a gallimaufry

little big readalong: Book 2 Brother North-Wind's Secret

The Little, Big readalong continues, but some of us are not doing terribly well. I forgot that this is quite a busy time of year for teachers, and my reading time and brain are being eaten into by making and marking tests and final exams. I’ve only just finished Book 2. Still, I feel that Little, Big itself doesn’t mind: it’s a leisurely book.

In fact, this post has been prompted by a discussion on Frances’ blog of the style and pace of Little, Big, a discussion which I’m too late to join. Frances wrote, noting Crowley’s liberal hand with the comma:

I can’t match my own reading rhythms with the cadence of the author’s language here. [...]True that the book is a comma convention but shouldn’t that actually dictate cadence, the pauses in thought, emphases? Are those pauses so frequent that the text is way out of sync with my personal preference in reading speed? Is this a deliberately paced novel that is pushing back against a greedy consumer?

Teresa and James B. Chester suggested in the comments that Crowley was deliberately trying to slow the pace. But Frances was unsure: ‘The author’s voice, I think, is unique enough that I can’t hear it in a compelling way in a consistent way and I feel less attached to the text.’

So there seemed to me to be two things going on here, a slowness and an alienation, and I have felt them both too. How and why is Crowley creating them?

(Egon Schiele, Woodland Prayer, oil on canvas, 1915; found here)

The slowness derives from both Crowley’s style and his narrative. I notice the narrative particularly because I’ve been reading a lot of children’s books to my daughter recently, and they are driven by ‘what next?’. What will Lucy find through the wardrobe? Where is Mortimer? Can Judy and Mrs Judy save the Shop in the Tree? Little, Big isn’t motivated by this in the slightest. I find I’m not troubled about what will happen next to Smoky or any of the Drinkwaters: they aren’t obviously menaced by anything or in conflict over anything. There is nothing which can really pose a menace: death itself is just another form of transformation or a stepping through a door. And we know that everyone is part of the Tale, foretold in the cards. Everyone reacts to this by becoming quite passive and aware of their unimportance as individuals. They exist to contribute to the Tale and are rather like figures in someone else’s dream. This creates a distance between them and us, the readers.

Crowley also works hard to disorient us in terms of the narrative’s structure and his language. He bends the passage of time – sometimes a few minutes passes between sections, sometimes many years, and we only find out by the bye. He plays with emphasis. What might be a background detail in another novel, a change in the weather, is described carefully, in heightened, intense language:

The previous week’s snow had not cleaved to earth, it was a night’s fall only, the rain returned heavily the next morning and George Mouse went sloshing off in it hollow eyed and confused, having caught, they all thought, Sophie’s bug. The rain continued like unassuageable grief, flooding the low broad lawn where the sphinxes decayed mumchance. Then the temperature tumbled, and Christmas Eve morning the world was all iron-gray and glaring in ice, all the color of the iron-gray sky where the sun made a white smear only behind the clouds. The lawn was hard enough to skate on; the house looked like a miniature house for a model railroad, set beside a pond made from a compact-mirror.

Crowley chooses to place this not at the beginning of the scene but in the middle. When you start reading this section of the book, ‘Agreement with Newton’, it isn’t immediately clear why the characters are ‘speeding’ and ‘sliding’ around. (Nor what Newton has to do with it.) It’s a puzzle to be worked out, and while you’re working it out, you’re being kept apart from the characters again, apart from immersing yourself in the world of the novel. And archaic and unusual language trips you up. ‘Mumchance’! A nice choice of word, conveying not only that the sphinxes are silent but that they are somehow part of a show or a stage set, an idea of artificiality picked up in ‘miniature house for a model railroad’ and ‘a pond made from a compact-mirror’.

(Piet Mondrian, The Gray Tree, oil on canvas, 1912; found here)

Crowley bends time and physics; he elevates small details and he also plays around with scale. The house is ‘miniature’, but it is also, as we know, many houses in one, perhaps a physical impossibility. Characters participate in this play. In Book 1, Smoky felt his one self held an ‘infinity of possibilities’ and many different characters, yet he believed that Daily Alice could contain him. Now Daily Alice experiences something similar:

Daily Alice couldn’t tell if she felt huge or small. She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head. She alternated between these feelings, expanding and diminishing. The stars wandered in and out of the vast portals of her eyes, under the immense empty tome of her brow; and then Smoky took her hand and she vanished to a speck, still holding the stars as in a tiny jewel box within her.

She is little and big. The novel contains the little and the big, the detail and the grand pattern. We find ourselves trusting to this, as the characters do. But all the time, Crowley seems to be showing us things differently, wrongfooting us and making us work, as if he’s saying, ‘Look, look. See things differently.’ We have to see things differently if we are to accept this story.

little big readalong: Book 1 Edgewood

Fellow readalongers, how are you faring with Little, Big? How far are you? Are you enjoying it?

I have decided to write a post for each of the six books which form the novel. Here are my thoughts on the first...

On a certain day in June, 19—, a young man was making his way on foot northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told of but had never visited. His name was Smoky Barnable, and he was going to Edgewood to get married; the fact that he walked and didn’t ride was one of the conditions placed on him coming there at all.

