Lord Byron's Novel

by John Crowley

  The outermost layer of Lord Byron’s Novel, if I can call it that, is the e-mails exchanged by the people involved in the supposed unearthing and publication of The Evening Land in the present decade. The style here is contemporary and informal after the Georgian cadences of Byron and Ada; why is this contrast so necessary? Can those in our own period redeem the mistakes, omissions, and tragedies of two hundred years ago?

  That’s an interesting idea, and it may be that the salvific role of Smith, Thea, and Lee did evolve as you say—but in fact the idea was simpler at the beginning. I needed some way for the Byron text to be discovered in the present and a response to come from a contemporary point of view. I wanted someone who knew little of Byron and was unmoved by what she did know, who could in her own learning somehow instruct the (possibly also unsympathetic) reader in what’s interesting about the man and his mind. I thought a young lesbian woman who was into science would be just right. That’s all. Then when you have a character, the character has to have a life and a story.

  Although Lord Byron’s Novel is highly original and a creative departure for you, it does reflect many of your abiding themes. One of these is the sense of a history lost, submerged, never to have been—as in Great Work of Time and theÆgypt sequence. Lord Byron and his daughter might have written the words you attribute to them; they in fact did not, making Lord Byron’s Novel a counterfactual fiction of a kind, a statement only of what should have been . . . or am I overstating the case here?

  I guess I think of stories and the telling of stories as being in large part the creation of unavailable worlds—lost or never existent. My books tend to be one step up from this: They have often been about people telling or hearing or pursuing stories, and thus are about the creation or coming-tobe of those unavailable worlds. In this book both Ada and Byron imagine worlds that could have been but weren’t; the fact that the world in which they did these things never existed either reinforces the poignancy. I guess—I don’t know—I hoped for a ripping yarn and here I am with my constant concerns.

  Well, Lord Byron’s Novel does have many very exciting elements one might associate with genre fiction: the atmosphere of the Oriental fantasy tale; ferocious combat among Albanian clansfolk; an ancient crumbling mansion; a mysterious murder; a zombie rescuer; smugglers; battle scenes; doppelgängers; somnambulant episodes; a global revolutionary brotherhood; and so forth. And a certain "Roony J. Welch" may just be quasi-immortal. . . . Is Lord Byron’s Novel in any significant sense a work of fantasy?

  Well, I don’t think Byron’s novel is—as Ada points out, it may be sensational, wild, and fantastic, but there are no strictly supernatural elements in it. Is mine? I think that if a novel has no whiff at all of the impossible, the fabulous, the inexplicable, or the metaphysical as the Romantics meant the word, then it isn’t very realistic, because the real (this, our shared physical and biological) world does have those intimations in it. (When the intimations become certainties you have fantasy.)

  Read on

  Have You Read?

  More from John Crowley

  NOVELTIES & SOUVENIRS: COLLECTED SHORT FICTION

  A remarkable collection of almost all of John Crowley’s short fiction, Novelties & Souvenirs demonstrates the scope, vision, and wonder of one of America’s greatest storytellers. Courage and admiration are celebrated and questioned, paradoxes examined, and human frailty appreciated in fifteen tales at once lyrical and provocative, ranging from the fantastic to the achingly real. Be it a tale of an expulsion from Eden, a journey through time, the dreams of a failed writer, or a dead woman’s ambiguous legacy, each story in Novelties & Souvenirs is a glorious reading experience offering delights to be savored . . . and remembered.

  "A rich and varied volume. . . . Crowley manages to not only explore the legacy of colonialism . . . but also the enthusiasm of youth, the price of honor, and the fragility of history."

  —Toronto Star

  THE TRANSLATOR

  A novel of tremendous scope and beauty, The Translator tells of the relationship between an exiled Russian poet and his American translator during the Cuban missile crisis, a time when a writer’s words—especially forbidden ones—could be powerful enough to change the course of history.

  "Grand and serious, involving nothing less than the souls of nations and the transforming power of language."

  —New York Times Book Review

  OTHERWISE: THREE NOVELS

  Otherwise collects three critically acclaimed short novels by John Crowley. The Deep is set in a twilight land where two warring powers—the Reds and the Blacks—play out an ancient game of murder and betrayal. Then a visitor from beyond the sky arrives to play a part in this dark and bloody pageant. From the moment he is found by two women who tend to the dead in the wake of battle it is clear that the great game is going to change at last.

  In Beasts, it is the day after tomorrow and society has been altered dramatically by experimentation that enables scientists to combine the genetic material of different species and mix the DNA of humans and animals. Loren Casaubon is an ethologist drawn into the resulting political and social vortex with a "leo"—a creature both man and lion—at its center.

