Gallowglass

Little, Big II

John Holbo is a blogger of exquisite literary taste and discernment, which is an obsequious way of saying that his likes and dislikes closely correspond to my own. His good judgement is confirmed again in his recent post on John Crowley's Little, Big, which he describes as "simply the best fantasy novel ever written. Or at least the most mature (as he says, the Gormenghast series always has to be a contender for best fantasy). Like Neil Gaiman and John's friend, I always try to keep four or five copies of LB by me, in case I find a worthy reader whom I can press a copy on.

There's a wonderful book to be written someday, providing an exegesis of LB - in addition to being a great read, it has the kinds of subtleties that reward careful criticism. A few of the usual postmodernist tricks are in there - a narrative bricolage formed in part from bits and pieces of other works; a narrative that is self-referential on many levels, and that in the end turns in on itself to form a perfect (and inaccessible) circle; characters who are quite aware that they are trapped within a Tale. But in the end, Crowley turns these conceits against themselves, and writes a book that is neither clever (in the pejorative sense), nor sterile, nor plotdriven. You care about the characters, and what's more, the book seems to catch at something deep within you. I think it's a book with a theory - or an argufment, to borrow a term from John. It claims that stories resonate and have meaning to us, precisely and only because they connect back to our lives. Narrative isn't a universe of signifiers that refer only to each other; it's a bridge, that leads us back to our world as we live it. As Crowley describes it, it's just at the moment that you reach the heart of the woods, that you begin to come out again. Or, to put it another way, the mechanisms of story will only work when they're in alignment with the universe of our lived experience; but when they are, they begin to generate something in and of themselves. Little, Big is a wonderful, heartwrenching, subtle book. Go read it.

And while you're at it, check out John's excellent fisking of Jonah Goldberg.