Book Notes: Beasts; Engine Summer; Little, Big (all John Crowley)

[rax]

So for a few years I've had a random three in one huge paperback thing including Beasts, Engine Summer, and Little, Big by John Crowley on the shelf, and I've always meant to read them (in my hilarious failure to read speculative fiction a few years back I went to find a book by him and ended up with The Translator [0]). The last couple of flights I brought the huge paperback with me so that I would read the novels contained therein, and I have thoughts about each of them, so I figured I would blog about it so y'all can read something that's not a tasklist. I'm not planning to reveal any endings or anything, but I will cut-tag for spoilers just in case.

Beasts (1976) presents a future in which human/lion hybrids fight for something approaching rights in an America where the accessible tech level has declined sharply for all but the most powerful. Themes of human/animal interaction and intertwining run throughout the novel, and there are some beautiful moments where similarities and differences that often go undernoticed are cast into light by the novel's plot. In addition, there is a Reynard, and he is a good Reynard, although not the best; I collect Reynards and I'm glad to add him to my list. On the whole, though, the book isn't very good. The beginning is really clumsily written, although it hits its stride later. It's not really clear what happened to fuck everything up techwise and politically. The lion-people are described with language I'm used to seeing racialized in the 1800s and it creeps me out kinda and while this may be the point I don't think it was managed super well. The female character who has Protected Her Precious Virginity In Slavery but then falls into bed with the lead lion within a day because he is soooooooo sexy grates and doesn't turn into what she could have. The gay character only having interest in boys, not men, is really itchy. Overall unless you're really looking for a good Reynard I'd pass on this one.

Engine Summer (1979) I'm not really sure how to write about. It was definitely my favorite of the three and the one I would recommend to others. It's a post-apocalyptic novel about the journey of a character who wishes to become a saint without quite understanding what a saint is. The world is much more fleshed out here than in Beasts; there are multiple believable societies who have picked bits and pieces of mythology out of what came before them, there's a better sense of how things got here without too much time being wasted on it, and while the characters are a bit ethereal they work and their interactions are interesting. The journeying is interesting and recognizing the husks of our civilization is always an apocalyptic treat. (Oh, that's a highway! I get it now.) The whole time I was reading it I wanted a machine that would let me distill books into themes so that I could use the machine on Engine Summer and Riddley Walker [1] and then take a diff of what came out. There's clearly something going on in Engine Summer that's not going on in other apocalyptic fiction but I'm not sure what it is, and I think if I could put my finger on it, I'd like the book more. Right now I can't help but think of it as "Riddley Walker, but with magic." Has anyone else read both of these books? Help?

Little, Big (1981) gives me such mixed feelings. It's a novel that spans generations about a family in upstate New York living in a house that gives them a connection to the world of the Fae, or maybe they have the connection and they imbue the house with its Fae-connectedness, or maybe something else, but the connection is definitely focused on their family and the house and the intersection. This is all well and good. The storytelling wanders between different characters and paints some members of the family in great detail and others in lesser; this is very well handled, I think, although occasionally I lost track of minor characters and just accepted them as "one of the ancillary people or maybe their kid, whichever." There are structural reasons there need to be many characters --- the structure of the book is frankly brilliant and folds on itself in fascinating ways and obviously involved something along the lines of a giant bulletin board with lots of index cards and thread. This book, too, extends into a near future where some sort of collapse is happening and people farm in New York City and the non-elite lose access to technological resources; it fits here better than in Beasts, but the causes for this are definitely abstracted away.

For all that the book is awesome, though, there are some things in it that gross me out. Some of the main characters are blatantly and awkwardly racist, in ways that are uncomfortable to read and not really undercut by the narrative. The narration itself is uncomfortable at times ("Negroes" in 1981? Really? Really?) and the fact that the character of color (a Puerto Rican woman who is a real developed character but whose family and background are kind of cardboard cutout, admittedly shown through the eyes of a racist white kid from upstate fairlyand) who also has the fairy magic is secretly part of the main family because of one-night stand shenanigans is kind of ick. Magic done by non-white actors is presented as dirtier or more dubious (although still effective) and the named black character speaks in awkward dialect, acts as a guide to white characters, and then when he's gotten the white characters into Fairyland, gets turned into a tree for his trouble. Ew. :( It's also kind of gross about queer stuff but I found that a lot more forgettable/ignorable.

