Little, Big

by John Crowley

Turn-of-the-century American architect John Drinkwater begins to suspect that within this world there lies another (and within that, another and another ad infinitum, each larger than the world that contains it). Towards the center is the realm of the fairies, which his wife, the Englishwoman Violet Bramble, can see and talk with but he can′t. Drinkwater gathers his thoughts into an ever-evolving book entitled The Architecture of Country Houses, which goes through at least six ever longer and more mystical editions.

Somewhere around the start of the 20th century, Drinkwater designs and builds a house called Edgewood north of New York City. It is a composite of many styles, each built over and across the others, supposedly as a ″sampler″ for customers thinking about employing Drinkwater's firm. It has the effect of disorienting visitors and somehow protecting the family, and it proves to be a door leading to the outer realm of Faerie.

At the beginning of the story, well after the deaths of Drinkwater and his wife, their great-granddaughter Daily Alice falls in love with and marries a stranger, ″Smoky″ Barnable. Alice has only briefly met Smoky at the home of her City cousin George Mouse. Smoky gradually realizes that Alice and her sister Sophie claimed to see fairies when they were younger and that they and their family see their history as ″the Tale″.

The family ages and Alice and Smoky have three daughters, Tacey, Lily and Lucy, and a son, Auberon. Sophie has an affair with Smoky, which she reveals when she becomes pregnant. She gives birth to a daughter, Lilac, whose father she says is Smoky but in fact is George Mouse. Lilac is stolen by the fairies and replaced with a changeling.

Alice and Sophie's great-aunt Nora Cloud regularly consults an ancient set of tarot cards to find out about such mundane matters as the weather or how soon a visitor will be arriving at the house. Smoky's instructions for his journey to Edgewood to marry Alice were based on one of Nora's card readings. Sophie learns how to use them from Aunt Cloud.

The story moves forward to Auberon as a young man venturing to ″the City″ (Manhattan), where he stays in George Mouse's gigantic ruinous compound of Old Law tenements, which Mouse has converted into a farmstead. The City is near collapse and rife with crime and poverty. Auberon and a striking and vivacious young Puerto Rican woman named Sylvie fall in love and live together.

Sylvie is lured away into Faerie. Inconsolable, Auberon takes to drink.

At this juncture, Russell Eigenblick, a charismatic and secretive politician, rises in popularity and becomes the President of the United States. He advocates civil war, but against what or who is unclear. He is opposed by a covert group of wealthy businessmen and politicians called the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club. They are working with the mage Ariel Hawksquill, a distant relation of the Drinkwater family. Hawksquill divines that Eigenblick is the re-awakened Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and that he has been called from sleep to protect Faerie. Although he has not realized it, his enemy is humanity, which has unknowingly driven the fairies deeper and deeper into hiding. She announces this to the Club, but the members have decided to proceed without her. She becomes Eigenblick's adviser.

Hawksquill meets Auberon and teaches him architecture-based techniques of the art of memory. She recognizes that the cards he mentions are the pack that Eigenblick seeks, as they were made to foretell his return, and she induces him to tell her how to get to Edgewood. In return she gives him her key to a private park (designed by his great-great-grandfather), where he practices the art of memory on his time with Sylvie.

He sinks further into alcoholism. After a drunken sexual encounter with Sylvie’s brother Bruno, which Auberon considers a degradation, he lives on the streets. Eventually Lilac appears to him and persuades him to begin a recovery. He moves back into George Mouse’s farm and becomes the writer for a soap opera, taking much of his material from his grandfather ″Doc″ Drinkwater’s animal stories for children and his mother’s letters with stories of her extended family.

Hawksquill goes to Edgewood, where she steals Sophie’s tarot cards, recognizing that they are somehow the map describing the route into Faerie. She returns to the City and tries to stop Eigenblick. But it is too late: Eigenblick has her killed, and though he shortly thereafter disappears, the country has fallen into a low-key civil war.

The fairies, who can see the future but remember little of the past, understand the peril they are in but forget why, and they prepare to go deeper into the realms of Faerie; however, this cannot happen unless the extended family of the Drinkwaters comes to the mysterious ″Fairies’ Parliament″. Lilac visits Sophie and Daily Alice, and Auberon and George, summoning them to that event.

Alice leaves first to find or create the way to Faerie. On Midsummer’s Day, the rest of the family assembles at Edgewood (including Auberon and George, who return from the City through a fantasy landscape). At the last minute, Smoky – who never really believed in Faerie – chooses not to go, instead devoting himself to finishing the repair of Edgewood′s old orrery, which drew energy from the stars to power the home. He succeeds, and is persuaded by Sophie to accompany the family, but he dies of a heart attack before he leaves the borders of Edgewood. The remaining family members walk into the new realm and take the fairies’ place, Smoky’s funeral turns into Auberon and Sylvie’s wedding, and thus the Tale is finally completed.

The book ends with a description of the empty Edgewood as it decays and returns to nature. Since for a long time it has lights permanently shining though electricity is scarce in the rest of the country, the house becomes a legend.