Current mood:	contemplative
Current music:	Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

That's an interesting question, and quite a long story...
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I start to get antsy if I go more than a week or so without having something published, so I was pleased to see that the Globe and Mail's book section has a piece by me this morning. Better still, my long-awaited review of the new John Crowley novel



Talk about Byronic!
By ROBERT J. WIERSEMA
Lord Byron's Novel:
The Evening Land
By John Crowley
Morrow, 480 pages, $22.95
There's a confession I should get out of the way: I'm a devotee of John Crowley's genre-defying 1981 novel Little, Big. In the past decade, I've probably read the book, in whole or in significant chunks, more than a dozen times. Whenever I travel, I carry an increasingly battered paperback copy with me, annotated and underscored throughout. I've lost track of the number of secondhand copies I've pressed upon people, imploring them to read it with an evangelical fervour.
I'm not the only one; it's a book that encourages -- and rewards -- slavish attention. Little, Big won the World Fantasy Award in 1982, and Harold Bloom included the book in his The Western Canon, saying later that the book ranked among the best five novels by a living writer. Incunabula Press of Seattle is preparing a limited edition of the novel (including a full scholarly introduction by Bloom) to mark its 25th anniversary next year. Copies -- including a $900 lettered edition -- are being sold by advance subscription (http://www.littlebig25.com).
This doesn't mean, however, that I'm indulgent toward Crowley's fiction overall. In fact, the opposite is true. The esteem in which I hold Little, Big has set the bar impossibly high for my reading of Crowley's later works. It has reached the point that I have to willfully put Little, Big out of my mind in order to give such novels as Aegypt, Love and Sleep and The Translator the attention they so richly deserve.
Even without Little, Big factoring into my judgment, Crowley is one of the front rank of contemporary U.S. writers, his work characterized by a boundless imagination rooted in dynamic particulars of characterization and language. A novel by John Crowley is a thing of beauty, an encompassing world that enfolds the reader. As he wrote (in Little, Big, naturally), "The further in you go, the bigger it gets."
On the surface, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, Crowley's latest, is a literary mystery focused on a long-lost manuscript, reminiscent of A. S. Byatt's Possession and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. Alexandra Novak, an American researcher who prefers to be called Smith, is in London updating the entry on Ada Byron for strongwomanstory.org, a website devoted to pioneering women in the sciences.
While Smith focuses initially on Ada's work with computer pioneer Charles Babbage, she becomes increasingly obsessed with Byron's estranged literary father after a mysterious manuscript appears. The pages -- written in a mathematical code -- are accompanied by annotations in Ada's hand, leading Smith to believe that the sheets may contain Lord Byron's only novel, long rumoured to have been burned by the writer owing to its autobiographical frankness.
Crowley nests three stories within Lord Byron's Novel. At the core of the book is the deciphered manuscript itself. While The Evening Land avoids a slavish recreation of Byron's prose style, the picaresque story of the young Lord Sane convincingly evokes the Gothic horrors and romances that arose from the summer at Villa Diodati, on Lake Geneva, during which Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley and Dr. John Polidori took turns telling one another ghost stories. The Evening Land is a fitting companion to Shelley's Frankenstein and Polidori's The Vampyre, which were published after that summer.
Ada Byron's annotations to the novel, written as she is dying of cancer, serve to both complement the text and to reveal, unwittingly, her sadness and slow decline. Ostracized by both of her parents, Ada is faced with the impossible decision of what to do with her father's manuscript, which her mother, suffering from Byron's reputation, is demanding she burn.
Enclosing the historical documents is the account of the manuscript's discovery and decoding. Recounted almost entirely in e-mails, the contemporary storyline focuses primarily on Smith, her partner Thea and her estranged father Lee, living abroad following a crime now decades old. The perfunctory nature of the e-mail form is deceptive: The characters and relationships quickly become compelling and enthralling despite the inherent limitations of the medium.
Over the course of the novel, the boundaries between the storylines become permeable, and the book takes on a reflective, meta-fictive quality. Elements, themes and relationships refract between the different textual worlds. Ali's longing for his lost daughter in The Evening Land, for example, both is and isn't analogous to Lord Byron's relationship with Ada, and to Smith's relationship with Lee (a 20th-century cad made up, it seems, of equal parts Byron and Polanski); each relationship gains force and depth from its relationship to the others.
As elements double and redouble, shift and change, the novel as a whole seems to burst open. What initially seemed austere -- a lost 19th-century manuscript, a series of footnotes and a clutch of e-mails -- broadens into a sweeping inquiry into the nature of life and loss, of art and science, of relationships familial and romantic, of the shifting possibilities of history and time itself. Never, however, does Crowley lose sight of his characters or their stories. It's heady, powerful stuff, and will likely take those new to Crowley's fiction somewhat by surprise: How does he do that?
Even when I expect great things from John Crowley, how does he keep surprising me?

Robert J. Wiersema is a Victoria writer and bookseller. His novel Before I Wake will be published next year.



This brings a few thoughts about reviewing to mind. Perhaps later, after I've had a chance to process them...
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