# Review of "Little, Big" by John Crowley (1981) [[Book Reviews|Book Review]]: [Little, Big](https://books.google.ca/books?id=CzN9i_nLVM4C&source=gbs_navlinks_s) I've read many novels, but very few have left as indelible an impression as *Little, Big*. A fantasy set in a real world setting, it manages to do what no other similarly constructed story I've read has done: create a world that perfectly integrates fantastical faeries and spirits with "realistic" humans. I found it absolutely haunting. Ostensibly the story of Smoky Barnable, it seems to me to be more the saga of a whole family and the role they play in a fantastical and global series of events. Smoky travels from the Big City to a small town called Edgewood. There, he marries his one true love, Daily Alice Drinkwater. As Smoky settles into a life in a town "not on any map", we learn with him of the odd structures, people, and events that exist and occur within the bounds of "five towns that form a pentagon" and, in ways, throughout a parallel, ethereal one overlapping with our human one. Once the readers have been acclimatized, however, the author leaves Smoky to his tinkering and takes us on visits to the many other members of the weirdly interconnected families from Edgewood and its environs. Events and stories are woven together with meticulous detail to create a magnificent tapestry of both the comedic and tragic, turning everyday events into mystical cataclysms and the the most innocuous faery acts into world-shaking upheavals. Of particular fascination to me is Crowley's way of describing an event from both a realistic and a fantastical point of view. The way some characters transform - literally and figuratively - or even transport themselves is at the same time exquisitely detailed and disconcertingly ambivalent. There's a sequence, for instance, in which Smoky's son, Auberon, is either an alcoholic in a city park (incidentally designed by his distant grandparent) or an adventurer seeking absolution in a deep country forest - or both. It could well be that Auberon's wilderness adventure is just a gin-induced hallucination. But it is also possible that the intricate paths of the city park - paths that lead you away from the small stone temple at its centre even when you're sure that's where they all must converge - are just manifestations of the forces exerted on him by the spirits of wilderness. This is not some cheap attempt to confuse the reader or forced ambiguity, nor is this a lack of imagination and/or vision of the author (as was, for instance, the last scene of the movie [Inception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception)). There is too much internal consistency, too much symmetry and sympathy, between the interpretations. What Crowley has done is create a perfect superposition of two different realities and, in so doing, has created something greater than their sum. This novel so influenced my view of reality that I once even thought I'd stumbled onto an Edgewood of my own. I remember once driving from Toronto to Windsor. Somewhere between London (Ontario) and Windsor, where the highway curved gently between low hills, I glanced to my right and saw a lone house, perhaps a half-kilometre from the highway. It was partly hidden by trees and hills. There was a wide path leading from the back of the house to a small pond. The house was a white-painted wooden bungalow, not large, with a black pitch roof. I only saw it for a moment before it was obscured by the hills. I was overcome at that moment by a strangely serene sense of otherness, as if I were, for a moment, somewhere else entirely, somewhere... better. I've driven that same stretch of highway many times since then. But I've never been able to find that curvy stretch of highway, and I've never seen that house again. What happened to me that day, I'll never understand. And whether it was unconsciously influenced by my first reading of "Little, Big", I'll never know. But I do thank John Crowley anyways, because the strange symmetry between what happened to me and the events of his novel will always dance together in my memory, and somehow give me a little contentment. Addendum: I originally read the novel in the mid- to late-1980s. I reread the novel in 2020. It's still absolutely wonderful.