The Engineer of Summer
The Work of John Crowley
Aesop has a fable about a lion and a mouse. The former spares the life of the latter on a whim; later the rodent rescues the captured beast by gnawing through a net which entangles him. The moral: change of fortune can make the strong man need a weaker man’s help. But it is never stated precisely to what end. The novels of John Crowley provide the answer, venturing beyond the platitude-horizon to further examine relationships based on power and debt, intrigue and compromise. Armed with semantic spanners and verbal calculus, he has harnessed fabulism’s oily truths: they power the machineries of his prose.
The leonine Crowley, with his huge mane and beard, is a technical savant in the soft sense. His work takes as much from other writers in the genre as from real science or real psychology. It is often remarked that he makes complete use of what has gone before. While it is true he creates nothing new, this should not be held against him. His strengths lie in consolidating the gains of his forerunners, juxtaposing existing themes and standards, sharpening vague notions. He is less a pioneer of science-fiction than a literary engineer.
He is also markedly unprolific. Half a dozen books alone attest to his achievement. Nor are these volumes, with one exception, particularly lengthy. They are densely written and feel much longer than they really are, consisting of many layers of strata, each level suggesting varying interpretations, the end result being a fusion of disparate parts into a greater sum. It is the gestalt cliché with a difference: the plethora of meanings are available for access by the consciousness. Surreal they are not, despite the assurances of several critics; they are not intended to slip into the mind unannounced. Crowley’s manners are impeccable; always he knocks on the lid of his reader’s cranium and requests admittance. If anything, his visits are taciturn and wary.
Born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942, Crowley was educated at the University of Indiana and worked as a photographer and commercial artist immediately after his graduation. Rather surprisingly, he became a full-time writer in 1966. The decade between the start of his writing career and publication of his first book remains slightly mysterious. Whatever he wrote in this time forms no discernible part of his oeuvre. Like Samuel Delany, who launched himself with a novel, Crowley bypassed the general route of short-stories and dove headfirst into the melting-pot of SF. It was an unconventional move, and his work sank like a stone pillar, only to be dredged to the surface by later admirers. At the time, like many such debuts, it was virtually ignored.
First published in 1975, The Deep barely hints at the lyricism of Crowley’s mature books. Yet for all its limitations it is a haunting text, with elaborate plotting and a rich tapestry of pithy characters. As a plain story it is both confusing and confused, but as a slice of a genuinely weird reality it is a work of near brilliance. The taste of a whole society is made concrete through expert description and powerful dialogue. Mouths full of wise saws and magic formulae, the protagonists manage to dance on puppet strings without losing their integrity. It is a difficult trick to pull off first time.
The language of The Deep is as dark as the world it depicts. Across a disc suspended over an abyss, feudal armies surge and slay. Far below, sleepy Leviathan clings to the adamantine pillar which holds the world up. After a generation of enforced peace, the Reds and the Blacks, the two factions seeking to run the land, decide to sound the war-viols and slaughter each other. There is much head-lopping, imprisonment in chilly castles, retreats through bottleneck passes, feasts and betrayals. The stage for these theatrical devices consists mostly of moor, plain and rock. The plot, which reruns the Wars of the Roses, and mixes equally indigestible Celtic and Biblical mythology, rapidly becomes too tangled to follow. The fact that many characters have similar names increases the confusion—but this is the point.
For all its dark charms, The Deep is too coarse to merit comparison with Crowley’s second novel. Published the following year, Beasts is one of his three contributions to the highest shelf of SF, a hallowed place where the best of the Golden Age authors nestle next to the few balanced surfers of the New Wave. In Beasts, we meet Aesop’s lion, a doomed noble figure, product of genetic experiments in the twilight years of the old United States. This is no twee parable, but a cleverly-woven account of a Balkanised future, where regional governments battle against a newly resurgent centralist tyranny. Beasts is concerned with the struggle (a familiar enough one in SF) between romantic libertarianism and absolute authority. The beasts of the title side with the rebels: it is a futile resistance, but one which ironically allows them to best express their optimism. Painter, the lion-man, is a messiah of darkness, but a warm darkness: he preaches the rule of the heart, with all its cruelty and compassion. It is his sheer humanity that encourages his human friend, Meric Landseer, to follow him into exile.
