Anybody else think this was one of the most brilliant evocations of the hippie spirit of the sixties ever put on paper, and the most imaginative fairy story ever written?
Man, it would make a good movie. I think the film “Photographing Fairies” (IIRC) was kinda close but set in the wrong milieu. It was the combination of pot-hazed hippiedom with hazy Victorian fantasies that really made the book work.
Plus, I wanna live in that house they lived in.
All I can remember of it is that the book was one long slog during which I kept hoping that something interesting would happen.
It was a difficult book to get through, but at the end I thought it was possibly the best fantasy ever written.
Although I liked the book over all, I had one major criticism.
I just can’t remember what it was.
Does Grandfather Trout still post here? I don’t think I’ve seen him in a while.
I admit that I’m not very smart, but I could not follow this book at all. Have tried a number of times over the past few years cause I keep seeing it referred to as “the greatest fantasy ever”. Could somebody explain to me why it was supposed to be so good? Oh, and what it was about?
I’m really glad they’ve relaxed the rules on reviving threads, because I went back and ordered a copy of Little, Big and reread it. Very different experience the second time around.
It’s a hard story to describe simply because it’s a complex, sprawling story with a lot of subtle things happening in a lot of subtle ways. I doubt if I can do it justice in one post without making things extremely long, so I guess I’ll just do a short version and then expand on it if anyone’s interested.
Little, Big is basically a creation myth, as thorough in its mythology as any of the Big Three Religion creation myths. It draws on Christian mythology, concepts of worlds within worlds, concepts of whole universes contained within a tiny grain of sand, Greek mythology, tarot and of course notions of fairies and elementals. It also draws in themes of alcoholism, theater of memory, architecture, and the weird subcultures that sprang up in the northeast around the turn of the century (If you’ve seen “The Road To Wellville” and you’ll know what I’m talking about).
The story starts with Violet Bramble, an English hothouse flower, the daughter of a rural English cleric growing up in the countryside. Although not a feral child in the classic sense of the word, Violet definitely has a strange, vaguely feral aura to her, though not in any threatening sense. Growing up in the rural English countryside, she spent most of her time roaming around the woods and hedges and so forth and was really more attuned to the nature around her than to the civilization, though she was educated and socialized enough to be presentable in polite rural society.
A successful young American architect named John Drinkwater gets lost during a walking tour and meets Violet, and winds up spending the night with Violet and her father. No hanky-panky occurs overnight – Violet is literally a child – but Drinkwater can’t get Violet out of his mind even years afterward when he’s returned to America and become a Very wealthy and successful architect.
They meet again years later. Violet has told her father that she sees, communicates with and is regularly visited by fairies. Her father eventually takes these tales at face value, and when his fortunes go south, he embarks on a lecture tour, telling people about fairies and such, and exhibiting poor Violet to his audiences as a fairy contractee.
He soon taps out the potential for English audiences, though he does pick up a few True Believers, and so he goes to America to continue the lecture tour. There he picks up more True Believers, but the lecture tour runs out of steam, but not before John Drinkwater has seen a picture of Violet as part of the tour publicity. He attends the lecture, reacquaints himself with Violet. They soon figure out that they love each other get married and move into the huge Victorian folly of a house along with Violet’s father, and have kids. The True Believers settle in the rural Upstate New York area where the house is located, forming a genteel sort of cult centered around the belief that Violet has been in contact with fairies, and that some of them are, too.
Maybe you think I have given away the story – hardly, this is just the preamble to the story proper, which spans several generations and deals with what can be regarded either as the story of supernatural response to the encroachments of human civilization, or of the birth, growth and death of a weird upstate New York subculture. Because although the book presents the fairies as a real presence in the Drinkwater family’s lives, and its True Believers, it does so within the context of a our mundane world in which fairies are generally believed not to exist, and some of the Drinkwaters themselves are unable to commune with fairies and as a result tend to be unbeliever-ish themselves. (In fact, the movie "Photographing Fairies, which happened to be airing earlier to day on the SciFi Channel, bears a suspicious resemblance to one of Little, Big’s subplot involving Augustine Drinkwater, a character who attempted throughout his life to photograph fairies.)
I could go on for pages detailing the plot of Little, Big, but it’s a huge book to start with, and the farther you get into it, the bigger it gets. But I’ll be glad to answer any questions anyone may have.
I read it quite a long time ago, and never truly understood it, but my reaction was that it was a long, slow, subtle horror. The fairies, present so subtly most of the time, warp the lives of the family that lived in that house. I pitied them as victims, though the book never explicitly stated this. I know for sure I wouldn’t want their lives, no matter how “magical” they were.
I didn’t find Little, Big all that horrific, though it definitely had some tragic elements. The only part of the story where I thought the fairies behaved in a manner I would consider horrifying would be:
When the fairies switched out Lily’s baby for a fake baby. Later in the story Lily’s daughter says it’s OK because of all the fun they’ll have during their immortal lives together, but I have trouble seeing how such a horribly traumatic event could ever be “made up for.”
I was very disappointed in Little, Big. It was beautifully written, but I kept waiting for the plot to kick in. The individual stories were interesting, but as a whole it didn’t work for me. I felt the same thing, only more so with Aegypt, another book of his.
His work reminds me of what Katherine Mansfield said about another author: “[Crowley] never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot? Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.”
I couldn’t disagree more with the idea that Crowley doesn’t bring his story to a full boil. One of the things I’d been expecting on my second reading was a botched ending, as I soon realized that it was going to be very hard for Crowley to deliver fully on the story he promises as the plot develops.
Crowley does deliver: spoiler below and if you have not read Little, Big you do NOT want to read this one, it will definitely ruin the hell out of the plot:
As the plot advances, it becomes clear that the Drinkwater clan and their followers are to be involved in some kind of transformative event that will Somehow protect the fairies and the Drinkwater clan from the encroaching mudane world. The transformative event, when it occurs, is definitely a huge one: essentially, Alice Drinkwater forms an alternate universe through an unspecified magical process and the fairies and the Drinkwater clan move into that alternate universe, with the only remaining door to it in our universe being the Drinkwater house. The nature of the process is hinted at with references to worlds within worlds and so forth, but it’s not exactly hard SF with rivets, if you know what I mean. This is where I think a lot of people decided Crowley didn’t bring his story fully to fruition. I found that the foreshadowing Crowley did earlier in the book was sufficent to establish the transformation, even without a fully described mechanism. I also like the fact that it remains possible to think of the new universe as a shared delusion, and that the state the Drinkwater clan and their followers actually enter is what the mundane world would call death – perhaps with complete accuracy. YMMV.