Little, Big

JfromJersey

The ultimate adult fantasy

"Where do I begin in attempting to review this remarkable book? I'll apologize in advance for being long-winded but I have much to say about John Crowley's tour de force. It's place might be in the fantasy genre, but it's unlike any fantasy novel I've ever read. First off, it's for intelligent adults, not children, or anyone looking for pure escapism. It's also not a Tolkien type fantasy. The bulk of the plot doesn't take place in an imaginary kingdom, with stereotypical heroes and villains, and exalted but all too obvious themes. It's not allegorical as are the works of MacDonald and Lewis. The fantastic elements, fairies, elves, and such, aren't ubiquitous, but operate for the most part in clandestine fashion, behind the scenes. LITTLE, BIG can rightly be termed realistic fiction with unrealistic elements, and the fantastic elements are often presented with a Carrollian wit. Characters are introduced much the way Dickens would have. Even their names have a certain Dickensian flavor. Most of the major characters are painted with subtle, rather than broad brush strokes, in a way reminiscent of George Eliot. Despite a basic goodness and decency, major characters like Smokey and George Mouse do things that violate certain moral codes, but these transgressions aren't unduly focused on. We discover things about these people that surprise us, but shouldn't shock us. Human weakness in the form of a surrendering to carnal urges serves to counterpoint inherent nobility. The action starts in the middle part of the 20th century, with the very mundane Smokey Barnable, on his way to a place called Edgewood, to marry a girl named Daily Alice Drinkwater, and play his part in the Tale. The Tale is one of the major motifs in LITTLE, BIG, and it ends at the conclusion of the novel. This "Tale" encompassed by the greater fiction of the novel is one of the charming aspects of this book, sort of a myth grafted onto a slice of 20th century American history. What is the Tale? On the surface, it is something a mysterious old woman named Mrs. Underhill may have mentioned to Alice's great grandmother Violet Bramble. It was understood that the Tale involved the family of Violet and her architect husband John Drinkwater, and it wouldn't end for quite some time. LITTLE, BIG tells the story of 4 generations of this family in lavish, beautifully descriptive prose. Part of the plot also involves a distant cousin of the family named Ariel Hawksquill and a sinister individual named Russell Eigenblick. Both will have their own important parts to play in the Tale. A good portion of the story takes place in Edgewood, which is represented by a very unusual house, designed and built by Violet's husband John, and located somewhere in the Northeast countryside (upstate NY?). Edgewood was built not merely to serve as a residence (a quite disorienting one at that), but as a way station between this dimension and the dimension of Faerie. It exists on the "edge" of the 2 realities. Edgewood is actually one of the main characters in the novel, and it's purpose is made clearer at the end of the book. Parts of the story also take place in the Great City (NYC), where Smokey and Alice's son Auberon (named after a great uncle) goes to play his role in the Tale. Auberon's journey is one of self discovery, in which he finds love, then loses it and almost loses his sanity in the aftermath. Crowley is wonderful at drawing parallels between things. In one instance he mentions a time when the Woods were wild and fearsome. Now the Woods are peaceful, and the city is in actuality, the Wild Wood. Smokey journeys from the wild city to the peaceful woods to marry and unwittingly becomes part of something greater and more profound than his humdrum reality, while years later, his only son does the reverse to escape the meaninglessness of his own existence and unwittingly fulfill his own destiny. Beautiful symmetry abounds in this novel. A recurring theme involves the seasons. Each season has a symbolic significance in the novel, and key sections of the narrative have plot elements that reflect the season in which they occur. There are many subtle and clever devices Crowley employs to foreshadow events in the novel. A charming scene in a subway tunnel between Auberon and his lover Sylvie, anticipates future events. Near the end, even something as simple as Smokey reaching for a copy of Ovid's Metamorphosis has a portentous significance which in an offhanded way underscores the Tale's mythic nature. LITTLE, BIG consists of 6 books, divided by 26 chapters headed by epigrams from famous philosophers and literary figures like Cicero, Samuel Johnson, and Virginia Woolf; further subdivided into sections with titles crystallizing thoughts presented in each section. This process of subdivision, rather than confusing the reader, allows one to draw a breath and absorb what is presented without getting mentally exhausted. It's necessary, because Crowley's writing often flaunts his erudition. He'll embellish passages with words that send you scrambling for the dictionary. This may not be a style of writing that pleases everyone, but for this novel I think it's effective. The story held my interest from the beginning, further piqued my curiosity as it progressed, and built anticipation to a crescendo which culminated in a tearful, yet truly sublime ending. Crowley does more than just tell a wonderful story. A fascinating sidelight is the presentation of certain philosophical elements.. historically controversial visions of reality which have seldom been presented in such a beautiful and imaginative way. There are elements of Gnosticism in the Tale; an attempt to link the spiritual with the rational. It brings to mind Hamlet's words to his rational buddy, "There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy". Whether or not Mr. Crowley is a proponent of, or even believes in such notions is not for me to surmise, although I 'm more inclined to think that the Gnostic and Hermetic ideas are used more as plot devices to flesh out the crucial emotional underpinnings of the story, rather than serve as major thematic components. Smokey represents to me, the rational, pragmatic, reasonable world. Alice and her family, the link to the world of spirit and wonder and imagination. The 2 must join together for the Tale to proceed, just as man must recognize his spiritual as well as rational nature. Smokey's life has little value at the start, but ends with a supreme personal fulfillment. The novel describes concentric levels of reality, the deeper in you travel, the more spacious it becomes. Man lives on one level. The faeries on a deeper level. Who knows what exists on levels further in? Carl Jung, in accord with Gnostic and Hermetic sources, describes man as a unique link between the microcosm (Little) and the macrocosm (Big), a portal so to speak, between 2 eternities, one inner and the other outer. The notion presented in the novel of alternative universes is not strictly proprietary to metaphysics. It has been a valid topic of debate in advanced physics. The notion of death in this book is not a fearful notion. Everything we are made of, including our consciousness, has always existed, and will always exist in one form or other for eternity. The deep thoughts are there, but they do not take away from the things in the novel that have primary importance for us as humans who live in the real world and don't pay much thought to alternative realities. In trying to compare LITTLE, BIG to other works of similar style, I am reminded a bit of One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Garcia Marquez. Both novels make reference to occultism and hermeticism. Both novels contain family trees, and relate unusual family histories through several generations.. but where the Colombian master's Buendia family were almost impossible for me to relate to, Crowley creates characters that are very easy to empathize with. They live and breathe, love and ache, undergo physical, emotional, and spiritual changes, and act all too human even when they become more or less than human. They resonate in your consciousness long after you finish the book. At least they did in mine. I highly recommend this book, and hope more people get to discover it's wonders. Like all great books, this one demands multiple readings. Great books are life experiences..journeys of self discovery, always there to be travelled, each successive venture leading us down more scenic routes to our destination. With LITTLE, BIG Crowley has fashioned his own Edgewood for the reader. We enter through the gates and proceed to a familiar world, one we all know, but nonetheless, a world ripe with mystery, enchantment, and some danger. There are puzzles to solve, and once solved, new ones arise to challenge us. Questions are asked, and once answered, new ones posed for pondering. The world we thought we knew changes into a new world. We leave with new insights, and perhaps a new world view, part of ourselves changed forever as we perceive life from an altered perspective. It may only have been a tale, but it had become our tale. We lived it along with the characters. The experience was just as meaningful for us as for them. ["

