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(Perennial, ISBN 0060937939)
John Crowley has gone on to perhaps greater things since writing Little, Big in the shape of the AEgypt series, but here is perhaps the most complete statement of his fictional vision that can be fitted into a single volume (though only just - my edition of the book is 538 pages of small print).
Little, Big is a multi-generational story about a family and their relationship with the fairies. Not twee, pretty fairies you understand, but powers with strange plans and desires of their own that shape the history of the family into a tale.
This shaping, and its various effects on those within the family, is the theme of the story. Whether life is a tale, and who is shaping it, is the theme to which Crowley has returned again and again. Although in that respect it is a post-modern novel, Crowley is not interested here in blurring the boundary between the fiction on the page and the one we inhabit, but only in looking at the reaction of his characters to finding themselves part of a Tale that is greater than they are.
The plot is much harder to describe. The main story focusses on Smoky Barnable, a young man who joins the Drinkwater family by marriage to Daily Alice. The book follows the couple through their lives, and into the lives of their children, as they live in a strangely protected bubble in the house called Edgewood, somewhere outside New York City. Meanwhile, civilization gradually crumbles, and a host of strange characters play through the book - from Ariel Hawksquill - a modern day wizard and practitioner of the Art of Memory, to Grandfather Trout - a fish with a sad story to tell.
To me, the book seems suffused with a sense of sadness. Everyone is burdened by the tale - at Smoky's wedding, the guests all thank him for taking on the weight of it. Although protected, the family is constantly injured by the powers that protect it. The ending represents the culmination of the fairies plans, and provides an explanation of why the Tale is as it is, but it is hard not to feel sorry for the characters who have had to suffer through it, although they were always Somehow marked out for their fates from the start.
Posted by MFreestone at January 31, 2004 10:59 PM