On 10/04/2026 00:59, James Nicoll wrote:

Little, Big by John Crowley
A young man walks out of the City and into a multigenerational Tale. https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/face-the-change

The plot sort of crept up on me as I mostly had no idea of where things
were going and sometimes became lost in the poetic prose to the extent
that I lost track of what was going on just as Smokey and the story did
after the appearance of the bag of weed. (I was better prepared on a
second reading.)
Smokey, who does not believe in fairies, becomes part of a physical map
for fairies which is the equivalent of a time/memory map for humans. For
the fairies to escape the evil power of the Lecturer, the "house", whose dimensions are measured in 4s, 7s, 52s, 365, operates as a door into a
smaller world which the fairies can retreat to. For this to happen,
Smokey has to agree to marry Alice and give his life for the tale. He
makes the required leap of faith when he realises that the orrery is a perpetual motion machine and finds the bag to carry Alice's childhood
in; he now believes in fairies but he is not one himself. Smokey thinks
of himself as a small cog, as unimportant but his life, once he begins
his journey is what happens and is of great importance not to him but to others. But that is only part of it. The richness of ideas, the
concept of little/big, the prose, the wandering, the hinting of the
futility of attempting to understand fairy motivation. Brilliant. Five
Stars.

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