Thoughts on Little, Big -- part 1

John Crowley’s Little, Big; or, The Fairies’ Parliament (1981, World Fantasy Award 1982) is something of a masterpiece. I say that with all due caution: I think very highly of a number of authors and books, but I don’t know of too many fantasy or scifi books that I’d call “masterpieces.” I’m sure there are those who would list Frank Herbert’s Dune, or Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, but I wouldn’t. Those books are superb, no question about it, but when you use a word like “masterpiece” you really need (in my view) to be talking about something that can sit comfortably next to the greats of English-language literature of any kind, in any era. And Little, Big really does achieve this.

Which makes it very difficult to say anything significant in a short blog entry….

As I’ve said before in this blog, a central difficulty about fairies in fiction is that they’ve got to be utterly alien, wildly unlike us, and yet somehow recognizable. When you read Irish fairy tales, it soon becomes clear that there are rules and structures which guide how fairies act, where they live, what you should and shouldn’t do around them, and so forth, and yet people always screw these up. They walk off the path, they eat and drink, they dance with the wrong people, they ask for or give names, and so forth. One interpretation of this is that there is a system of rules, strange but reasonably consistent, and these tales are in a sense cautionary, telling listeners what the rules are and why they should be obeyed.

That this interpretation doesn’t work, narratively, is proven by most of the untold numbers of “fae” (or whatever) novels that glut the shelves. If the fairies work like this, it’s boring. I know everyone adores Jim Butcher’s books, but as soon as Harry starts messing around with Unseelie Courts and all that, I get very bored. Fairies turn out, in this kind of work, to be people with odd powers and a kind of maddeningly narrow-minded self-righteousness—and yet we’re supposed to be caught up in the “wonder” of it. Blah. Tolkien has much the same problem: sure, Elrond is ridiculously old, but most of his vaunted wisdom is told and not shown—we don’t see much display of it—and as for Lothlorien, Celeborn is a remarkably uninteresting character even for Tolkien (who wasn’t great, let’s face it, on three-dimensional characterization).

You can just go with the “utterly alien” bit easily enough—strong scifi or horror monsters are your guide—but then fairies cease to be, well, fairies. So how do you solve the problem?

Crowley’s solution in Little, Big is so stunningly simple—and so amazingly difficult to pull off—that it boggles the mind.

Consider:

Every fairy-tale, every Tale, is simultaneously perfectly internally consistent and wildly illogical and convoluted. It has absolute rules that can’t be broken, except that they get broken. It makes perfect sense to the fairies who are in it, telling it, being told by it—which are all the same thing—and very little sense to anyone outside. To those on the outside, it all seems weirdly familiar and completely alien. Characters do things that don’t make any sense and yet are perfectly sensible to them, and when they do these things we somehow think simultaneously that these actions are inexplicable and real.

Okay, so suppose you have a reasonably complex and convoluted family, living mostly together across a few generations in a big house. Depending on where you focus your attention, everything that happens will be completely mundane and uninteresting, just what always happens, hear it every day—and at the same time, everything will be totally bizarre, you’ve never heard anything like it, impossible to explain. Because actually the intricacies of the fine details of how ordinary people live their lives are completely bizarre, if you choose to interpret them so.

To take a very drastic example (not one Crowley uses, let it be said), what has to happen to a marriage, initially happy, for it to end with a husband beating his wife repeatedly, her lying to everyone she knows about it, and him ultimately murdering her? On the one hand, this horrid story is before us every day, in the news, in TV, wherever we look—even, all too often, in our neighborhoods. On the other hand, how do you actually explain any of that? Suppose you wanted to write it as a short story, and you set certain rules:

1. The man is not intrinsically a bad person, a monster or psychopath, but just an ordinary man;

2. The man’s actions must be so internally consistent with his character, her character, and the history of the marriage, that when the murder takes place the reader thinks, “yes, I can entirely understand that he did this and why”;

3. Under no circumstances may the man’s actions be justified: we have to understand what he does, even empathize (which is not to say sympathize), but the responsibility for his monstrous crime must lie absolutely and unquestionably with him alone.

What would it take to achieve this? I mean, what sort of writing could pull this off?

Now consider again: this dreadful tale could be a Tale. The ending is inevitable, like fate, the workings-out of fae necessity. Everything done or thought by every character is part of it. And yet every part of it is also completely free: the man can’t claim, “fate made me do it,” because nobody made him do anything. Nevertheless, that he did it was entirely fated, and the whole awful history of this marriage was and is a Tale.

In that case, the man and the woman and everyone else caught in this would be completely familiar to us and yet completely alien. The unfolding events would be all-too-expected and totally bizarre. At a distance, not knowing any of what’s really going on in these people’s heads and hearts, we’d say, “sure, happens every day, and a hateful, awful story it is too.” But if we knew everything inside, we’d be forced to say, “these people only seem like us; actually, deep down, they’re really very much unlike us.” Or perhaps the other way around.

And that’s Crowley’s magical trick.

As the book progresses, two things happen, perfectly synchronized. 

On the one hand, the characters become more and more familiar, more and more human and comprehensible, and the whole “fairy” thing seems to recede into the background. It’s constantly hinted, there’s bits everywhere, but the whole magical wonder of the fairies here-and-now fades a bit. In part I suppose that the constant hinting makes it a little less surprising when it does come into the foreground, but the main thing is that the more dramatically bizarre fairy actions seem increasingly to be things that happened in the past and don’t now.

On the other hand, the whole world in which the characters live becomes slowly but surely stranger, less familiar, although it’s familiar to us because we experience it through them. The bits that happen around the turn of the 20th century are set in an upstate New York that could be lifted out of any novel of the period. The bits that happen late in the 20th century aren’t quite here, but in a New York (state and city) that started the same as ours but somehow deviated from it in subtle but meaningful ways.

The result, of course, is that at the end the difference between over there in Fairy and right here in New York has become largely a matter of interpretation, and the difference between these very human (all-too-human) characters we’ve grown to love and the alien, bizarre fairies about whom we know perhaps less and less has become vanishingly slight. It turns out we’ve been reading a huge Fairy Tale from the outset, only we got suckered into thinking we were reading a family-chronicle novel with magical hints. Or maybe we’ve been reading a family-chronicle novel and got suckered into thinking we were reading a Fairy Tale. Or maybe there’s no difference.

What if what makes the fairies so completely alien is that they’re exactly like we are?

John Crowley’s Little, Big. Read it and—literally—weep.