nside every story John Crowley has ever written is a single sentence. This sentence may not actually have been written down, but often a version of it surfaces, ringing like bone china. "There is," he tells us, again and again, in as many words as this or none, "another Story of the world." Sometimes this utterance is intended to help us understand the story told, sometimes it will tell us that the world is the Story told, and sometimes it will tell us that there is no other Story available to us or anyone in this real and only world, our own world caught in the gears of linear Time. Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land is perhaps Crowley's most intense iteration of the third and most desolate meaning of the inner sentence (though "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines," a 2002 novella soon to be published in book form, is similarly unrelenting); the final pages of Lord Byron's Novel convey a desiderium—a sense of longing for that which cannot have been and could not happen, but should have—that is utterly, heart-rendingly shut from transcendence. Lord Byron's Novel is a fiction about a Story which cannot be understood as anything more than fiction.
It was not always so. In the Aegypt books, a great battle is waged (Endless Things, the final volume of the sequence, should be released soon) over the redemptive injection of another Story of the world into all the veins and arteries of our fallen habitation; though, once told, that new Story will be the Story we have always known: only "God," or an Author who bestrides the Time calliope, may see what has happened, or is happening, or is to come. Rush That Speaks, in Engine Summer (1979), is nothing but the Story he tells; the world outside spins like a dervish. And Little, Big (1981) is (to be vulgarly reductive) a Tale of Faerie more real than the world it pays a long farewell to, the relict world described in that novel's great final paragraph, from which I quote only the last few lines:
The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn't as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.
It is impossible not to sense that part of the strength of this paragraph lies in the fact that it also describes what happens to human beings in the course of things. Like Middle-earth after the "victory," we all lose the weather of our great days. The world that Faerie leaves behind in Little, Big is the world of Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land.
Tales of the bored storytellers
The book is not easy to describe, though it is in fact very easy to follow. I'll refer to Crowley's novel as a whole as Lord Byron's Novel, a complicatedly layered text which encompasses Crowley's vision of a novel Byron might have written (though in fact he never wrote an extended prose fiction) and which someone—perhaps not Byron—has entitled The Evening Land. There are three layers to Lord Byron's Novel, each told in alternating segments.
By far the largest of these is The Evening Land itself, a tale supposedly written by Lord Byron between 1816, after he'd finished Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and 1822, when he was getting properly into Don Juan; almost certainly, we're told, he began The Evening Land at the Villa Diodati on Lake Leman, where he, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Polidori and a couple of extras had foregathered, were bored, and decided to tell each other stories. Mary Shelley's tale became Frankenstein; or the Modern Promethus (1818); John Polidori's story became Ernestus Berchtold; or the Modern Oedipus (1819), a very long novel which has never been reprinted (Polidori also transformed an unrelated Byron fragment into The Vampyre (1819), which was released in magazine form as by Byron himself, though the book publishers retreated from this fabrication; it is the first significant vampire tale in English); Percy Shelley's tale was minor; and Byron's, too, was negligible.
In Lord Byron's Novel, that exiguous contribution to the Diodati Club Story Sessions has become The Evening Land and has been—mysteriously—acquired in the last year of her life by Byron's daughter, the real Ada Lovelace (1815-1852). In order to preserve this precious fictional testament from her vengeful mother—who'd been deeply implicated in the publisher John Murray's (historical) burning of Byron's manuscript memoirs after his death in 1824—Ada secretly encyphers it, and has it deposited in a bank vault, along with a series of semi-scholarly notes to the tale, which she has not encyphered. These notes, plus some other material, make up the second layer of Lord Byron's Novel.
One hundred fifty years on, both the encyphered novel and Ada's notes have—again rather mysteriously—been made available to a researcher and Web site designer named Alexandra ("Smith") Novak, who solves Ada's cypher with her mathematician lover's help, and whose own emotional life complexly refracts the events told in The Evening Land, which itself (see below) refracts Byron's sense of the events which shaped his life and career up to 1822. An e-mail record of Smith's research and relationships and slow reconciliation with her estranged father, plus other stuff, makes up the third layer.
