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Novelties and Souvenirs: collected short fiction
by John Crowley
(Perennial, May 2004, 384pp, $13.95 paperback, ISBN 0380731061.)
Review by Graham Sleight
John Crowley may be the finest living American  fantasy
writer, but he has never been prolific -- he's produced just four novels
since the World Fantasy Award-winning Little, Big (1981) -- and
so his work hasn't been nearly as visible as it deserves to be. (This
is particularly the case in the UK, where none of his novels since Ægypt
(1987) have been published.) Nonetheless, the grace of his prose and
his grasp of the possibilities of fantasy and sf have made him widely
admired. In particular, Little, Big has become both influential
and well-loved, a centrepiece of the American canon of the fantastic
in the same way that Lord of the Rings or Gormenghast
are for the English tradition. So it's genuinely good news that Perennial
have published this collection of Crowley's short fiction -- collections
being risky ventures for publishers at the best of times -- even if
I'm going to grumble about it on a couple of scores.
The first grumble is that, although the blurb says that Novelties
and Souvenirs "is a complete collection of Crowley's short fiction",
it's not. It omits his superb novella "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's
Heroines" (published in 2002 in Conjunctions 39, ed. Peter Straub),
an account of two teenagers meeting at a summer Shakespeare festival.
It's the most poignant and tragic story which Crowley has yet written,
and by common consent was a standout in the "New Wave Fabulists" issue
of Conjunctions which it appeared in along with exceptional work
by Andy Duncan, Neil Gaiman, M. John Harrison, Kelly Link, and China
Miéville among others. The second grumble is that Perennial have
equipped Novelties and Souvenirs with a cover so nondescript
-- a black and white photo of a city street with an airship above it
-- that it's hard to remember or fix in the mind. It's certainly hard
to imagine any casual reader in a bookstore being struck by it. Grumbles
over, mostly.
Of the fifteen stories here, four were in Crowley's earlier collection
Novelty (1989), seven were in Antiquities (1993), and
the remainder have been published since. The centrepiece is clearly
the novella "Great Work of Time" (1989), which depicts the work of a
secret "Otherhood" to safeguard the British Empire in accordance with
the last wishes of its vainglorious evangelist Cecil Rhodes. The Otherhood
has access to a kind of time-travel using "orthogonal logic", which
enables them to tweak events to preserve peace and the Empire -- the
two goals amount to the same thing. So, when we first meet one of the
protagonists, Denys Winterset, he is a civil servant travelling home
in 1956 from an African posting on Rhodes's long-planned Cape-to-Cairo
railway, which was never completed in our world. Denys is approached
in a restaurant and recruited for the Otherhood, which has as its headquarters
(naturally) a London club. As Denys is drawn into its circle, he comes
to see the rationale for the Otherhood's work: it has created a more
benign Empire stripped of the racism it engendered in our world while
averting the worst of the twentieth century's holocausts. He agrees
to go back in time to meet Rhodes and steer events to ensure the survival
of the Otherhood. But every action has unintended consequences, and
in another strand of the narrative, we follow the Otherhood's President
as he ventures into a future world inhabited by angels, "draconics"
and other inhuman but sentient races. Meeting a lizard-like "Magus",
he is told that this world is a consequence of the Otherhood's tinkering,
but that its inhabitants know they are illusory. The Magus's request
is "that you put this world out like a light" (155). "Great Work of
Time" is told as a series of seemingly unconnected fragmentary tales,
and two-thirds of the way through one begins to wonder how Crowley will
be able to knit these strands together. Slowly, however, the story's
true structural ingenuity becomes apparent, and we're given an ending
which makes very clear what the Otherhood has done. To say exactly how
Crowley achieves this would be to give spoilers of the worst kind, but
I can't think of another story in the genre which shuts itself down
so comprehensively or which so tellingly examines the costs of the genre's
time-travel japes. To put it another way: "Great Work of Time" is the
least sequellable story I've ever read.
