Fantastic Metropolis

After another lengthy period of gestation, he attempted to cool the brow of fantasy with the reserved Love and Sleep (1994). This is a quiet and sombre work: the dusky prose is less dark than that of The Deep, but evokes a gloomier mood, though the bleakness is distorted and disguised, wrapped in bedsheets like a sleeping failure. More than his other books since that first novel, Love and Sleep has been ignored by establishment and honest public. It is a difficult book to obtain and not really worth the search, though it has a controlled passion and delicate intensity, a clean bluster about the edges of the ideas, which make it seem a genuine fusion between the classical and romantic aesthetic. Whether such an odd blend has a future, whether it might mature in the little room under the genre stairs, is hard to ascertain. Crowley has done it before: striking Little, Big with a hammer will spill more love and sleep onto the ground than any book too involved in bedroom theory. Perhaps the volume is just a spanner for the adjustment of future work.

John Crowley, with infinite care, has woven a net to catch readers of fantasy fiction. In the woodlands of imaginative writing, his snares are hard to avoid. It is the lion’s turn to capture his prey: the callow dreams that still sparkle beneath the veneer of cynicism. Ironically, in this conceit, the mouse—George Mouse, Edgewood eccentric, one of the most touching characters in Little, Big—colludes in the hunt and gnaws nothing. Even familiarity, it seems, can be forged anew. Haunting as he is, appraisals of Crowley are always affected by his invisible presence and snatch unwisely at his transforming style.

It is difficult not to respond to Crowley’s vision on an archetypal level, or to disentangle a pysche from his mystic webs. Aesop Redivivus, screwdriver in paw, he rewires the circuits of the Fable, activating the psycho-Summer with the friction of prose on mind. It is the season as it no longer is: as it never really was. Under its sun, his shadow nudges other genres; his volumes fall over ideas like mathematical sets. Rather than trying to struggle in the net, it is better to be hauled high into the Visitor’s Gallery of the Fairies’ Parliament, to take the proffered seat and hear out the entire proceedings.

This profile was first published in The Zone magazine (Issue #5, Spring 1997.)