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Summary: Some books are just magic
Review: There is little I can add to the previous reviews except to say that, in a lifetime of compulsive reading, this book represents one of the best. I can think of few others that even approached the sense of completeness and wonder that is in this book. Please, please read it..tell others about it..keep it in print..and give Mr. Crowley the motivation to keep writing perfect books for us.
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Summary: Brilliant
Review: This book is one of the great fantasies in English and one of my favorite novels. Crowley's style combines elaboration with precision, and his book has room for everything--the conspiracy that runs American politics, a post-modern tour de force with Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale", a perfect one-line memory of pelicans in an alcoholic delusion (probably), and a moving Tale about memorable characters. My copy is beaten up from many rereadings--and now a friend of mine is beating it up further. She can't get past the first chapter because she's enjoying rereading it so much.
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Summary: Myth, prelude to a Midsummer Night's Dream
Review: Do you believe in fairies? Your answer will change after having read this masterwork - for better or worse, "littler or bigger" is only for you to say. This is great fiction - not bound by any genre. What a shame - a condemnation of the general public's desire for "quick and easy" or sensational reads - that this contemporary classic is out of print less than twenty years after initial publication. There is a depth, breadth and richness herein that is rare. It is a tale of the passing of generations and worlds, the relationship of man to his world and everything in it, mortality and immortality, and the basic human beliefs that lead to the creation of myth and religion. Something of the Jungian lies at the heart - do we choose the course and events of our lives or are they chosen for us? The answer is, of course, both. Are we contained by the world, or is the world contained by us? The answer is, of course, both. Do we have indiviual experiences, or are we part of mankind's shared experience across the ages? Again, both. Crowley avoids the trap of allegory while creating a work of fantasy and myth that enrichs and enlightens while all the while seeming familiar and close. His story is fundamental and applicable to the contemporary world, while transporting us away in space and time, to an age where magic was still real, where doorways were still open for the little and the big to pass between worlds.
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Summary: This is what fantasy should be.
Review: "Little, Big" weaves a hypnotic spell from beginning to end, with one foot planted firmly in the Real World and the other in a sometimes visible, yet never knowable faerie realm. Anyone who is looking for intelligent, unpretentious, literate, evocative fantasy should read this.
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Summary: Little, Big transcends genre
Review: John Crowley's classic novel of family, faerie, architecture, and, yes, lust, is a truly remarkable novel. While it has fairies in it, it is not a fantasy novel. While it chronicles the decline of a great family, this is no Buddenbrooks. While it gives the reader a hasty history of Beaux-Arts architecture, there is no dust on this prose. And even though this tale is sometimes one of lust, this book hasn't a trace of sleaze. This book manages to tell a story about a family close to the faerie world and still be, more than anything else, a *human* drama. What Ursula K. Le Guin says is true, "Persons who enter this book are advised that they will leave it a different size than when they came in."
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Summary: A watercolor depicition of what "fairy" really means.
Review: Smoky Barnable, a man forever haunted by his own anonymity,enters a fantastic world of Victorian architecture,memory gardens, and speaking trout when he marries Daily Alice and becomes part of the Tale that will change this world. This is a beautifully lyrical book, where elves are carefully photographed, where reborn heroes run for political office, and where a battered deck of cards predicts the rebirth of Fairy. Choose a properly stormy Sunday afternoon, crawl back into bed, and read this book cover to cover.
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Summary: magicalism without magic
Review: A note to fellow fans of this book: If you aren't already aware of it, a special 25th Anniversary Edition of this novel is being planned. You can read about it here: www.littlebig25.com/.
As for a review of the book, there are excellent reviews already here. For my own part, I'll simply say that I don't read fantasy fiction, yet _Little, Big_ is one of the 5 best novels I've ever read (see my "Favorite Fictions" list). It doesn't read like fantasy fiction. It's literary fiction that happens to have fantastical elements, not unlike the extraordinary novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The only complaint I can register about the book is that I really have no idea what the Barbarossa section is doing there. But that is at least as likely a failing on my part as on the author's. What's more, I don't even object much to its being in the book, it's so beautifully written. I just don't know what it's for. It's like one of the lovely but supernumerary facades of Edgewood: I'd be pleased as punch if someone could tell me why it's there, but in the meantime I'm happy to just look at it.
With the recent publication of Susanna Clarke's _Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell_, we now have 2 wonderful and completely different novels about the fact that we live, as a previous reviewer put it, in "a 'magical' world in which magic in fact rarely happens." If you want a stronger sense of plot and character resolution, Clarke has it in spades. If you want more magic in the prose itself, Crowley is definitely your man. The 2 might very usefully be read back-to-back. In fact, I might re-read them just for that experience.