What Byron might have written
The end result is maybe the most readable book Crowley has ever written. Any problems we may face as readers lie deep within. But as it is the deep within of the tale that counts here, the other Story at its heart that so affects its future readers, perhaps we should begin at the very end of Lord Byron's Novel, where Smith and her father's "Introduction" to a scholarly edition of The Evening Land is placed. She has been pointing out the gaps between the real world and the desiderium-ridden counterfactual Byron has composed. What she says, refitted to address the fallen circumstances of our only world, is what the last paragraph of Little, Big tells us. "Lord Byron also," she says,
never got to America, nor did he ever return to England; Ada never went abroad to see him—as she might have today, if her father could have been properly treated for his illnesses, if her mother had not retained a lifelong horror of her husband, if the world then had been more like the world now, if things weren't as they are and were.
There are points when one almost regrets that The Evening Land is surrounded by the other layers of Lord Byron's Novel, because Crowley's rendering of what the real Lord Byron might have written had he written a novel makes in fact for a remarkably good novel in its own right, a miracle of device and historical tact, pyrotechnical and sly, transformative and never still: like Byron. The Evening Land, whose main action runs from around 1810 to around 1822, is divided into three more or less equal sections. The first section is told in a high Gothic style, as slyly hectic as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), and as cumulatively vertiginous as Charles Maturin's juggernautish Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). The second section is a social novel set mostly in a London obsessed by the threat of Napoleon—the gonzo Jane Austen style here deployed, as well as some plot elements (the feted newcomer to London hustled by ephebes from one familiar scene to another, while secret calumnies accumulate around him, etc.)—remind one of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004), but in the end to entirely differing effect. The final section segues into an early Romantic adventure featuring Doubles and devoted slaves and mysterious sojourns off-camera, all acted upon and elevated by revolutionary republican sentiments; the effect is rather like something that might have been written by the young Victor Hugo. The Evening Land as a whole, with its acute playfulness, its gusts of hilarity, and the experimental impetuous-seeming self-referential narrative asides which ironize the most exorbitant ricochets of its plotting, has an almost Shandyesque feel—I'm referring to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-1767) here. It is all exactly what we might dream the real Byron might have written if he'd lived another couple of decades, if he'd become what he was beginning to become in the wilder stretches of Don Juan: a Sterne with cast-iron balls. He could have laughed Victorian England (which was beginning to loom in 1824) half to death. But that is another Story.
A miracle made of words
The events recounted in The Evening Land are very complicated to render, and there is little point in trying to do so. The more one learns of Byron and his intimate relationships with women and (in absentia) with his daughter Ada through reading the whole of Lord Byron's Novel, the clearer it becomes that everything in The Evening Land revolves around parents and children, and that the engine that drives Byron to continue his tale is a deep longing somehow to tell another Story of the world, one in which he did not in 1816 permanently abandon his daughter Ada into the hands of his nearly demented control-freak pious vengeful ex-wife (as the historical Byron did; he never saw Ada, then an infant, again). What Crowley's Byron needs to create is a Story in which he can magically extract the young Ada (whose name is Una in The Evening Land) from this world, and take her to the evening land itself far to the west which is America, which is another Story.
We begin with Ali, who has been guided by a zombie to the place where his father--the terrible "Satan" Porteous, Lord Sane—swings dead from a rope, having been hanged by an unknown assailant. We learn that Sane had abandoned Ali as an infant in Albania, but had extracted him to gloomy Britain in order to gain an inheritance; charismatic to the point of mesmerism, amoral and ruthless, Sane has tricked and mocked and tortured the poor Ali, who has finally come back "home" to Scotland, only to find him "DEAD!" He is arrested for murder, he escapes mysteriously, fails to resume his quasi-incestuous relationship (she is the near Double of his closest highly eroticized male friend) with one woman, and begins his disastrous adult life by marrying the pregnant Catherine Delaunay, whom he believes he impregnated while somnambulating. Catherine soon leaves Ali, whose name has been blackened in London by unknown gossipers whose malice seems supernatural. Their daughter is Una. "Ah!" exlaims the narrator to us,
Little recks the common Reader, how it grieves an Author, when—the dictates of Fate being unalterable, once he has decided upon them—he must push his Hero to commit an enormity, or even a foolishness—how he longs to warn him, dissuade him ... even as the skirling of his pen propels the poor fellow onward!
Propelled indeed, poor Ali commits foolishnesses and enormities, ends up in Albania almost in the arms of his half-sister (the historical Byron did not, of course, stop at almost with his own half-sister), who is immediately shot to death; but himself survives to find out that his tormenter from the moment he discovers his dead father, the villain who impersonated him and impregnated Catherine, is his own Double—his slightly older brother, Aengus, whose existence nobody has ever suspected, and who has a gimp leg (as did the historical Byron). To-ing and fro-ing ensues, superbly executed in the various voices of The Evening Land, and years pass full of incident.
