove effective in tempting readers reluctant to give his super-sized masterpiece, Little, Big, a try), but it does offer a tantalizing peek into his mind and the themes that have informed his entire career. The question of novelty and security has permeated, in one form or another, all of Crowley's fiction, as does a fascination with all things English, and with the long-lost empire. The Crowley that emerges from this collection is a dreamer, but a realistic one. He knows how cruel and disappointing the world can be, and yet he can't help but believe that in the end, through hard work and careful thought and a great deal of love, we can bring it to a happy ending.
Monday, August 01, 2005
Bigger on the Inside
If you haven't read John Crowley's Little, Big, you've missed out on one of, if not the, finest and most heartbreaking works of fantasy in existence, a book as intimate as a marriage and as grand as a secret plot to change the world. Here's a taste:
Over at The Valve, John Holbo has been talking about Little, Big, and Crowley himself has shown up in the comments.
"When he received these communications, Santa drew the claws of his spectacles from behind his ears and pressed the sore place on the bridge of his nose with thumb and finger. What was it they expected him to do with these? A shotgun, a bear, snowshoes, some pretty things and some useful: well, all right. But for the rest of it . . . He just didn't know what people were thinking anymore. But it was growing late: if they, or anyone else, were disappointed in him tomorrow, it wouldn't be the first time. He took his furred hat from its peg and drew on his gloves. He went out, already unaccountably weary though his journey had not even begun, into the multicolored arctic waste beneath a decillions stars, whose near brilliance seemed to chime, even as the harness of his reindeer chimed when they raised their shaggy heads at this approach, and as the eternal snow chimed too when he trod it with his booted feet."
Over at The Valve, John Holbo has been talking about Little, Big, and Crowley himself has shown up in the comments.
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