Little, Big

For full-throated, mature fantasy, Crowley - author of the superb Engine Summer (1979) and others - is becoming the American writer against whom all others will have to be measured. Here he has made a large family saga with a silvery underside; he has housed it in a mansion called Edgewood (built in every style by a 19th-century visionary named John Drink-water, whose book Architecture of Country Houses eventually comes to be understood as the Book of Life itself); and he has let it run through four generations. Smoky Barnable, a proofreader for the phone book in "The City" some short time henceforth, opens the story as he arrives at Edgewood to marry the long-bodied Daily Alice. Like all Drink-waters, Daily Alice knows about - and is not flustered by - the fairies that inhabit the surrounding woods; in fact, when Smoky later strays and beds Alice's younger sister Sophie, the resulting love-child is promptly taken away by the same fairies (to lessen family strife) and lives for 25 years after upon a flying stork (in wonderful aerial chapters). That Crowley can so deftly pull off these shifts in wondrous perspective indicates his mastery of the mode - but he goes further, setting himself even harder tasks. When Smoky's and Alice's son, Auberon, takes off for The City to seek his own truth, a more contemporary level is introduced (Auberon writes TV soap operas, falls in love with an appealing Puerto Rican girl named Sylvie). . . only to be stretched into another dimension: Sylvie finds herself enrolled in a brief, awful resurgence of the Holy Roman Empire (!), and its last leader, Frederick Barbarossa, comes back re-incarnated to give it another shot. And all the doings - political, social, amorous, personal, spiritual - are finally aligned to "The Tale," hints of which are found in old Drink-water's book . . . and in an orrery which Smoky finds in an attic (it turns out to be a perpetual motion machine). Hidden or revealed, metamorphosed or fixed, the characters here are forever smack up against the implied question of the title: Is life a small speck on a huge blueprint? Or a big, clumsy blindness to one exquisitely tiny grain of truth? So - with the lovely wending of its brook-clear prose (this is the sort of book you'd like to read aloud, over months, to a sharp ten-year-old), its unforced philosophical and literate harmonies, and its genuine imaginativeness - Crowley's novel seems like a sort of chime-organ: lovely sounds from a big, uncommonly satisfying, and elegant what if? book. (Kirkus Reviews)