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Summary: Wow...
Review: That's pretty much all I can say about this novel. It certainly is the most frustrating, convoluted, wordy, and confusing story I have ever read- but I loved every second of it. Or did I? I really don't know. It is also the most elaborate, emotional, thought provoking, and inspirational story I have read either. Crowley is amazing at describing all those little thoughts you have in your head, all the intangible feelings you have, all the unfulfilled desires you feel- in a way that makes you think "Yes, exactly- that's it- that's how it is!" The book certainly gets larger, deeper, and more involved the further in you go. Those of you who need a final, conclusive ending with a clear plot line steer clear. However, it is a deeply moving book for reasons I really can't describe. I would really recommend taking your time and savoring all the (vast) descriptions- let yourself be immersed into the story. It took me a second try to finish the book- I just didn't get it the first time around and put it down, frustrated and bored. My second time was much more enlightening- I went into it expecting a deep read and was well rewarded (though it will be some time before I pick it up again- it's almost exhausting in it's complexity).
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Summary: Size matters
Review: John Crowley's "Little, Big" is a particularly challenging work of fantasy to read and describe because it is not so much a story as it is about storytelling. Although written by an American in 1981, it often looks like a novel that came from an Englishman in 1881, immersed as it is in a Victorian mode, as though Lewis Carroll had lived into the automotive age and decided to incorporate elements from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" into an epic of magic and madness.
Shakespeare's play is clearly an inspiration, as the essence of "Little, Big" is founded on fairies, pixies, brownies, sprites, sylphs, dryads--i.e., mythological personifications of nature--although most of the characters are (apparently) human. The genesis of the story (or the Tale, as it is referred to throughout the novel) is the marriage of Smoky Barnable, an average, unassuming young man from the mundane world, to a fantastically beautiful and tall girl named Daily Alice Drinkwater, whose family is somehow (or should I say Somehow) connected to the supernatural. The Drinkwaters live in a large, bizarrely constructed house called Edgewood which, not unlike a smaller version of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, is a gothic manor of labyrinthine and spatially illogical architecture surrounded by a demesne of ornate gardens and wooded landscapes and seems almost to exist in an alternate realm of its own, separated from the real world.
The novel does acknowledge the "real" world, but only obliquely, like a surrealistic painting. Smoky and Daily Alice's son Auberon, perplexed by the secrets of the Drinkwater dynasty and desiring to make a living on his own as a writer, comes to the City (transparently New York) to live with his cousin George Mouse, who actually has a farm. It is here that Auberon will eventually meet his Titania, and here also that a distant relation, an old woman mystic named Ariel Hawksquill, will contend with Russell Eigenblick, a tyrant with an ancient past and a future that poses danger for the Tale.
If none of this sounds like the constitution of a cohesive novel, be aware that "Little, Big" has little interest in the conventions of literary genre and instead seeks to achieve a phantasmagorical effect. To this end, Crowley weaves an intricate tapestry of concepts from history, mythology, and his own imagination, employing tarot cards, talking animals, the Holy Roman Empire, a contraption called the Cosmo-Opticon, an orrery (keep a dictionary handy) powered by a perpetual-motion machine, while Auberon's three sisters spin, measure, and cut thread like the Fates. This is heavy, complex, philosophical material to be read with patience and an open mind, not for the common fantasy reader who is hoping for an easy, banal plot.
Crowley's rich, colorful prose pays lavish attention to detail, contrasting the tranquil idyll of Edgewood with the faceless modernity of the City, but even more notably it maintains the narrative in a certain nebulous state, as though the characters were passing in and out of each other's dreams. Everywhere is the thrill that something to be revealed is barely out of reach, and little by little the pieces come together like a finely cut jigsaw puzzle. This book is a marvel; a massively enjoyable journey into the myriad possibilities of post-Victorian fantasy.
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Summary: One of those books you remember forever
Review: This book is so successful on so many levels that it is difficult to know where to begin. Other reviewers have discussed the plot, so I won't go into that. I will just say that I am one of the folks who read every edition printed "under the sign of the unicorn" in the now legendary series published by Ballantine in the '60s and '70s. I have enjoyed fantasy from Machen to MacDonald to contemporaries like Powers, Blaylock, and Melville. But this book is so good that it enters into the pantheon of those few greats that actually seem to be numenous in themselves. This book is unforgettable. This story of worlds within worlds and the imprint of architypes is a must read for anyone who loves fantasy, or just really good books!
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