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October 20, 2008 Verified Purchase

Frank J. Kim

A Little Bit of a Big Deal

"This is a great American novel that is not meant for everybody, which is why it's a great American novel that's mostly unknown. It's a fairy tale book not meant for little children. Who this book is meant for are those who want to experience the truth of a world like ours that just happens to be poked, prodded, and moved about by the Fey peoples of an alternate plane of existence. This is a novel about an extraordinary family across multiple generations--a family with foibles and flaws and beauty and strength, who struggle to understand the Why of their existence as they also alternately struggle against and work with the Little People (who may not be so little). And so this novel asks a lot of big philosophical and metaphysical questions. The author, John Crowley, is not interested in pat answers. The questions are sometimes more important than the conclusions that follow. And sometimes, there are no conclusions explicitly stated. It's up to the reader to use some mental effort to figure out what's happening in the story. This is why I say that this novel is not for everyone. In today's reading culture, where even college-educated adults are only willing to read young adult novels, this book may be a challenge to some. For one thing, Crowley's prose is DENSE. What I mean by that is that he'll write sentences that are their own paragraphs. Sentences with numerous clauses that are separately by a multitude of commas, semi-colons, hyphens, long dashes, and parentheticals. And within these long sentence constructions, Crowley will pack in multiple disparate ideas that he is able to artfully connect with an overarching theme, philosophical thesis, or series of actions. And also, the sentences are beautiful, almost musical, in their prose. Here's an example (the hairy thing mentioned is a squirrel's tail; a love totem from the Fey): "But they had kept their promise, oh they had, he was on the way to becoming an entire anthology of love, with footnotes (there were a pair of step-ins under his seat, he could not remember who had stepped out of them); only, as he drove from drugstore to church, from farmhouse to farmhouse, with the hairy thing flying from his windscreen, he came to know that it did not and had not ever contained his power over women: his power over women lay in their power over him." Some people have compared this novel to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book "One Hundred Years of Solitude". It's an apt comparison in that both novels are shining examples of the magic realism genre and great prose, and both are concerned with the rising and falling fortunes of remarkable multi-generational families. But Crowley's novel dives more deeply into the metaphysical. In his story, the universe is actually a multiverse with fantastical realms of existence nested within each other, yet paradoxically, the deeper ones are larger than the ones that contain them. And from this mind-expanding idea, Crowley is able to craft an epic narrative that takes the reader to some truly bizarre and beautiful settings. Some of the characters start to wake up to this and take advantage of this strange architecture of the universe. The main characters here will speak and live and breathe and stumble and fall their way through this story. For all the magic-realism trappings of this story, the characters always feel like real people. And that is perhaps Crowley's great strength as an author. He never lets the metaphysical or phantasmagoric elements of the story cloud the essential humanity of the people who live inside that reality. I challenge anyone to read this novel from beginning to end and not fall in love with at least 3 of the main characters. ["