Little, Big got me thinking about how fairyland-as-a-parallel-to-here-accessed-though-an-endless-forest functions as a trope, though, and what it depends on. I don't think it strictly requires that most or all of the characters involved be white, although I've always seen it done that way. (Were all of the characters in The Great Night white? I forget. ^^;;) The Fae can be written many different ways, or maybe not even be there. The forest, though, seems structural; what would it look like to go through desert to get to fairyland? Arctic tundra? Ocean between islands? I suspect that different places grow different kinds of myths but I also wonder about the transposition; I spend time wandering through what feels like endless desert, and I want to know, what sort of Fairlyand would I get to if I walked in one too many circles and didn't come back out at the trailhead? The couple of books I've read like this drew really heavily on First Nations mythology, and that's potentially really interesting (and potentially really exploitative!) but not what I'm thinking of here. Has anyone put the path to Fairyland not in the forest but in the desert, or somewhere else, and seriously explored what that shift would mean? I'm kind of tempted to try, but I'm woefully underread in this genre and don't even really know where to start research.

[0] Ruth has a reading of the book in which the main character is actually an angel and everything is taking place on a symbolic level, and while I find this reading really interesting, I don't personally find it compelling as the reality --- whatever that means --- of what's taking place in the novel. Your mileage may vary.

[1] Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban, is a post-apocalyptic novel written in the first person in the pidgin language left over from English after what is presumed to be a nuclear war. It's frickin' brilliant, it takes a lot of effort but if you are up to learning almost a new language by reading a book written in it, go read it. 

Comments

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Sometimes the path to fairlyland is through a closet? (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?) Maybe that's different, it just occurred to me and I didn't know if it really applied.

I guess that's not so much a 'fairyland' in the sense of 'inhabited by fairies/other fae creatures'.

To reach Neverland, I guess you fly (instead of going through a forest). Might also be slightly different.

I think this is probably evidence this isn't particularly my area of expertise and I should hush up :)

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

Lev Grossman is topical in two ways. In his The Magicians and The Magician King he has a city between the worlds, obviously inspired by Lewis' Wood, but except for taking it physically as a place in a couple instances that doesn't seem to change so much the nature of the stories. (The characters do speculate about who built the city, and how, and why, but the plots don't really explore this yet.) He also, in The Magician King, writes a Reynard, so if you collect them there's one to add to your set, but his is really not one of the better ones.

Bear's Faerie in the Promethean Age books (Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water, Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth) is the closest I've seen a Fairyland done with not-all-white characters. (Not without problems -- see RaceFail! -- but done, at all.)

There at least Bear's fairyland is explicitly tied to the mythology of the British Isles. I think that tie is usually present for American writers, implicitly or explicitly, and that is part of why their fairylands are often accessed via forests, and why the fairylands you see accessed via deserts are tied to First Nations mythology. (Or could be Arabic mythology, or Mongolian, to pick two other desert civilizations.)

Honestly I think being well-read in genre is overrated for writers of that genre -- not critically so, but some -- and I think you underestimate how much you've read, to say nothing of how much you've picked up by cultural osmosis. By which I mean, I wouldn't let it stop you if it's something you want to try. :-)

[rivenwanderer.livejournal.com]

I extremely love the feel of Little, Big and its setting and its dizzying meta-ness. But problematic things are pretty problematic, and I definitely keep having "whoa, um?" moments during my reread.

[kelkyag]

More thoughts later, but a few immediate ones.

