Lord Byrons Novel -- The Evening Land by John Crowley
Lord Byron’s Novel – The Evening Land by John Crowley
John Crowley is one of the most accomplished stylists writing today – not just in the fantasy field, but anywhere. His works are exquisitely written, the prose in perfect control, the imagery memorable. His latest work, Lord Byron’s Novel – The Evening Land, is another remarkable work. In some ways it’s hard to know exactly what to say about it, or even to say what makes it so engrossing, but it’s something to experience, especially by those who love language, who appreciate style, and aren’t just reading to get as quickly as possible from start to finish.
The book is made up of three intertwined threads. The longest thread is the Byron’s (Crowley’s, of course) novel. Crowley perfectly captures the style we could image Lord Byron would have used had we truly had a surviving novel by him. It alone is wonderful – at once a gothic, an adventure story, a romance, a tragedy – told in the style of such early 19th century fiction. But more than that, it’s an examination of the character of Byron, since it’s also an autobiographical novel of sorts. Reading it has made me want to go out and read more of Byron’s poetry (though I confess of the trio of Byron, Keats, and Shelly, Byron was the one I’d always liked least).
Each chapter of Byron’s novel is followed by notes by his daughter, Ada Lovelace, friend of Charles Babbage and inventor of the concept of programming languages (and for whom the programming language Ada is named). In the world of Crowley’s novel, Ada has found her father’s novel and is annotating (and, it turns out, hiding it from her mother, who wants it destroyed). Her notes explain some parts of the novel, but they do more than that. They are her searching for the father she never really knew, reaching out to him in the only way she now could (since of course he was long dead by that point).
Intertwined with all of this is the story of the finding of the novel, told in emails and a few letters. Alexandra Novak has gone to London to help pull together some recently found papers of Ada Lovelace for www.strongwomanstory.org, a site collecting information about women in the sciences (unfortunately, the site is fictional; I checked). Amongst the papers, she finds a one page of the supposedly destroyed novel, Ada’s notes, and many pages of numbers, thought to be a program written by Ada. She send some of the information to her lover in New York, who determines it’s really code – Ada’s way of hiding the novel from her mother. Alexandra also takes a big step: she contacts her long estranged father (who when she was very young had fled America after having an affair with an underage girl at a celebrity party). Her father is an expert on Byron, so she engages his help in putting everything together. The technical details are fascinating, but it’s Alexandra’s relationship with her father, and his with her, that is particularly compelling. Both – though especially Alexandra – start out tentative, but it’s clear that she wants to know him and he to know her.
Each of the three strands is linked to the others, therefore, not only by its surface story – the story of Lord Byron’s novel – but by the underlying idea of the relationship between father and daughter, by fathers and daughters separated but still straining in a way to know something of the other.
Overall, this is a beautiful work. As I noted above, it won’t be to everyone’s taste, but for those who do like this sort of thing, it will stay with them for a long time.
John Crowley is one of the most accomplished stylists writing today – not just in the fantasy field, but anywhere. His works are exquisitely written, the prose in perfect control, the imagery memorable. His latest work, Lord Byron’s Novel – The Evening Land, is another remarkable work. In some ways it’s hard to know exactly what to say about it, or even to say what makes it so engrossing, but it’s something to experience, especially by those who love language, who appreciate style, and aren’t just reading to get as quickly as possible from start to finish.
The book is made up of three intertwined threads. The longest thread is the Byron’s (Crowley’s, of course) novel. Crowley perfectly captures the style we could image Lord Byron would have used had we truly had a surviving novel by him. It alone is wonderful – at once a gothic, an adventure story, a romance, a tragedy – told in the style of such early 19th century fiction. But more than that, it’s an examination of the character of Byron, since it’s also an autobiographical novel of sorts. Reading it has made me want to go out and read more of Byron’s poetry (though I confess of the trio of Byron, Keats, and Shelly, Byron was the one I’d always liked least).
Each chapter of Byron’s novel is followed by notes by his daughter, Ada Lovelace, friend of Charles Babbage and inventor of the concept of programming languages (and for whom the programming language Ada is named). In the world of Crowley’s novel, Ada has found her father’s novel and is annotating (and, it turns out, hiding it from her mother, who wants it destroyed). Her notes explain some parts of the novel, but they do more than that. They are her searching for the father she never really knew, reaching out to him in the only way she now could (since of course he was long dead by that point).
Intertwined with all of this is the story of the finding of the novel, told in emails and a few letters. Alexandra Novak has gone to London to help pull together some recently found papers of Ada Lovelace for www.strongwomanstory.org, a site collecting information about women in the sciences (unfortunately, the site is fictional; I checked). Amongst the papers, she finds a one page of the supposedly destroyed novel, Ada’s notes, and many pages of numbers, thought to be a program written by Ada. She send some of the information to her lover in New York, who determines it’s really code – Ada’s way of hiding the novel from her mother. Alexandra also takes a big step: she contacts her long estranged father (who when she was very young had fled America after having an affair with an underage girl at a celebrity party). Her father is an expert on Byron, so she engages his help in putting everything together. The technical details are fascinating, but it’s Alexandra’s relationship with her father, and his with her, that is particularly compelling. Both – though especially Alexandra – start out tentative, but it’s clear that she wants to know him and he to know her.
Each of the three strands is linked to the others, therefore, not only by its surface story – the story of Lord Byron’s novel – but by the underlying idea of the relationship between father and daughter, by fathers and daughters separated but still straining in a way to know something of the other.
Overall, this is a beautiful work. As I noted above, it won’t be to everyone’s taste, but for those who do like this sort of thing, it will stay with them for a long time.
posted by Jim Mann at 10:22 PM
2 Comments:
I'm reading this now too. I'm getting to the point that I don't want to read any more of it, because it'll be over too soon. His complete inhabiting of Byron's language is remarkable. What a delight to have discovered!
Yes, this is one of the books that you want to keep going. Crowley's language is wonderful and the world -- or rather the three worlds he creates (the world of the novel within a novel, Ada's world, and the world of Alex et. al) -- are all great.
Post a Comment
<< Home