Little, Big by John Crowley
Hello, Stranger.
Primary Driver: (Plot, World, or Character) [Charitably]
Bechdel Test: Pass
Technobabble: Moderate Fantasy Babble.
Review: I loathed this book. Pacing could be charitably described as dreamy - but more aptly as between lethargic and catatonic. Characters are as plentiful as they are unimaginative and disposable. Plot is not really a feature: all of the standbys for family drama are here, from "You're Not the Father!" through "A Surprise Same-Sex Encounter?!" with a bit of "But She's My Sister!" thrown in for good measure. Quality of writing is decent, but some striking phrasing and evocative images are nowhere near enough to redeem this one.
She was not much in his mind as he walked, though for sure she hadn’t been far from it often in the last nearly two years he had loved her; the room he had met her in was one he looked into with the mind’s eye often, sometimes with the trepidation he had felt then, but often nowadays with a grateful happiness; looked in to see George Mouse showing him from afar a glass, a pipe, and his two tall cousins: she, and her shy sister behind her.
If this is the type of text that you relish reading, then this is the book for you. This excerpt also functions as a perfect representation of the rest of the book. Bloated, floating descriptions, detached meandering, and outrageously long sentences. The text drags as best it can, as often as it can, wherever it can.
Little, Big apes One Hundred Years of Solitude without any of the profundity. At no point did the soap-opera happenings evoke any emotion - the characters are just too uninteresting and unrelatable. This is perhaps the greatest failure of this book - Crowley's total inability to evoke emotion, empathy, or feeling. There is nothing human about his humans.
The one interesting character here is the house. Edgewood, as the house is named, is an architectural puzzle - each side is wildly different, and visitors are liable to get completely lost within it. At first I found this appealing, until I realized the obvious - I was hoping that this book was House of Leaves, and it was not. The menace and fascination of the house as a character and entity by Danielewski is shown nowhere in this book.
There is the age-old saying about one death being a tragedy and a thousand being a statistic. The same applies to personal tragedies. One terrible occurrence is remarkable, but when they just keep happening and happening, eventually you just shrug and say, "Huh. Yup. Sucks." This is the point that we reach in Little, Big.
This book angered me not because it was astoundingly terrible but simply because there is no reason for it to be. There are no parts of this that have not been done better by other authors in other books. There are no characters that bring a unique perspective to events that we've seen before. There are no surprising mechanics that change it up. Instead, this manages to be a mashup of the worst kind - a pointless muddle. Part of the issue is the feeling, in some ways, that there is a disconnect between the magical realism elements of the story and the core tensions. It feels like this was a failed fantasy book, or a failed drama, and the other part was spliced on for the sake of spicing it up.
Plenty of underwhelming books have, at their core, a much better story. You can see what the author wanted to do, and where it failed - sloppy writing, over-indulgent editor, and so on. I can't find that with this one. There is no kernel of wisdom. No part of this is a story that needed to be told.
Added note: the kind people of Reddit have informed me that my dislike of this book indicates that I should be skinned, pickled, flipped inside out, and so on - so there are those who love it! Didn't think this would be the divisive one...
“Gentlemen,” she said, gripping the back of an upright leather chair like a lectern, “more than two years ago you gave me the assignment of discovering the nature and intentions of Russell Eigenblick. You have had an unconscionable wait, but I think tonight I can at least provide you with an identification; a recommendation as to the disposition of the case will be far harder. If I can make one at all. And if I can make one, then you—yes, even you—may be incapable of acting on it.”
There was an exchange of glances at this, subtler than one sees on stage, but with the same effect of registering mutual surprise and concern. It had once before occurred to Hawksquill that the men she dealt with were not the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club at all, but actors hired to represent them. She suppressed the notion.
“We all know,” she went on, “the tales, found in many mythologies, of a hero who, though slain on the field of battle or otherwise meeting a tragic end, is said not to have died at all, but to have been home away to somewhere, elsewhere, an isle or a cave or a cloud, where he sleeps; and from where, at his people’s greatest need, he will issue, with his paladins, to aid them, and to rule then over a new Golden Age. Rex Quondam et Futurus. Arthur in Avalon; Sikander somewhere in Persia; Cuchulain in every other fen or glen of Ireland; Jesus Christ himself.
