Little, Big

The test is subtractive, and the domestic spine survives it. Smoky’s walk to Edgewood, the marriage into a family that knows itself to be in a story, Sophie’s sleep and the stolen Lilac, Auberon’s going to the City and his loss, the departure at the Parliament: each is the Tale moving one step, and little there can be cut. The test bites on the second plot. Russell Eigenblick, Barbarossa woken into a failing America, and Ariel Hawksquill, the memory artist who hunts him, are joined to the family late and loosely; their chapters could be much reduced without loss to what the book knows, and the political allegory is the part least compelled by its argument. Auberon’s long decline in the City also runs past its need. The length is not the charge; the charge is that perhaps a sixth of the book is permitted rather than required.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A family, and any life lived long enough, is a story whose shape its members feel and cannot read while they are in it; the larger world is not elsewhere but folded inside the ordinary one, and the price of entering it is the loss of the ordinary. Smoky is the instrument: an anonymous man who marries into meaning, never sees what the women of the house see, and lives a whole life on trust in a story he is told he belongs to. That holds as a truth of marriage and of age, and it is shown, in Daily Alice’s patience and in Sophie’s grief for the stolen Lilac. Held off the top because much of what the book uncovers is mood, the elegiac sense of a vanishing enchantment, more than an articulated condition, and because the social disclosure the Eigenblick plot reaches for, how a people longs for a sleeping king, is gestured at rather than earned.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Elevation comes often, and it is mostly warm: the height of wonder and of loss rather than of terror. Smoky’s first sight of Edgewood and its many faces; the wedding; the orrery in the attic and the discovery of what it was built to show; Violet’s otherness; and the close, where the family passes into the Tale and the house is left behind, a transport few novels of its decade reach. The book names its own sublime: “The further in you go, the bigger it gets.” It is an inward vastness, the small that holds the large, and it is the title. The dreadful register is thin: Eigenblick’s rise and the City’s decline are rendered as melancholy more than terror. Held below the top because the elevation is of one key, and because the political chapters flatten between the heights.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth built, not evoked: the archetypal structure is the plot. The family are the agents of a Tale, the long design of the fairies, and they know it; Aunt Cloud’s cards read it, and every marriage, birth and theft in the book is a move in it. The stolen child, the man turned beast in Grandfather Trout in the pond, the emperor asleep under the mountain returned as Eigenblick, the house as a cosmos and the world within the world: each bears weight, and none is ornament. The particular stays particular, an American family with a doctor who writes animal stories and quarrels over a house. The deepest construction is the title’s paradox, the other world larger than this one and inside it, built into the house, the orrery and the end. Held below the top because some of the myth arrives as allusion, to Carroll, to Shakespeare’s fairy names, to the Cottingley photographs, and because the Barbarossa strand is myth applied rather than grown.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Two inheritances. One is fantasy after Tolkien, which in 1981 meant the secondary world, the quest and the war; Crowley turned from all three, set faerie inside an American house and a family chronicle, and never shows the other world plainly. The other is the literary family saga, with One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) the nearest precedent for the marvellous admitted into a lineage, and Victorian fantasy, Carroll and MacDonald, and the Hermetic tradition behind both. The swerve is the joining: a fantasy written to the standard of the literary novel in sentence and design, and a family novel whose law is a fairy tale. The stake was real: a long, slow, unclassifiable book sent into a genre market that had no shelf for it, by an author whose earlier books were science fiction. Held at the bar because García Márquez had made the marvellous family chronicle, and the swerve lies as much in the field the book entered as in its instrument.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book is built as its house is built: Edgewood is a compendium of styles, larger inside than out, and the novel is a compendium of modes, domestic chronicle, fairy tale, Hermetic romance and political allegory, that opens inward. The omniscient narrator, who knows the end and speaks in the family’s own idiom of the Tale, is the instrument of the book’s central knowledge, that its people live inside a story told about them. A close third person on Smoky alone could not know that, and a first person could not hold the generations. The orrery and the Art of Memory are models of the book inside the book. Held below the top because the form loosens in the Eigenblick and Hawksquill strands, told nearer to conventional plotting, where the design is a container more than an instrument.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, and forty-five years of rereading by a devoted readership supply it. The book is made to yield on return: the cards prefigure what follows, the genealogy and the seasons are patterned, the orrery and the memory palace are keys a first reading passes by, and the end reorders everything that led to it. Its open questions are real: whether the Tale is a gift or a theft, whether the family’s passage is a fulfilment or a death, whether Smoky’s faith is wisdom or resignation. Formal depth yields too, in the architecture of the house and of the book. Held in the middle of the eights because the demonstration is narrower than the promise: the critical literature is modest beside what the most studied novels carry, and much of the book’s depth, its Hermetic scheme, is a depth of design that, once found, is found.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The field is the American novel of its decade, with fantasy in English the part of it the book entered. The force: it showed that fantasy could be a literary novel of the first order, domestic, American, slow and adult, without the apparatus of the secondary world, and it gave the field a model of faerie as something inside the ordinary rather than beyond it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the reach stops largely at the genre’s border: the novel at large did not turn on the book, and what descends from it is a manner within fantasy more than a redirection of fiction, a descent more easily asserted than documented. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1982, and a standing among writers and readers of literary fantasy as one of its central books.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at forty-five years. Form takes no charge: the novel survives whole as published in 1981. Fabric takes none: the book is set across generations, not fixed to its moment, and its near-future City has aged into a period piece less than most near futures do. The charge falls on presence. The book lives among readers of fantasy and among writers, as a cult classic rather than a continuously taught or widely translated novel, and it is little present in schools and in the wider culture beside the most read American fiction of its decade. That narrower presence sets the figure where it stands. Decades demonstrate less than centuries, and forty-five years show survival without yet showing permanence.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged on Crowley’s English, and the command is high and load-bearing. The prose is the book’s chief instrument: long, cadenced, exact sentences that hold a comic domestic register and a visionary one in the same paragraph, and a voice that can speak of seasons and generations without losing the single afternoon. The construction is intricate: the cards, the genealogy, the orrery and the parallel of house and book are worked into the plot rather than laid on it, and the end gathers threads laid hundreds of pages before. The character work is fine in the women of the house, Daily Alice, Sophie, Aunt Cloud and Violet, and in Smoky. Charged: the Eigenblick and Hawksquill chapters are plotted with less finish, the City strand sags in Auberon’s long decline, and the pace of the middle books slows past what the design needs.

