John Crowley's The Evening Land

I got this book for Christmas, and it turned out to be a reasonably good travel book, easy to pick up and put down, not especially demanding. As an adolescent I was much enamored of Crowley's Little, Big. (I'm not sure if I would like it as much if I read it again as an adult.) Evening Land doesn't quite measure up to my memories of Little, Big, but certainly has something in common with it--juxtaposition of American modernity and Romantic-era Europe. Codes and mysteries. Dark secrets.

The novel has a post-modern sort of structure. It evolves on two main levels. First, there is a story purporting to be the long-undiscovered text of Lord Byron's novel, together with annotations made by the daughter he (Byron) never knew. Second, there is a record e-mail correspondence among a variety of people, revealing in epistolary form the discovery of the novel as a cooperative venture between the main character, Smith, and the father she never knew. Sometimes the e-mail parts are quite touching; I especially like the "voice" of Smith's lover Tess, a mathematician with little regard for punctuation. A lot of it is irritating. It succeeds quite well in capturing the genre of e-mail, but that's in fact not a good thing. It's easy to read but occasionally a bit cringe-inducing. One of the main problems is that the characters spend a lot of time scratching their heads over a mystery that the reader solves long before they do...

As for Byron's novel itself, it is not wholly convincing as an early 19th century text, but that in fact may be a good thing. It is just alien enough stylistically to play the part, even if it probably wouldn't fool any Byron scholars. (It purports to do so, or rather to "convince," in the correspondence plot). There are numerous figural parallels between the characters in the Byron story (both his fiction and his biography) and the modern persons. These would be interesting except that the Byronic characters are so grand and consequential, that what's at stake in the e-mail plot just seems so trivial and hard to care about.

All the same, but book was thought-provoking, and had a lot of careful research about Byron's life, which was interesting in itself.