  Engine Summer features a young man named Rush That Speaks who is growing up in a far distant world—one in which our own age, the wondrous age of angels, when men could fly, is only dimly remembered. Now it is the "engine summer of the world," and Rush goes in search of saints who can teach him to speak truthfully and be immortal in the stories he tells. The immortality that awaits him, though, is one he could not have imagined.

  "Crowley writes with style and wit . . . creates characters that live and breathe."

  —New York Newsday (on The Deep)

  "Haunting, thought-provoking . . . extraordinarily touching."

  —Booklist (on Beasts)

  "A strikingly original and involving book . . . with uncommon sensitivity and grace."

  —Washington Post Book World (on Engine Summer)

  Spotlight on Little, Big

  Little, Big tells the epic story of Smoky Barnable—an anonymous young man who meets and falls in love with Daily Alice Drinkwater and goes to live with her in Edgewood, a place not found on any map. In an impossible mansion full of Daily Alice’s relatives, who all seem to have ties to another world not far away, Smoky fathers a family and tries to learn what tale he has found himself in—and how it is to end.

  "The kind of book around which cults are formed, and rightly so. There’s magic here."

  —Los Angeles Herald Examiner

  Chapter One: "Somewhere to Elsewhere"

  Men are men, but Man is a woman.

  —Chesterton

  On a certain day in June, 19 —, a young man was making his way on foot northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told of but had never visited. His name was Smoky Barnable, and he was going to Edgewood to get married; the fact that he walked and didn’t ride was one of the conditions placed on his coming there at all.

  “Smoky Barnable was going to Edgewood to get married; the fact that he walked and didn’t ride was one of the conditions placed on his coming there at all.”

  Though he had left his City room early in the morning it was nearly noon before he had crossed the huge bridge on a little-used walkway and come out into the named but boundaryless towns on the north side of the river. Through the afternoon he negotiated those Indian-named places, usually unable to take the straight route commanded by the imperious and constant flow of traffic; he went neighborhood by neighborhood, looking down alleys and into stores. He saw few walkers, even indigenous, though there were kids on bikes; he wondered about their lives in these places, which to him seemed gloomily peripheral, though the kids were cheerful enough.

  “He wasn’t sure if the map was forbidden by the conditions, but the directions he’d been given to get to Edgewood weren’t explicit, and he opened it.”

  The regular blocks of commercial avenue
s and residential streets began gradually to become disordered, thinning like the extremes of a great forest; began to be broken by weedy lots as though by glades; now and then a dusty undergrown woods or a scruffy meadow announced that it was available to be turned into an industrial park. Smoky turned that phrase over in his mind, since that seemed truly the place in the world where he was, the industrial park, between the desert and the sown.

  He stopped at a bench where people could catch buses from Somewhere to Elsewhere. He sat, shrugged his small pack from his back, took from it a sandwich he had made himself—another condition—and a confetti-colored gas station road map. He wasn’t sure if the map was forbidden by the conditions, but the directions he’d been given to get to Edgewood weren’t explicit, and he opened it.

  Now. This blue line was apparently the cracked macadam lined with untenanted brick factories he had been walking along. He turned the map so that this line ran parallel to his bench, as the road did (he wasn’t much of a map reader) and found, far off to his left, the place he walked toward. The name Edgewood didn’t appear, actually, but it was here somewhere, in this group of five towns marked with the legend’s most insignificant bullets. So. There was a mighty double red line that went near there, proud with exits and entrances; he couldn’t walk along that. A thick blue line (on the model of the vascular system, Smoky imagined all the traffic flowing south to the city on the blue lines, away on the red) ran somewhat nearer, extending corpuscular access to towns and townlets along the way. This much thinner sclerotic blue line he sat beside was tributary to this; probably commerce had moved there, Tool Town, Food City, Furniture World, Carpet Village. Well. . . . But there was also, almost indistinguishable, a narrow black line he could take soon instead. He thought at first that it led nowhere, but no, it went on, faltering, seeming at first almost forgotten by the mapmaker in the ganglia, but then growing clearer in the northward emptiness, and coming very near a town Smoky knew to be near Edgewood.

  That one, then. It seemed a walker’s road.

  After measuring with his thumb and finger the distance on the map he had come, and how far he had to go (much farther), he slung on his pack, tilted his head against the sun, and went on.

  She was not much in his mind as he walked, though for sure she hadn’t been far from it often in the last nearly two years he had loved her; the room he had met her in was one he had looked into with the mind’s eye often, sometimes with the trepidation he had felt then, but often nowadays with a grateful happiness; looked in to see George Mouse showing him from afar a glass, a pipe, and his two tall cousins: she, and her shy sister behind her.