Score: 8.9 / 10

One law governs the family: everything that happens is the Tale, and the further in one goes, the bigger it gets. Take two distant elements, Doc’s animal stories for children and Hawksquill’s memory palace, or a picnic at Edgewood and the riots of the City: the book binds them under one physics, that the small contains the large and that stories are lived before they are understood. The range is wide, from domestic comedy and fairy tale to Renaissance magic and near-future politics. The law holds less firmly at the political pole. Eigenblick is joined to the fairies’ design, but the tonal law of the political chapters, satire and thriller, is not the law of the house, and the seam shows where the two plots meet. Held in the middle of the eights for that seam; the floor is met with ease.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Held, mostly, not listed. Consciousness: Smoky’s life of trust, Sophie’s grief and sleep, Auberon’s loss. The family: its generations, marriages, an adultery and its child, children borne and lost, the house as inheritance and quarrel. The natural order: the seasons, the wood, the pond, the turning year as the book’s clock. The sacred: faerie, the Hermetic tradition, the cards, the passage at the end. History and the state: from the building of the house to the City’s decline and a demagogue’s rise in a near future. All are integrated through one family and one house. Held in the low eights because labour is nearly absent, the state is allegory more than agency, and the passing of history is a ground, lightly marked, rather than a force the family meets.

Score: 8.3 / 10