baaaby hedgehogs

Don't they look like chestnuts full of flesh?

[EDIT: Apparently you will have to click to see the fleshchestnuts. Life is arduous.]
[META-EDIT: Or not.]

nanoreview: John Crowley, John Byron's novel

I'm not fit to judge whether Crowley's emulation of Byron's novel-writing is accurate. Let's just say it is. The problem with this then is that Crowley is a better novelist than Byron. The Crowley's-Byron novel isn't bad, I wouldn't kick it out of bed, but if it stood alone I wouldn't think twice of it. It forms the bulk of the book. Does the framing matter, Crowley's-Ada's notes on it and the email among the characters uncovering it, carry it? Does it transfigure it?

My money was on transfiguration. But in the end, I didn't see it. Most of what I saw going on were parallels between Byron's novel and Byron's life, which Ada helpfully (and, as far as I could tell, straightforwardly) pointed out, and between Byron-and-Ada and Lee-and-Alex. All surprisingly straightforward for Crowley, unless I missed an entire plane here. (I wonder whether the inconsistencies in the text lead anywhere.)

Around Ada is where my Crowley-antennae quivered. I don't remember the passage, and I took the book back to the library, but there was one place in particular where science and poetry and history, especially history, were stirring around.

I did take this down:

When she was a little girl she invented a science called Flyology. They didn't let her have any stories or fairy tales or poetry at all so that her natural tendency (supposedly) for mental aberration or craziness or whatever she was supposed to have inherited from her father wouldn't develop. So instead of dreaming about that kind of stuff she dreamed about science. The Art of Flying. She studied the wings of dead birds to see how they did it, and she set up a lab called the Flying Room, strung with ropes and pulleys and a "triangle" of some kind. She made plans and drawings and paper wings, and she wanted to build a flying horse powered by steam (she loved horses) with room inside for a driver or pilot, and she would become like a carrier pigeon, delivering and collecting her mother's endless mail. For a while she signed her letters Annabella Carrier Pigeon. Why does it make me want to cry?