Little, Big by John Crowley

Warning: heavy spoilers

Who is who:

• Daily Alice and Sophie Drinkwater—two sisters, live at Edgewood, their family house
• Smoky—Alice’s husband
• Auberon—their son
• Sylvie—Auberon’s True Love
• Ariel Hawksquill—a magician
• Violet Bramble—a great-grandmother of Sophie and Daily Alice

There are books with excellent style and rich but somewhat controversial content like One Hundred Years of Solitude. There are books with excellent style and rich content but with nothing truly fresh to offer, such as The House at the Edge of Night. And there are books like Little, Big.

In the matter of style, it’s a role model of how to make a rip off from Marquez and other detached-narration-magical-realism authors. In the matter of content, it’s a family saga so bland that Buddenbrooks look like an adventure novel in comparison to it. In the matter of controversy, it’s as unsettling as an average novel by Marquez. But, oh wait, Marquez’s books have many redeeming qualities when compared to it. There are terrible about sexual violence and sometimes even about paedophilia, but they also introduce strong-willed and cunning women such as Fermina Daza or Ursula Buendìa, and they give their female characters quite a lot of agency and airtime.

At Little, Big, meanwhile, there is a guy bedding sleeping women/sleeping with a girl who might have been his daughter and a guy taking photos of his little female relatives. Nobody seems to be alarmed with it. There’s is also the protagonist cheating on his wife with her sister for no apparent reason. And there is an ancestor of the main characters who started sleeping around and impregnating the girls from his neighbourhood basically because his mum had forbidden him to have a garage for his automobile. Powerful logic indeed. And female characters? One cunning sorceress engaged in Great Intrigue and Great Politics (Ariel Hawksquill) can’t make up for all the other women in the novel who often lack both airtime and agency. Daily Alice having her Big Moment at the end of the story isn’t any better fleshed out due to it. For most of the tale, she’s just tall and composed, and preoccupied with household and kids; that’s all we learn of her. Her sister Sophie has her kid taken by the faerie and that’s the main thing about her; her daughter Lilac is a stock mysterious changeling figure and nobody else. Sylvie is the Exotic Love Interest of Auberon, the second protagonist. Her character might have been fresh in the 1980s but from the current perspective, it’s apparently tainted with certain prejudices about Latin-American people and their supposed sensuality and superstition. And Violet Bramble, the ancestor of protagonists, is totally scatter-brained and depends entirely on her husband, as it is stated explicitly in narration.

Having analyzed male characters of the novel, though, I realized that the whole bland girls stuff might not be necessarily about intentious sexism. Because guys in Little, Big are as plain as women, and they equally, or even more, lack agency. Great things, such as Love, Business or Ideas, merely happen to them Deus ex Machina. Smoky’s life is about being married to Daily Alice. Their son Auberon’s life is about loving Sylvie and making drama because of her disappearance.

Deus ex Machina is the overall problem of this story anyway. Smoky and Alice fell for each other because they had to. Sylvie and Auberon fell for each other because they had to. Edgewood house went crumbling because so Buendìas’ house did to enable the characters to End the Tale. I know that for some other reader, it may be all fairytales-rules-aware or metatext writing, but to me it’s simply lazy.

And let’s not forget of, ekhm… The content itself. Because there’s supposedly some. There’s the whole Faery-mystery things and Edgewood’s ties to it on the one hand and reincarnated Emperor Barbarossa on the other one, yes?

The latter one is actually carried out in a good way even if it doesn’t entirely fit into the rest of the story—the very concept of “We’ll revive a mighty historical figure and he’ll turn out to be as much a charismatic jerk as he was in his own times spread havoc across the country” is damnably cool. But there’s one problem—the whole thread not only cuts off abruptly, but it isn’t truly connected to the rest of the plot. If Smoky&Co. are eventually forced to leave Edgewood, it has nothing to do with the revived Barbarossa. The reason is more about the Faery Thing. And the said Thing, I must admit, was a huge dissapointment to me throughout the most of the book.

Just thing what a premise it was: a family inhabiting a mysterious remote house-within-houses, a group of people with special ties to faery.

And what we actually get is a big house built in a mix of styles—that’s the whole secret—and a family whose dealings with fairies are either vague or ridiculous. We never get deep into the magical land, and we never learn anything significant about the faery. For books like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell it may work, as the references are numerous enough, but for Little, Big, it isn’t.

Can it be the question of a wrong premise or label? As for a book awarded with World Fantasy Award, I expected something more supernatural and speculative-concerned, but what I got is magical realism, which was, by the way, made more vivid by Marquez or Allende. Little, Big is merely a copy of books like these, with a pinch of English folklore and Western spiritualism, and with American aura added. And in comparison to them, nothing really happens at Edgewood or New York The City.

In a good family saga, one should be able to mark some periods or point turning points. It’s easy to do it with Buddenbrooks or with The House of Spirits. With Little, Big, it isn’t so obvious. The pace isn’t unclear or blurred; it’s just so undefined and bland that sometimes you just leaf through pages, wondering when, at last, there will be some new interesting fragment. And here “interesting” often turns creepy. Or half-baked.

The funniest thing is that the book isn’t truly boring or off-putting to me. I’ve read more controversial and more, much more bland works. Still, the true is that if not the ripped-off beautiful style, I would have marked it as a DNF stock magical-realism fantasy, I think.