  “She was nearly six feet tall, which was several inches taller than Smoky; her sister, just turned fourteen, was as tall as he. Their party dresses were short, and glittered, hers red, her sister’s white.”

  It was in the Mouse townhouse, last tenanted house on the block, in the library on the third floor, the one whose mullioned windows were patched with cardboard and whose dark rug was worn white in pathways between door, bar, and windows. It was that very room.

  She was tall.

  She was nearly six feet tall, which was several inches taller than Smoky; her sister, just turned fourteen, was as tall as he. Their party dresses were short, and glittered, hers red, her sister’s white; their long, long stockings glistened. What was odd was that tall as they were they were shy, especially the younger, who smiled but wouldn’t take Smoky’s hand, only turned away further behind her sister.

  Delicate giantesses. The older glanced towards George as he made debonair introductions. Her smile was tentative. Her hair was red-gold and curly-fine. Her name, George said, was Daily Alice.

  He took her hand, looking up. "A long drink of water," he said, and she began to laugh. Her sister laughed, too, and George Mouse bent down and slapped his knee. Smoky, not knowing why the old chestnut should be so funny, looked from one to another with a seraphic idiot’s grin, his hand unrelinquished.

  It was the happiest moment of his life,

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  PRAISE FOR JOHN CROWLEY AND

  Lord Byron’s Nove

  “An eerily authentic simulation of Romantic literature…beautiful.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Complex and satisfying, pleasurably dizzying in its layers and self-references, and addictively readable.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “There are some people—and I’m one of them—for whom life consists only of passing the time between novels by John Crowley.”

  —Michael Chabon

  “Remarkable and convincing…. Despite its Romantic trappings, Lord Byron’s Novel pulses with contemporary vitality.”

  —Toronto Star

  “Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land is an extraordinary confluence of High Romanticism and our Information Era: every note in it rings with authenticity. ‘The Evening Land’ is a novel Byron indeed might have written, and his daughter, Ada, as created by Crowley, is vividly memorable, worthy of her exuberant father. Had Giordano Bruno, incinerated by the church for his heresies, been born in the twentieth century he would have become John Crowley.”

  —Harold Bloom

  “Magnificent…multilayered and convoluted…highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Crowley is a writer of unmistakable humanity and unparalleled style.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Exuberant…. ‘The Evening Land’ itself is spookily like Byron’s other prose writings, and wholly plausible as the work of his pen. (I can’t resist, though, registering a fan’s tiny objection that Crowley is a better novelist than Byron could have been[.)]”

  —Salon.com

  “Crowley is one of those necessary writers for whom one has been waiting without knowing it.”

  —Russell Hoban

  “Magnificent…. In Crowley’s hands, Byron’s tale alone would have made fine work…. We’re kept on our toes by ironic humor, sobering emotion, narrow escapes, strange states of mind, and whiffs of the supernatural…. Crowley proves pitch-perfect in fabricating eighteenth-century fictional style…. I nominate this for novel of the year.”

  —Nashville Tennessean

  “For Crowley, the presence of Lord Byron’s novel within his own Lord Byron’s Novel acts as but the fulcrum for all the various, radiating wonders of the book.”

  —BookPage

  “When a writer I love has a new book out, I read it the minute I have the time. When John Crowley has a new book out, I make the time. Lord Byron’s Novel is John Crowley at his reliably fantastic, intricately constructed, beautifully written, compulsively readable best.”

  —Karen Joy Fowler

  “Both intellectually appealing and deeply moving—part contemporary epistolary family drama, part Gothic romance, part cryptographic mystery, part historical fiction…. Lord Byron’s Novel is a gorgeous testament to that tragic dream of reason, as well as to the Byronic imagination.”

  —Locus

  “In Crowley’s brilliant new book, the notional Byronic novel alone would be worth the price of admission…. This engrossing and entertaining book confirms its author as one of the most remarkable writers of fiction of the present day.”

  —John Hollander

  “Intricate and enthralling…. Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land is a book that should, and I hope will, be read by many people, more than once.”

  —Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine

  “Crowley transforms the lead of daily life into seriously dazzling artistic gold.”

  —New York Newsday

  “Crowley is generous, obsessed, fascinating, gripping. Really, I think Crowley is so good that he has left everybody else in the dust.”

  —Peter Straub

  ALSO BY JOHN CROWLEY

  Otherwise: Three Novels

  Beasts

/>   The Deep

  Engine Summer

  Little, Big

  Ægypt

  Love & Sleep

  Dæmonomania

  The Translator

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  LORD BYRON’S NOVEL. Copyright © 2005 by John Crowley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ePub edition October 2007 ISBN 9780061748646

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