It is a book of country life, city life, marriages and affairs, births and deaths, hopes and dreams, the disillusionment of moving to the City it is a book about falling out of love, and falling right back in. For long swaths, you forget that this is a fantasy book at all. He teases, dodges, and skips around the point as often as he can. The central question, teased throughout the narrative, is: Are faeries real? Hints and glimpses are shown to the characters, but for the first 1/2 to 2/3 of the book it is only to the reader that Crowley unveils what might be a sufficient answer. Built by John Storm Drinkwater, Edgewood is a house that doesn’t make sense it has four floors, seven chimneys, three hundred and sixty-five stairs, and fifty-two doors. Little, Big follows four generations of the Drinkwater family, who live in the house Edgewood. The only sufficient word is 'Remarkable.' The book progresses quickly over very dense material, reinventing itself every hundred pages, but follows a single narrative thread that connects over four generations of a family in an ever-expanding plot. John Crowley writes with the elegance and complexity of Dostoevsky or Dickens, the whimsy and imagineering of Tolkien, but neither the dry, stiffness of the former or the sometimes overwrought stickiness of the other. I finished the whirlwind of an ending a few hours ago. I gave it the good old "college try" and, some two months later, am exhausted, but replete. My dear mother happened randomly upon an omnibus copy of Crowley's at her workplace and decided to give it to me, entirely unaware that I was even interested in him. (I've been interested in John Crowley for a few months after hearing a glowing recommendation on this very sub for his 2017 novel, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr.
Most of all, it is the story of Smoky Barnable. It is a story about a family saga, a story about the architecture of country houses, a story about fairies and magic and resurrected emperors - but at its heart it is a story about a house, Edgewood, and the family that lives there.
It is perhaps best described as “contemporary magical realism", but seems to defy all expectations of the genre with which we are familiar. Little, Big is a fantasy novel by John Crowley published in 1981.
“In winter,” Grandfather Trout said, “summer is a myth. " Love is a myth,” Grandfather Trout said.
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