A War, a Destiny, and Them

After having regrown a little bit of brain and ability to even after my dumb-books-only weekend away and with the move completed, I decided to revisit John Crowley’s Little, Big. I’d read this in my first semester at college and didn’t remember very much of it–it didn’t make much of an impression on me and I vaguely remembered it being very slow; the only bit that had stuck in my head after nearly seventeen years (!!!) was the bit where Sophie, after a youth spent dreaming profusely, laments how much time there is in the day to fill up when you don’t sleep through all of it. I don’t know why that bit stuck with me, but it did.

Upon revisiting, I can definitely see why younger me didn’t love it too much–it’s a slow, sprawling, domestic sort of book that’s mostly about love and marriage and children and only sometimes about fairies–but this time around I enjoyed it a lot. It predominantly tells the story of the lifecycle of a big, sprawling house with multiple fronts in different architectural styles, and of five or so generations of the family that live in it (and that live in some odd little tenements in the City, associated with the same architectural firm). There’s a lot of intimations about Something going on but it tends to take hundreds of pages for anyone to figure out what it is. One of the things I like about this book is that it doesn’t over-explain; in fact, it barely explains at all–a lot of the dialogue is about the family members who are more sort of in touch with the fairy world failing to be able to explain it to anyone else, and there are lots of little pieces that are eventually made clear enough for the reader to connect but there’s never any moment like “And that’s when so-and-so realized that Grandfather Trout was actually August!” the way there would be in… well, probably anything that was trying to be a little more commercial and a little less literary/magical-realism-y. The whole book has a sort of unsettled dreamy quality that I think I once found boring but this time really drew me in. (Also, the house has a Gothic bathroom.)

The book does have an actual plot and several subplots, they are just hard to explain and I don’t want to spoil them. Our main character, if there is one, in the beginning is Smoky Barnable, who marries into the family–and into the house. He is in some ways excluded from the family’s secrets, but he is definitely more bound to the house than many of the other family members. The timeline starts with his marriage to Daily Alice Drinkwater, and then flashes back to cover the previous generations of the family, and jumps around a lot. Later in the book we have the trials and tribulations of Smoky’s son, Auberon, who goes to the City to seek his fortune and has not at all the kinds of adventures he was expecting, and we have an ominous political situation involving a mysterious guy named Russell Eigenblick and a very powerful mage named Ariel Hawksquill, known to the youngest Barnables as the Lady with the Alligator Purse (this is my favorite touch in the whole book). But the absolutely most bonkers subplot is the story of Lilac, the illegitimate child of Daily Alice’s younger sister Sophie and–well, it depends who you ask, and whether or not they are lying to you. But the three Lilacs and their various mysterious disappearances are definitely the strangest and most overtly fantastic parts of the story, and they are also very creepy, which I liked.

At any rate, I am glad I reread this and I’d definitely recommend it highly if you are looking for some adult (as in for people with a few years under their belts, not as in Adult Content) fantasy and like big weird houses.