3 of 3 members found this review helpful.
“I don't quite know what to say about this book, and though I've said this before about other books I mean it probably more literally in this case than in any other. The first two or three chapters were pure bliss, sheer romance and pleasure, in every word and every image, some of the best prose fiction I've ever read. Then things dried out a little bit, but still remained captivating and rich and had a uniquely pleasing texture found in few other places. But starting at the beginning of part three, Little, Big takes numerous curious turns which eventually left me wondering why I was still reading at all.
Don't get me wrong. It's not the meandering, slowly-paced quality of the book, often cited by other negative reviewers, which I dislike. I love books like that, in which I can immerse myself and get lost in the Story. But there is very little Story here, instead, a "Tale" whose beginning and ending are admittedly too remote to see clearly (a conceit I actually like a lot, but which starts to fail around the point mentioned above), the turnings and descents and ascents, sometimes large, sometimes small, are detailed in these mid to later chapters. The problem is that while every sentence has a double meaning lingering between the lines, and every minor movement seems to whisper, Great and Important Events are happening here, Something Big is coming, nothing great or important or big ever really does seem to happen. It's like a promise delayed, a payment deferred, which I can tolerate, but at the scale of a hundred or two pages of deferment, it gets hard to remain patient without some payoff of at least a small kind. What the reader gets instead is increasing promises of payoff, but no actual hint of one. And that continued to be the case even to the end of the book, which had far too ambiguous of a conclusion considering how much time I had invested in it, trusting the author against my better judgment that it would eventually be worth it. If I'd known it would be this way before I started the book, I never would have read it.
Another criticism is the flavor of the book. I don't refer to the style here, which is next to masterful -- but rather the flavor. It is a book about a family history, about secret currents in world history, about fairies. But the flavor is far from what one might expect, and I am not sure that this is a good thing. Rather than the ravishing romantic air of the fairy tales of Lewis or MacDonald (who is actually referenced once early in the book), or the aged, epic formality of Tolkien's legendarium, or the smartly fantastic weavings of a modern writer such as Neil Gaiman, or rather even than something colored by tradition and folklore, Crowley's flavor comes out as a sort of bizarrely convoluted, New Age antiquarianism. It's no secret that I am no fan of New Age, but this flavor's effect on me is more sheerly puzzling than off-putting.
As to the positives: Little, Big is a magical Tale about a family plagued by business with the fairies, with the fairies usually off to the side, if glimpsed at all then glimpsed out of the corner of your eyes. The story spans about a hundred years, following the history of the house Edgewood, which is really many houses in one house, and its inhabitants and neighbors. My favorite parts were the romance of Smoky and Alice, the history of August Drinkwater, the descriptions of Old Law Farm, and Auberon's childhood. While later portions of the book were long, dry deserts following the lush oases of the beginnings, I did appreciate Crowley's lucidity in painting a possible American near-future, strangely realistic: of an "aged and paralytic welfare state", plagued by endless depression, ready and waiting to be taken over by a tyrant.
In conclusion, while Little, Big seems to have an entire cult following, and praise from Harold Bloom, one of the English language's most well-respected modern day literary critics, as well as all of the elements I most enjoy in a book, I felt it a chore rather than a pleasure to read it and often wished I could just put it down and find something better. What kept me going was the memory of its earlier lushness and greatness, which, in the end, did not seem to justify my faith. ”
Michael wrote this review Wednesday, July 22 2009.
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