“All these tales, moving as they are, are not true. No trials of his people awakened Arthur; Cuchulain is able to sleep through the mutual slaughter of his, protracted over centuries; the Second Coming, continually announced, has been delayed past the virtual end of the Church that so much counted on it. No: whatever the next World-Age brings (and that age lies anyway well in the to-come) it will not bring back a hero whose name we know. But…” She paused, assailed by a sudden doubt. Said aloud, the absurdity of it seemed greater. She even flushed, ashamed, as she went on: “But it happens that one of these stories is true. It’s not one we would ever have thought to be true, even if it were one we remember and tell, and for the most part it isn’t; it and its hero are much forgotten. But we know it to be true because the necessary conclusion of it has occurred: the hero has awakened. Russell Eigenblick is he.”
This shot fell less heavily among her hearers than she had expected it to. She felt them withdraw from her; she saw, or perceived, their necks stiffen, their chins draw down doubtfully into expensive haberdashery. There was nothing for it but to go on.
“You may wonder,” she said, “as I did, what people Russell Eigenblick has returned to aid, We as a people are too young to have cultivated stories like those told of Arthur, and perhaps too self-satisfied to have felt the need of any. Certainly none are told of the so-called fathers of our country; the idea that one of those gentlemen is not dead but asleep, say, in the Ozarks or the Rockies is funny but not anywhere held. Only the despised ghost-dancing Red Man has a history and a memory long enough to supply such a hero; and the Indians have shown as little interest in Russell Eigenblick as in our Presidents, and he as little in them. What people then?
“The answer is: no people. No people: but an Empire. An Empire which could, and once did, comprise any people or peoples regardless, and had a life, a crown, borders and capitals of the greatest mutability. You will remember Voltaire’s dig: that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Yet in some sense it existed until (as we have thought) its last Emperor, Francis II, resigned the title in 1806. Well: my contention is, gentlemen, that the Holy Roman Empire did not pass away then either. It continued to exist. It continued, like an amoeba, to shift, crawl, expand, contract; and that while Russell Eigenblick slept his long sleep (exactly eight hundred years by my reckoning)—while, in effect, we all slept—it has crept and slid, shifting and drifting like the continents, until it is now located here, where we sit. How exactly its borders should be drawn I have no idea, though I suspect they may be identical with this country’s. In any case we are well within it. This city may even be its Capital: though probably only its Chief City.”
She had ceased looking at them.
“And Russell Eigenblick?” she asked of no one. “He was once its Emperor. Not its first, who was of course Charlemagne (about whom the same sleep-wake story was for a while told) nor its last, nor even its greatest. Vigorous, yes; talented; uneven in temperament; no administrator; steady, but generally unsuccessful, in war. It was he who, by the way, added the ‘holy’ to his Empire’s name. About 1190 he chose, with the Empire generally at peace and the Pope for the moment off his back, to go on crusade. The Infidel only briefly felt his scourge; he won a battle or two, and then, crossing a stream in Armenia, he fell from his horse, and was too weighted down by his armor to get out. He drowned. So says Gregorovius, among other authorities.
“The Germans, though, after many later reverses, came to disbelieve this. He hadn’t died. He was only asleep, perhaps beneath the Kyffhauser in the Hartz Mountains (the place is still pointed out to tourists) or perhaps in Domdaniel in the sea, or wherever, but he would return, one day; return to the aid of his beloved Germans, and lead German arms to victory and a German empire to glory. The hideous history of Germany in the last century may be the working-out of this vain dream. But in fact that Emperor, despite his birth and his name, was no German. He was Emperor of all the world, or at least all Christendom. He was heir to French Charlemagne and Roman Caesar. And now he has shifted like his ancient borders, and has changed no allegiances in doing so, only his name. Gentlemen, Russell Eigenblick is the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, yes, die alte Barbarossa, reawakened to rule over this strange latter age of his Empire.”
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