Errant Penny (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} errantpenny) wrote, |
I love him, but he's not to everyone's taste. I've loaned Little, Big (definitely Crowley's most popular book) to several people, and they gave up on it fairly quickly, saying they couldn't get into it.
Crowley is compared often to Latin American Spanish realists, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It's hard to describe, but most of Crowley's novels really aren't fantasy, though there's a thread of otherworldliness running through them. It's like he often writes about another world, kind of parallel to ours, that can't be described outright but has to be hinted at obliquely. But then, in the same book, he can suddenly have an act of magic very "in your face", and rather than the contrast being jarring or out-of-place, it seems right. He kind of weaves his spell in his books...his prose has a special rhythm to it, a poetry, and while he's not verbose or baroque, he's definitely not a staccato-Hemingway kind of writer either...I would suggest either starting with Little, Big or The Deep. The latter is Crowley's first novel, but the edition of it alone (which I have -- yay!), is no longer available. It's published in an omnibus edition called Otherwise: http://www.amazon.com/Otherwise-Three-N
The Deep is a fairly straightforward science fantasy novel -- and is beautiful, and sad -- and very short -- but even in this one Crowley introduces a theme of things not being what they're outwardly represented to be, for instance, some of the characters talk about the names of their names...
The other two novels in the omnibus, Beasts and Engine Summer, are two of his strangest, inaccessible, and "coldest" (books especially "summer") -- and I've reread them far less often than I've reread some of his other books.
So, okay, there's a primer!
Crowley is compared often to Latin American Spanish realists, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It's hard to describe, but most of Crowley's novels really aren't fantasy, though there's a thread of otherworldliness running through them. It's like he often writes about another world, kind of parallel to ours, that can't be described outright but has to be hinted at obliquely. But then, in the same book, he can suddenly have an act of magic very "in your face", and rather than the contrast being jarring or out-of-place, it seems right. He kind of weaves his spell in his books...his prose has a special rhythm to it, a poetry, and while he's not verbose or baroque, he's definitely not a staccato-Hemingway kind of writer either...I would suggest either starting with Little, Big or The Deep. The latter is Crowley's first novel, but the edition of it alone (which I have -- yay!), is no longer available. It's published in an omnibus edition called Otherwise: http://www.amazon.com/Otherwise-Three-N
The Deep is a fairly straightforward science fantasy novel -- and is beautiful, and sad -- and very short -- but even in this one Crowley introduces a theme of things not being what they're outwardly represented to be, for instance, some of the characters talk about the names of their names...
The other two novels in the omnibus, Beasts and Engine Summer, are two of his strangest, inaccessible, and "coldest" (books especially "summer") -- and I've reread them far less often than I've reread some of his other books.
So, okay, there's a primer!
