Fantastic Metropolis

Despite similar trappings, Beasts is all that H.G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau is not. The perception of Painter and of Reynard, the fox-man, and even of Sweets, the genetically altered dog, serves not to show the distance of humanity from its senses, but the intimacy. Here, Crowley is aligned with the kingdom of feelings over the republic of reason, yet he knows the latter is sure to conquer. This acceptance lends Beasts a dour sort of sprightliness, a melancholy joy. The lion is caught in the net time after time; it is the nature of independence to be hunted down by the soulless. However, Crowley is not backward-looking; he is able to visualise a compromise, beneficial to both, something which sets him far apart from writers who make use of similar material for reactionary and technophobic ends. Paradoxically, for all his use of fantasy and fairy imagery, he is the ultimate realist.

Crowley’s third novel, Engine Summer (1979), is one of the great SF novels of the modern age, combining the energy and philosophy of his two earlier works with a new kind of sensuous beauty and a yearning quality almost unparalleled in the genre. The novel’s structure and dynamic are extremely complex without being awkward: as the story unfolds, clarity is gradually earned, not through the resolution of fictional events but by an alteration in the reader’s approach to the narrative. As with many of his works, Engine Summer is set in a near-future, after the collapse of the western economies. Post-Catastrophe communities have emerged, but these are not desperate times; over the rustic commune of Little Belaire an almost idyllic ambience has settled. Yet the story of Rush Who Speaks and his search for his lost love, Once A Day, is a surface fantasy. The veneer is quickly scraped off during the quest. Rush That Speaks has to journey beyond the borders of his haven, into a world still tainted with memories of our earlier age. Absorbing knowledge from his dealings with ancient sources, he discovers disappointment. It is Odin trading his eye for wisdom again; the lachrymose truth that the ability to register joy cannot be extended without its own loss.

The technicalities of Engine Summer are aesthetically pleasing. The world of Rush That Speaks looks back at our own in the same way that the real narrator regards Little Belaire. For Rush That Speaks is merely a recording crystal doomed to forever replay his life for the benefit of another future age. The irony of this is that the characters wish only to know and speak truth, to become transparent. Rush That Speaks attains this wish in a practical mode, his personality crystallised and subject to the penetrating will of his descendants. When he is switched off, at the end, his rest—though temporary—is deserved. Readers who persist this far, through the maze of plot, character and expression, are in a similar position: true empathy has been achieved, if not true sympathy. A primeval familiarity is gained, the text becomes archetypal. Crowley’s skill at slotting myth sideways into reality, rather than overlaying it on modern concerns, reveals a cunning adaptive mind at work. He perfects what others hardly know they have created.

During the writing of Engine Summer, Crowley finally decided to try his hand at a couple of short-stories. ‘Antiquities’ appeared in 1977, to be followed by ‘Where Spirits Gat Them Home’, both enjoyable and fay pieces of nonsense exuding an air of what can be described as exuberant gloom. As John Barth, an author with obvious similarities to Crowley, once remarked: “Writers tend by temperament to be either sprinters or marathoners.” Like Barth, Crowley is in the latter category. The short form is not his cup of nectar-and-oil. His best efforts in this field came a little later: ‘The Green Child’ in 1981 and ‘Snow’ in 1985, one of the better stories published in the magazine OMNI. It is tempting to think of Crowley’s short fiction as mere doodles, the ticking over of the machine while the driver was asking directions from SF pedestrians. Several maps were drawn on the back of an old genre, the driver pulled away and followed them all simultaneously.

They led him into the realm of the Alternative-Universe theme. The tome which resulted is Crowley’s best book, the remarkable Little, Big. Published in 1981, having been worked on intermittently for ten years, the novel won the World Fantasy Award and was showered with favourable reviews. To describe Little, Big as a ‘fantasy’ is slightly misleading. Though concerned with many of the elfin trappings of homely fairy-tale, a quick peep behind the William Morris curtains reveals something closer to mainstream satire. The book begins awkwardly, though comfortingly; it seems that Crowley is as unlikely to reach a worthwhile destination as his pedagogic hero, Smoky Barnable. Fifty pages later, these doubts are largely extinguished. On his way to marry Alice Drinkwater, the utterly charming heroine, in her family manse at Edgewood, Smoky turns memories in his mind, accompanied by a poignant sense of longing. But now Crowley springs a surprise: in Little, Big, the present is always more nostalgic than the past. Alice’s family are eccentrics who can communicate with an invisible realm of “little people.”