"Great Work of Time" shares with a few other stories here a distinct
trait in Crowley's writing: Anglophilia. (One remembers that Pierce
Moffett, in Crowley's Ægypt, had wished "that the British
had won the War of Independence (he had been profoundly Anglophile as
a child)".) "Antiquities" (1977), for instance, is a Club Story recounting
an epidemic of inconstant wives in Cheshire. "The Green Child" (1980)
re-tells a Suffolk folk-tale, and "The Reason for the Visit" (1981)
resurrects Virginia Woolf.
These three early tales are each relatively slight, vignettes or experiments
in form. But Crowley at shorter length can be devastatingly effective.
"Exogamy" (1993) is barely five pages long, but manages to be a quest
story, a love story, and a reworking of myth both unsentimental and
moving. "The War Between the Objects and the Subjects" (2002) is even
shorter but effortlessly suggestive.
"Exogamy" falls into another group of stories here, the reworkings
of fairy-tale or myth. "Lost and Abandoned" (1995) casts the Hansel
and Gretel story in a contemporary setting, while "An Earthly Mother
Sits and Sings" (2000) re-tells a Scottish folk tale. "Missolonghi 1824"
(1990) is also a kind of myth-tale, a story told by Lord Byron at the
end of his life to a boy he has just failed to seduce. While walking
in the woods of Arcadia years ago, Byron says, he came across a creature
of myth captured by villagers. He alone was able to communicate with
it, using the classical Greek he learned decades ago at school, and
a bargain was struck -- or so it seems to Byron. As in many of Crowley's
stories, the fantastic exists here on the margins of our world, a possibility
which can be seen or imagined but never entirely grasped.
One set of stories that Crowley seems to enjoy reworking is the Bible,
and in particular the Catholic interpretation of it. "Her Bounty to
the Dead" (1978) is the most substantial of the early stories here,
a shard of family history structured around a priest's heretical thoughts.
"The Nightingale Sings At Night" (1989) is a sweet revisionist fable
of Eden, sitting just this side of sentimentality. In "Novelty" (1983),
a writer who may or may not be Crowley sits in a bar and ponders ideas
for his next novel. He imagines an alternate story of Christianity,
where Christ refused to take up his cross, and instead lived on -- making,
in a sense, a fuller commitment to humanity that way. On one level,
"Novelty" is nothing more than another mood-piece, but charmingly done,
and a wonderful answer to people who ask writers So, where do you get
your ideas? But it also tables some ideas at the heart of Crowley's
work, especially the Ægypt sequence. Here the writer is
explaining to his editor about the alternate religion his novel would
depict. The editor misunderstands it as a kind of pantheism, and the
writer responds:
"No. No. The opposite. In that kind of religion the trees and the
sky and the weather stand for God or some kind of supernatural unity.
In my religion, God and all the rituals and sacraments would stand
for the real world. The religion would be a means of perceiving the
real world in a sacramental way. A Gnostic ascension. A secret at
the heart of it. And the secret is -- everything. Common reality.
The day outside the church window." (46)
There are also a couple of stories here which are readable as science
fiction. "Snow" (1985) takes on a simple sf notion: the rich pay to
be followed by a tiny wasp-like recording camera, so that after their
deaths their relatives can watch recordings of their loved ones. But
the system has problems: access is random only, and the recordings seem
to degrade as time goes on so that every vista seems filled with snow.
"Gone" (1996) is a somewhat unorthodox alien invasion story, told from
the viewpoint of a fragmenting marriage. "In Blue" (1989) is the most
difficult story in the collection, an sf dystopia founded on a cognitive
revolution so total that explaining it takes up most of the story. The
nearest comparison I know is Ted Chiang's extraordinary "Story of Your
Life" (1998): there, too, the reader's work at understanding the central
mystery becomes a kind of secular epiphany, an attempt to see clearly
and truly the day outside the church window.
So Novelties and Souvenirs is an immensely rewarding book, and
surely the most wide-ranging collection of short fiction to be published
this year. The stories here are ingenious, challenging, and beautifully
written. Crowley says at the end of Little, Big that we know
the world is as it is and not otherwise, that if there was ever a time
when magic worked, it's not now. Each of these stories is a stab at
describing what otherwise might be like.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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