Oz is a magical land, if not strictly a fairy land, surrounded by a "impassable" desert that can only be crossed by magic (or possibly airflight in extreme weather -- not sure if magic is required in those cases, but there are a number of detailed magical crossings). I believe Ozma is actually a fairy, with a backstory something like "a/the fairy queen found this boring land surrounded by an impassable desert, thought that a terrible waste, and assigned someone from her court to take charge of the place".

The forest as a (wild) place of transformation is certainly a recurring theme in european fairy tales. One doesn't necessarily get to fairy lands via the woods, but one goes into the woods and learns or is changed before returning. (One of my books talks about this idea in a modern fairy tale context, need to find/review it.)

Getting to fairy land by way of an unremarkable garden gate is also a trope that leaps to mind -- there being places that exist both here and there where one can cross, some by accident and some only if one knows what one is doing.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I tried reading Little, Big a few times a while back and really just couldn't connect to it.

I'd be tempted to play with putting the path to Fairyland in the desert, but my upcoming story about fairies is quite resolutely set in New Orleans. Not much desert there.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I have not read Riddley Walker, but I can go on and on and on about Engine Summer. (There are reasons my username is my username everywhere I can get it.) I don't have a favorite book, but if I do it's probably Engine Summer.

There's the meta-play of the book's structure, for one-- every time I reread the book I experience it as a different playthrough of the crystal, because inevitably, due to the nature of attention, I emphasize different details to myself with every rereading, am a slightly different person doing the rereading even if I literally close the book at the end and turn back to the first page. Rush is explicitly in-text in a position that many fictional characters are in implicitly simply by being fictional characters, living many lives between being born and dying, all of them the same life, sparked in the heads of the readers and contingent on those readers' own personalities and quirks. The in-text player of the crystal is in some ways the reification of a set of reader-reactions which John Crowley may or may not wish the actual reader to have; through that present but mostly de-emphasized mediation Crowley has a means of commenting on the gap between author and text, the gap between semiotic intent and produced meaning, and the processes in the readers' minds which make up the act of reading itself. I admire that so hard. And one thing Crowley says quite firmly is that every reader is valuable: this particular runthrough was the only one in which the fly in amber, an obvious but handy little piece of allegorical foreshadowing, was present. So Engine Summer is a book which has helped me look at my own internal processes of reading, and which helps me remember that reading is a valuable thing, both on an individual and a societal level. The actions which take place during reading are at one and the same time so societally normalized (in the social class I am part of) and so societally marginalized (in, annoyingly enough, the same social class) that I can only conclude that there is something going on there which is profoundly socially terrifying, and I find it useful to be reminded of that thing's value.

Then, of course, there's the question of genre. The broader genre is science fiction (I'm not sure where you're getting the magic? Every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from, etc., but I think it's important to what Crowley's doing that he presents the elements of Engine Summer as advanced/alien technology). The slightly narrower genre is post-apocalyptic fiction. Now in my experience there are three general routes people go with post-apocalyptic novels, and they are: 1) utopian society; 2) dystopian society; 3) one of the first two leading to the other. The impulse to put a utopian society after an apocalypse comes about because the starting conditions for most utopian societies are so different from what we have now that you need an apocalypse to create those starting conditions. The impulse to put a dystopian society after an apocalypse comes about because of the obviously terrible conditions brought about by an apocalypse, such as shortages of basic necessities, and the historically visible trend of those who desire power profiting from times of privation and upheaval. And quite frequently a dystopian society is turned into a utopian one because the author has faith in a utopian element of human nature or at least in the badassery of a protagonist; while, and this is one of the things that makes Engine Summer so interesting, a utopia turns into a dystopia because the author can think of perfectly reasonable human beings who would just hate living in any proposed utopian society the author can come up with. Engine Summer-- the only book I have ever seen do this-- is a collection of tiny pocket utopias, each one suited very well to the people who live in them, and really not suited at all to a different kind of person. Which makes it a greatly successful utopian novel, to my mind, because in a world composed entirely of interdependent yet separate pocket utopias, there should at least theoretically be a society which will be a utopia for any given person, if that person just goes looking for it long enough.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