And then a miracle occurs, very quietly—the very texture of The Evening Land straightens out as if by magic. The two brothers agree to exchange tasks. Now that he has (as it were) earthed all of the misfortunes undergone by the historical Byron, the now mysteriously puissant Ali (imagine Valentino playing Lawrence of Arabia) can stop being Byron. He can take over his brother's revolutionary role, at which (unlike Byron) he is likely to succeed, though off-stage; and Aengus, wandering Aengus, now that he has effectively become the protagonist, can rescue his own daughter Una, and take her to the evening land which is another Story.
The escape of Aengus and Una is in almost every sense a coup de theatre, even when read in isolation. But of course we have not been reading The Evening Land in isolation. We have been reading Lord Byron's Novel, and we have been following throughout Ada Lovelace's initially rather Kinbote-like notes, which darken and deepen and become exceedingly painful to read as her cancer progresses; she died at 36—the age her father died—of cervical cancer. The pain can only be deepened as the closing pages of The Evening Land—the love letter that Byron has written to her—convey finally, very much too late, his dream that they might escape together the mortal circumstances that, inevitably, kept them apart in real life, rifted from any touch. The final twist of the knife for Crowley's version of Ada, though he does not declare this explicitly, may well be the transformation Byron himself undergoes over the course of writing The Evening Land—because he too, like his novel, passes from genre to genre, from stage to stage in life's journey. In 1816, he is still "Byronesque," and his book shows it; by 1822, he is a matured man, sufficiently seasoned to be capable of writing Don Juan. (It all constitutes an exceedingly cunning advocacy of the historical Byron on Crowley's part.) For Ada, though, it is nothing but lances of greater pain at terminus.
In 2002, on the other hand, the engines of transformation espoused and exemplified by The Evening Land have a different outcome. Smith has initially been very reluctant to collaborate with her father, a Byon expert who is also a famous film director in exile from America for the same reason Roman Polanski is. Naturally enough, he has always been monstrous to her, though unseen. But the alchemy of The Evening Land loosens the bondage of separation between them, her mother turns out not to object to their reunion, and the novel is signed off from a location where the two have certainly met. None of this is as gripping as either the story of Ali/Aengus or of Ada; but Crowley is able to use their e-mail conversations to convey a great deal of hard, interesting data on Byron and his times.
The Secret Masters are here
We are left with one loose end. In the first pages of Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, we are introduced indirectly to a mysterious stranger who has possession of and who sells the Ada Lovelace papers in 2002, passing them over in a "sea chest," rather as though it contained Moses. This man's name is Roony J. Welch, which, Crowley tells us, "doesn't even sound like a real name," forcing almost any reader to figure out that "Roony J Welch" is an acronym for "John Crowley"; Roony's physical description, moreover, matches Crowley's, except for the gold earring. A little further into the novel, we learn that the mysterious stranger who has possession of and sells the original manuscript to Ada in 1852 is also a dead ringer for John Crowley, sans earring.
What we're to make of this is hard to say. It may be a metafictional joke, a "confession" that Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land is really a fiction written by me, John Crowley. Or there may be something else. In a communication several weeks ago, Elizabeth Hand suggested that the revolutionary group know as "The Lucifers," which Ali joins, might somehow relate to the real Byron's habit of describing himself as a Fallen Angel; The Lucifers relate as well to a cluster of imagery, in this text and elsewhere, which very plausibly links Lucifer (or his agents) to evening lands, that links great half-unseen figures, who may be Secret Masters of our Story, to the escapes they permit to mortals. "Crowley" may therefore be one of those who tell us what we dream. (Hand's own review will appear elsewhere.)
Within the exceedingly rich ambit of Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, I think it may be enough to say: This may work, too. Hand certainly captures spot-on Crowley's inherent habit of mind, his almost heliotropic bent to follow any road toward a larger Story. I would like to find a Secret Master here, just as the protagonist of the Aegypt sequence longs to find a Messenger there who will tell him: You must change your life. But it's all too late for Ada, though, here and now, in this novel about this world. The effect of her death extinguishes Roony J. Welch. In the end, The Evening Land is hers.