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January 20, 2017 Verified Purchase

Daniel Myers

Magic and Memory

"Much like many of the other reviewers, I find it difficult to put down why this book is so good in many respects, but not so good at times. I would say, first off, that I truly don't think that this book is primarily concerned with fairies, save as a sort of thematic trope. In any event, Crowley himself has asseverated (after being asked by so many readers) that he does NOT believe in fairies. I would say that, like Proust, Crowley's main concern is with memory and its elusive, magical quality.-Witness the number of times that memory (or the loss of it, or the regaining of it, partial or wholly) is mentioned throughout the book -Just an example of this theme is the quote from St. Augustine (p.343 of my edition): "The fields, the caves, the dens of Memory cannot be counted nor the kinds of things counted that fill them...I force my way in amongst them, even as far as my power reaches, and nowhere find an end." For whatever reason, the book comes to sparkling life for me when Sylvie "leaves" Auberon and he is left to ebriously roam the city for a year in desolation, spiritual and otherwise, meditating (again, much like Proust) on love and memory. It's the richest, most rapturous part of the book, where "magic" is seen to be in the world we daily inhabit, in our loves and memories----in our lives, that is. As for the rest-Edgewood and the family and all its doings and undoings, all I can recommend is that the reader carefully bookmark the family tree at the book's beginning and try to keep up with things as much as is possible, and it will NOT be possible to keep up with them all. In this sense, the book is, as another reviewer has remarked, a sort of quagmire, especially towards the ending of "The Tale" or, shall we say, the Little, Big. Summing up: A genuine, neglected piece of true literature that, while not a masterpiece exactly, surely deserves much more attention and serious consideration than the literary world (save the wonderful Harold Bloom) has afforded it. ["

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December 25, 2005 Verified Purchase

Christin Keck

One of the most beautiful stories ever written

"John Crowley is a rare writer--he has a massive vocabulary, his sentences are so well-constructed you will fall into them like falling onto a feather bed--engrossed in their beauty and comfort and pleasure. The Tale he tells in this book is a timeless one--love, fantasy, expectations both realized and dashed--and it will stay with you long after reading the final page. The story begins with Smoky Barnable, an "anonymous" young man who is walking from the big city (unnamed but most obviously New York) to a house upstate called Edgewood where his fiancée, Daily Alice Drinkwater, lives, so they can be married. Smoky's and Alice's pasts are very different, but have been destined to come together to make a new life together. What Smoky does not fully realize (though Alice does more) is that he and this marriage are part of The Tale, a long, long story concerning members of this family he is about to marry into, that has been told for generations; Smokey and Alice's marriage and what follows are only the latest chapters. The Tale involves fantastical beings, strange houses, odd situations, and the details are best left for the reader to discover rather than discuss in this review. Let me say only that the Tale gets told in ways that can lift your heart high or break it, and Smoky is only the beginning of this accounting of it. The rest will not fail to engage you in its beauty and its poetry. Crowley has crafted a truly incredible story, one that cannot be easily forgotten once finished. It's an adult fairy tale, a multi-generational story about a family, marriage, love, heartbreak and consequences, and even a historically accurate accounting of the history of magic. It's enduring. Extraordinary. A Tale I have read so many times over again I've lost count. And absolutely my most favorite book ever written, bar none. If you like it, it's a great precursor to his four-volume set known as the Aegypt tetralogy--which continues some of the same ideas and incidents mentioned in this book into a different in-depth study about history and magic, with characters that are also exceptional and poignant. That is a completely different story, but also in many ways the same for it continues one of the threads in Little, Big into a multi-branching ensemble of concepts, history and philosophies. But the Aegypt cycle is not this story, not yet. Crowley is a storyteller that deserves to be exalted for his knowledge, his understanding and his ability to weave the past into the present in ways that take the reader down roads and into places he or she might never have known existed but for these tales. Mostly, however, Crowley is a writer who is an absolutely master of the craft. His ability is so expert that it can leave the reader breathless with admiration. It is my opinion as a reader and a writer that there is no better writer alive today. Everything I've ever read by Crowley is a masterpiece. ["

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April 14, 2019 Verified Purchase