Some of you may recall that, not too long ago, I mentioned the novelist John Crowley, and said that you should buy his novels, and then read them several times.
[Y]ou should buy his novels...and then read them several times
See? I did say that.
It is quite likely, however, that there are those among you who still have not bought one John Crowley novel, nor read it several times. To say nothing of them all. This displeases me greatly. Go out and read them, or you will face my terrible wrath.
Perhaps my terrible wrath is not motivation enough. Why, you ask, should I read the works of this man called Crowley? Why, you ask? Why should you continue to process fluids through your liver? It is an integral part of life. It is nature's way.
Perhaps you are not the sort of person who accepts overheated rhetoric blindly and unquestioningly. Perhaps you are the sort of person who requires elaboration. I know your type. Your elaborative type. Very well, then. I shall elaborate.
...
Though he has worked in other forms and media as well, it is primarily as a novelist that John Crowley is of interest. He has been publishing novels at increasingly lengthy intervals since 19751. His most characteristic features as a novelist, apart from being extremely good indeed, are his abiding interest in history, and his indifference to genre constraints. He's marketed as a science fiction author, and though some of his works are unquestionably science fiction--Beasts, Engine Summer, and 'Great Work of Time,' for example--his last five novels are equally unquestionably not. Nor, though said novels--Little, Big, AEgypt, Love & Sleep, Daemonomania, and The Translator--contain elements of the fantastical, is it entirely accurate to describe them as fantasy. Perhaps he could be called a magical realist...Or some kind of postmodernist, given that his stories are often about stories themselves, and the story oftentimes is that the characters must learn that they are in a Story...Perhaps that is more characteristic of his work. Or perhaps I should say it's characteristic of Crowley that his works are symbols more than they are symbolic, densely-woven constructs whose unravelling brings a hint of the gnosis about which he writes. Or perhaps...Well. He is difficult to characterise; let us leave it at that. He is obscure, unfortunately, and very often out of print. He is also a truly great novelist; Little, Big is perhaps my favourite book. His prose is beautiful, not overwrought, extraordinarily vivid and full of life. He can use it sweetly, enchantingly, almost, but not quite, verging on the twee. Or he can depict sadomasochistic bondage, uncomfortable eroticism, power, powerlessness, despair, error, failure, Christianity...He has range. And scope. He writes about history, and stories, and why these two things are the same. He writes about gnosis, an awakening into enlightenment. And this is not separate from history; he draws on the Gnostic heresy of the early centuries CE, and the Hermetic tradition it spawned in the Renaissance, and the Art of Memory practiced by the Hermetic heretic Giordano Bruno, and Somehow makes these curiosities from the dusty corners of history not only relevant but positively essential to unwinding the lives and loves of real (or as real as fictional characters can be) people.
He writes about love. Perhaps that is the simplest way to put it. Romantic love. Innocent love. Worldly love. Tragic love. Sexual love. Illegal love.
He tells a Story. And the Story revolves around realising that there is a Story to be told.
And he's a bit good2.
1: Sleight, Graham. "The Fiction of John Crowley: A Bibliography." In Snake's-Hands, ed. Alice K. Turner and Michael Andre-Driussi. Wildside Press, 2003.
2: Now read him at once, or face my aforementioned terrible wrath: I shall destroy the Sun.
Posted by aloysius at May 17, 2003 12:49 AM |