As I read the opening lines, I was reminded of my struggle the first time I encountered this novel: what is going on? Where and when are we? How do I read this? This first paragraph shows us a pattern that is repeated as we continue through the book: it sets forth to destabilise, to give us information and yet somehow render it meaningless. For instance, when is this story taking place? ‘On a certain day in June’ is precise and helpful; ‘19—’ is not, not really. It plays on the old literary convention of using a dash to disguise a name, date or place, and hides as much as it tells. Then we’re told that Smoky ‘didn’t ride’, which implies to me that people are still frequently travelling on horseback, yet as we read further we find this is a world of telephones and computers and cars and motorways. (Or have I misunderstood ‘ride’ in this context? )

Smoky is an odd name for a hero; we soon learn it’s not his real name but it’s the only one we’re given. He is called Smoky because he’s so anonymous, like all the Barnables, although from his mother (who deserted him as a child) he has inherited ‘a streak of [her] concreteness: an actual streak it seemed to those who knew him, a streak of presence surrounded by a dim glow of absence’. This streak perhaps suggests possibility. He’s leaving a decaying, unnamed City for a place, Edgewood, which isn’t marked on the map he has, yet is using to guide him. And he is travelling under ‘conditions’ which seem pretty arbitrary: he must walk, he must not buy food and he must beg or find places to sleep, not pay for them. Arbitrary, but magical, and dictated by ‘the cards’, the tarot that Great Aunt Cloud reads and reads.

Other characters have odd names too, some of which – Alice and Timmie Willie, Ariel and Auberon – allude to literary figures, others of which are very suggestive – Lionel Mouse, Violet Bramble, Nora Cloud (and perhaps they are literary figures I just don’t recognise?). Looking at a family tree at the front of the book, I think that I can see an urban ‘side’ – Mouses and the Townses – and a rural one – Drinkwaters, Woods, Dales.

While Smoky is walking towards, he hopes, Edgewood, we learn in a series of flashbacks about his early life and his brief meetings with the girl who will become his fiancée, Daily Alice Drinkwater. On one occasion, she tells him how she first knew she would marry him, when she stepped inside a rainbow and heard her dog speak his name. Smoky is sceptical:

‘A fairy tale,’ he said.
‘I guess,’ she said sleepily. [...]
He knew he would have to believe in order to go where she had been; knew that, if he believed, he could go there even if it didn’t exist, if it was make-believe. [...] He searched himself for that old will, long in disuse. If she went there, ever, he didn’t want to be left behind; wanted never to be farther from her than this.

This passage seems to be saying that a story, a fairy tale, is not just a series of sounds or words, it is an actual, physical place. And conversely, that physical space is not what you think it is.

The name ‘Edgewood’ shrieks liminality and borders. The house that Smoky finds there, Daily Alice’s home, is very strange indeed:

‘See, it’s a house all fronts. It was built to be a sample. My great-grandfather [...] He built this house to be a sample, so people could come and look at it, from any side, and choose which kind of house they wanted; that’s why the inside is so crazy. It’s so many houses, sort of put inside each other or across each other, with their fronts sticking out.’
[...] He looked where she pointed, along the back front. It was a severe, classical facade softened by ivy, its gray stone stained as though by dark tears; tall, arched windows; symmetrical detail he recognized as the classical Orders; rustications, columns, plinths. Someone was looking out one tall window with an air of melancholy. ‘Now come on.’ She [...] led him by the hand along that front, and as they passed, it seemed to fold like scenery; what had looked flat became out-thrust; what stuck out folded in; pillars turned pilasters and disappeared. Like one of those ripply pictures children play with, where a face turns from grim to grin as you move it, the back front altered, and when they reached the opposite wall and turned to look back, the house had become cheerful and mock-Tudor, with deep curling eaves and clustered chimneys like comic hats. One of the broad casement windows (a stained piece or two glittered among the leaded panes) opened on the second floor, and Sophie looked out, waving.

I try to imagine exactly how that all works, and I can’t. The house doesn’t seem to be governed by the physical laws which shape ordinary houses. The house is like the story Alice told, it’s a space but a different sort of space. Crowley is constantly disorienting us, showing us the strangeness, asking us to open our minds to new possibilities. He writes about insubstantial heroes, impossible houses, lives dominated by tarot, rainbows you can step inside. And we haven’t even reached the first Elf yet. (We have, however, encountered a talking fish.) How do we read this? We are constantly being wrongfooted, offered a different logic. And yet, there is just enough play on the familiar to keep us from bewilderment. And lovely writing. If a story is a place, this is a place where you want to stay. Thank goodness it’s a long book! I have hours of pleasure ahead.

If you are participating in the readalong and have posted, please put a link in the comments so we can read your thoughts too!

(István Orosz is a Hungarian artist who is known for his ‘impossible objects’ and anamorphoses, pictures which appear distorted until you look at them from a particular angle or through a special mirror. All the pictures in this post are by him: The Pergola, The Well (1998) and an untitled work of 1989 from his Hungarian Wikipedia page. His website is here.)

little big readalong

A readalong! I’ve never done one before, but Dolce Bellezza instigated it, and Tom from Wuthering Expectations declared he would join in, and I would love to reread this and discuss it, because it is such a rich and wild book... Little Big by John Crowley is perhaps not as widely known in Britain as it should be. It is:

the epic story of Smoky Barnable, an anonymous young man who travel by foot from the City to a place called Edgewood–not found on any map–to marry Daily Alice Drinkwater, as was prophesied. It is the story of four generations of a singular family, living in a house that is many houses on the magical border of an otherworld. (from the back cover)

This is a book unlike any other I’ve read, it’s hard to describe, but it’s beautifully written and now I’m thinking of it I think of sunshine and daydreams and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. If that seems like your cup of tea, then please join us in May! You can read more about it, and put your name down if you fancy, here.