BIG, LITTLE by John Crowley (1983)

Smoky Barnable, the hero of John Crowley’s Big, Little , is a wandering minstrel. If to be a minstrel is to make up your own tune and then tune that tune to its own poetic logic, then Smoky is indeed a minstrel. Take this sentence:

Rooks (Smoky supposed) fled home across a cloud-streaked chilly sky toward naked trees which gestured beyond the newly-turned furrows of a March field (he was quite sure it was March). 

Smoky works things out as he goes along. His mental world, which extends into the world of nature, is one of supposition. Crowley’s sentence reads as a series of nature jottings; a journal entry written by a character working out what lies upon the horizon of his mind: what he does and doesn’t know, and where exactly nature is —- with which he is almost in tune — in the seasonal cycle of the year. Much of Crowley’s novel is concerned with the extent of his characters’ knowledge; despite seeming so, this not a fantasy novel, but something closer to American folktale run through English whimsy and fancy. Rooks only exist because Smoky supposes them to be moving across a cloud-streaked chilly sky. Rooks, in other words, are birds that fly home - flee home in fact - across a cold cloudy sky. Clouds are in important in Big, Little; important enough that we have the character of Great-Aunt Cloud, card-reader and clairvoyant in the tradition of T.S. Eliot’s Madame Sosostris, ‘turn[ing] up a trump card called ‘the Secret.’ Cloud, as she is known as, reads signs and portents as Smoky himself reads the skies. Rooks fly across the sky towards ‘naked trees’ which deliver a form of augury; but the flight and the trees are related: both ‘gesture beyond’ the furrow of a newly-turned March field. In other words, the trees are turning up their own hints and secrets from the natural world, and these hints suggest that something is about to happen: a new event (newly-turned) from the life of the fields. Such secrets are confirmed by Smoky whose mental acknowledgement is tucked into a form of parenthetical nodding of the head: ‘(he was quite sure it was March). And so we understand, by parenthetical implication, that Smoky is the one supposing all this: that rooks flee across chilly skies towards naked trees when something is about to turn within the season: some new event, some revelation. 

Crowley’s character reminds me that the mind has its own means of supposing things, and that no matter what sort of evidence we might have from the physical world of seeing and thinking differently, for reaching other more exacting conclusions, we meet with those that best suit our whim and fancy. Smoky’s imagination enjoys the picturesque romanticism of ‘a cloud-streaked chilly sky’; and so he draws the image of the rooks fleeing through that striking picture of the clouds because - well in part - it reminds him of Aunt Cloud sitting at home with her cards. But also because it is fantastically arresting to bring together ‘cloud-streaked’, ‘chilly sky’ and ‘naked trees’. It works because the clouds are full (with streaks) and the sky is chilly (like cold water or snow) and trees are naked like people undressing before they sleep. And so off we go — supposing and supposing in the way that you do when you are given enough time and space and cloudy imagery to open up your mind to whimsical suggestions.