Fantastic Metropolis

The domestic arrangements of the Drinkwater clan are incongruous in the modern world. Pacts are made—and broken—with the fairies; curses and blessings are traded like callow witticisms. Edgewood is threatened by another of Crowley’s militaristic autocrats, a reborn Barbarossa who decides to stamp non-conformists to dust. As his prime targets are those who revere the imagination, Edgewood, whose very fabric is stitched with the thread of the impossible, seems doomed. The Drinkwaters must defend themselves with a suitably imaginative ploy, though the cost is high. In this way, Little, Big resembles a less haughty version of Ernst Jünger’s marvellous novel, On the Marble Cliffs. They share a sense of impotence and sacrifice in the face of blustering dictatorial forces. Transported to the cosmos of “Faery”, the Drinkwaters are transmuted into suitably ethereal spirits. But in this form, Fairy-Land is no longer special; it is merely another prosaic abode. It is Alice who saves the clan, firstly in the flesh, to open the gateway between the dimensions; secondly, as a reborn soul, a symbol of immortal hope.

Packed with arcane learning and passages of dainty delight, Little, Big is simultaneously the most elegant and awry of Crowley’s books. But it is assured classic status. The same cannot be said for the Great Work of Time (1989), a short novel which demonstrated Crowley’s inability to develop sufficient force and motive in less than hundreds of pages. Not that this book is a failure; rather it appears to be a backwards step in the direction of The Deep. Crowley does not stumble over the edge of the unfathomable gulf, but he totters briefly, waving his arms and clasping at the most overworked sub-genre of all: chrono-paradox. The lessons of the Great Work of Time have already been learned—Bradbury taught them, among others; Moorcock and Barrington Bayley threw them out of the classroom window. Meddling with time, controlling history, will always prove catastrophic: this is formularistic stuff. At least Crowley suffuses the dead-end ironies of his parable with cruel wit.

Strangely, this story of an alternative Cecil Rhodes who controls a secret brotherhood of chronic-argonauts gains strength when printed with related work. In Crowley’s first anthology, Novelty, the tale rubs prose with the title piece, the tautologous ‘The Nightingales Sing At Night’ and ‘In Blue’. The last is particularly impressive. Once again, Crowley dips hands into the clay of a traditional SF theme—the dystopia—and moulds a fresh vessel. Again, it is a relatively shallow dish, holding hints of something much tastier. By this time, of course, he had turned into the victim of his own talent. Having sprung fully-grown from the head of SF, like Athene from Zeus’ bonce, he seemed to want to capture a denied childhood. His retrograde motion was partly frustrated by readers and reviewers who were racing in the other direction, trying to catch up with him. The collision had already resulted in some minor vignettes and deflected him into less wispy territory.

Crowley had finally discovered the idea of the linked sequence, the dragon-and-butter of many a lesser fantasy writer. AEgypt (1987) was the first part of a quartet which will surely take as long as a real pyramid to complete. Diphthong-heavy, this novel has been generally dismissed by critics. This is partly due to its hazy rigour and also because Little, Big has already been nominated as Crowley’s masterpiece. His efforts to trump that magnum opus are unwelcome; they confuse the issue. AEgypt was thus immediately divided by a veritable Nile of sniffy comment: gentle disparagement on one bank, faint praise on the other. It is true that it lacks a readily-digestible pattern, and the airy dialogue seems to skirt direct communication between the characters, but the magic of the whole is no less potent for this. Indeed, Crowley relies on a deceptively easy pace for his effects. In all his books, dialogue is oblique; Little, Big is full of mumbling, tongue-tied characters.

AEgypt is a neoplatonist text, which means delicacy and bookishness form its core. The country of the title is not the same as the cradle of our civilisation, noted for wading-birds and crocodiles, but a land more closely congruent with the Mediaeval idea of Africa, a place of fabulous creatures and dog-headed men. Again the plot centres on an inward voyage across the borders of improbable dimensions. The unique Edgewood truism, “The further in you go, the bigger it gets”, applies here in a narrower sense. The story’s taste is slightly musty, as if the author has licked all the shadows in a curio-shop. Imagine the fantasy genre lost in a House of Mirrors; the distortions are Crowley’s basic materials. Sometimes, his manipulations even manage to twist them back to normal.