cont. in next comment for length issues

If you are psychologically suited to living in Little Belaire, you will probably not be happy in Dr. Boots' List, and vice versa. Nor would you be happy in the sky-platform of the angels, or in a single nuclear family unit, or as a hermit. But all of them are valid ways of living, different and equally interesting modes of human experience. Once a Day knew perfectly well where she did not belong, and very sensibly went to where she did. Rush's problem is that he was already living where he belonged. He left his utopia because of his infatuation, which was his mistake to make-- you will note nobody stops him from making it-- and significantly failed at making himself into a person who could fit in as well in other places as he had at his first home. This changes his existential status from that of a citizen of utopia, whose only goals are to exist and to be happy, into the more melancholy and yet more common goal of being historically remembered, of synthesizing something about the world around him, of putting the pieces of a plot-puzzle together, of becoming a saint.

That ambition, once achieved, is incompatible with the life of a citizen of utopia... which is why we do not know what happens to Rush after the impression of the crystal. But I have always hoped he went home and lived there happily, because Little Belaire does not seem to me to be the sort of place where knowing too much about the outer world would destroy your ability to be in it; rather the opposite, honestly.

I mentioned that I think it's important that the speculative elements of the book are presented as technology rather than as magic, and I think it is, because of the historical dimension. Dr. Boots, and the crystal, and the angel city, are all human far-futuretech; the Four Pots and the bubbles they smoke in Little Belaire are alien; truthful speaking seems to be a form of meditation or internal thought process raised to the level of technology via long practice and is understood by most of its practitioners on the level in which many people in our society understand the internal combustion engine, i.e., not very well but they use it every day. If any of these were magic, the question would arise as to why they are not usable now, in our society; the magic would set a barrier between that world and ours, since even in a 'return of magic' story one is aware that in our current universe we just do not think that is a thing that will ever happen. The bubbles are implausible, Dr. Boots is implausible, truthful speaking is implausible as all get out-- but none of them are things that are entirely known to be outside the realms of possibility. Crowley's utopias are founded on things which are very unlikely, but it is important, when one is trying to say something real about human nature via presenting a utopia, that they not be founded on genuine impossibility, or on a fundamental change to human nature itself. If I found my utopian society on the idea that there is magic which has made everybody nice, I may still be able to say things about what I think humans would do if our nature was changed so that everybody is nice, but I can't say that those people are still us. In fact the gulf between them and us is unbridgeable. Interesting, and possibly fictionally useful, but unbridgeable. Whereas, if there is alien tech which makes people nicer because everybody is slightly stoned all the time, well, people who are slightly stoned all the time quite often are nicer, if more likely to do stupid shit, and hey, alien drugs, maybe they all don't have that problem. Expose a person from here-and-now to similar stimuli, and you may well get a similar result. At any rate you can see how Crowley got to Little Belaire from here-and-now people. The SF nature is what makes a utopia psychologically convincing.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

and again, length issues

Anyhow. Ursula Le Guin, in an essay about utopias, discussed the concepts of yin and yang as she understood them in the process of translating Taoist texts, and said that most utopias she had encountered are yang: loud, bright, centralized, technologized, warm, outgoing, powerful, read-as-conventionally-masculine, strong. She wondered what a yin utopia would look like, quiet, weak, decentralized, not culturally focused on technology, cold, dark, inward-turning, read-as-conventionally-feminine. The world, for her, is not complete without both yin and yang. Her Always Coming Home is an attempt to write a yin utopia. Engine Summer is the other thing I've seen which comes the closest to it.

... I'll shut up now, because I really could keep going, and it's late and I am exhausted beyond measure from Readercon, which btw had gender-neutral bathrooms this year, and openly genderqueer people who aren't me, and though the work there is not done it has been definitely firmly started, so that was nice to see.

Should I read Riddley Walker? Do you think I'd like it?