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Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land
One of the most accomplished literary artists of our time, John Crowley has given us fiction that illuminates and astounds -- from the wonder and whimsy of Little, Big to the poignancy and lyrical beauty of The Translator . Now he turns his unique genius in a different direction to imagine the novel the great, haunted, and enigmatic Romanticpoet Lord Byron never penned ... but very well might have. Documents discovered in a rotting old trunk in an English storage room prove that the manuscript of a novel by Byron once existed, and that it was saved from destruction, read, and annotated by Ada, Countess of Lovelace, a brilliant mathematician and Byron's abandoned daughter, during the final, agonizing months of her young life. While the curious mystery of what became of the manuscript itself is explored, we are permitted to read it -- the whole of Byron's only novel -- beginning to end. And what a novel it is -- a thrilling romance chock-full of treacheries and deceits, loves and fortunes gloriously gained and tragically lost; a tale of blood, vengeance, and mystery, of thrilling escapes and ruthless murder. Yet in the story of Ali -- the bastard son of the demonic Lord Sane, torn from his life in high Albania to be raised a proper, if penniless, English gentleman -- Ada finds gripping revelations of its author's hidden character, and glimpses into the secrets of his soul. John Crowley's masterly creation is, in itself, a stunning and unprecedented act of literary impersonation. But Lord Byron's Novel is much more, weaving strands from different centuries into an extraordinary tapestry of loss and discovery, and the powerful, invisible threads that eternally bind parent to child. It is the story of a dying daughter's poignant attempt to understand the famous absent father she longed for to her last day, and the contemporary tale of the determined young woman who, by learning the secret of Byron's manuscript and Ada's devotion, reconnects with her own father, who was driven from her life by a crime as terrible as any Byron was accused of. John Crowley's novel is a wonder -- a modern masterwork that moves, enlightens, and satisfies on every level.
480 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
39 people are currently reading
739 people want to read
About the author
John Crowley
129 books836 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942; his father was then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 15th volume of fiction (Endless Things) in 2007. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
His first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1979) was nominated for the 1980 American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s 100 Best Science Fiction Novels.
In 1981 came Little, Big, which Ursula Le Guin described as a book that “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.”
In 1980 Crowley embarked on an ambitious four-volume novel, Ægypt, comprising The Solitudes (originally published as Ægypt), Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things, published in May 2007. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
He is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaianno (Italy), and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet. A novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, appeared in 2002. A museum-quality 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, featuring the art of Peter Milton and a critical introduction by Harold Bloom, is in preparation.
Note: The John Crowley who wrote Sans épines, la rose: Tony Blair, un modèle pour l'Europe? is a different author with the same name. (website)
John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942; his father was then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 15th volume of fiction (Endless Things) in 2007. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
His first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1979) was nominated for the 1980 American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s 100 Best Science Fiction Novels.
In 1981 came Little, Big, which Ursula Le Guin described as a book that “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.”
In 1980 Crowley embarked on an ambitious four-volume novel, Ægypt, comprising The Solitudes (originally published as Ægypt), Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things, published in May 2007. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
He is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaianno (Italy), and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet. A novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, appeared in 2002. A museum-quality 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, featuring the art of Peter Milton and a critical introduction by Harold Bloom, is in preparation.
Note: The John Crowley who wrote Sans épines, la rose: Tony Blair, un modèle pour l'Europe? is a different author with the same name. (website)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 78 reviews
October 4, 2014
A fine and thoroughly disappointing novel.
It is virtually devoid of the mystery and depth of meaning of Crowley's best novels, which I consider to be Little, Big and the Aegypt series.
Technically, it is a marvel, and the mock Byron novel is a rip-roaring read, and even the email exchanges among the principal contemporary characters are interesting; but the book as a whole is terribly predictable (the Byron novel itself being predictably unpredictable). Considering that the novel includes an account of intense literary sleuthing, there is no suspense or sense of discovery. From the beginning you know that the Byron novel has been found, so the sense of excitement the characters feel and express in their email exchanges is totally defused en route to the reader.
The book does explore the nature of self, but for Crowley in a very simplistic dualistic fashion (Byron (or rather his alter-ego in the novel-within-a-novel) is in the end revealed as a split personality ); but essentially the book is about daughters coming to terms with absent, troubled fathers, which is admittedly a moving subject, and I suppose Crowley handles that aspect with subtlety and depth, so certain people will certainly find at least parts of the novel moving, but it's just too specific a subject to carry the weight of the entire novel, which in the end I considered little more than an academic display of technical virtuosity, an excercise in various voices.
It is virtually devoid of the mystery and depth of meaning of Crowley's best novels, which I consider to be Little, Big and the Aegypt series.
Technically, it is a marvel, and the mock Byron novel is a rip-roaring read, and even the email exchanges among the principal contemporary characters are interesting; but the book as a whole is terribly predictable (the Byron novel itself being predictably unpredictable). Considering that the novel includes an account of intense literary sleuthing, there is no suspense or sense of discovery. From the beginning you know that the Byron novel has been found, so the sense of excitement the characters feel and express in their email exchanges is totally defused en route to the reader.
The book does explore the nature of self, but for Crowley in a very simplistic dualistic fashion (Byron (or rather his alter-ego in the novel-within-a-novel) is in the end revealed as a split personality ); but essentially the book is about daughters coming to terms with absent, troubled fathers, which is admittedly a moving subject, and I suppose Crowley handles that aspect with subtlety and depth, so certain people will certainly find at least parts of the novel moving, but it's just too specific a subject to carry the weight of the entire novel, which in the end I considered little more than an academic display of technical virtuosity, an excercise in various voices.
December 29, 2025
4.5 stars (bumped up from my previous 4)
This is probably one of Crowley’s least known novels, but I do think it is one of his best (though not my absolute favourite). In it Crowley does metafictional gothic melodrama, constructing a fictitious novel by Lord Byron and intermingling it with the correspondence of a modern researcher looking into the life of his daughter, the mathematician Ada Lovelace. In this sense I suppose it shares some commonality with a book like A. S. Byatt’s _Possession_ in which researchers drawn into an investigation of historical documents create a parallel story of past and future. Is this a wider thing? Is there a mini-genre of past/present research novels out there? Crowley’s conceit is that certain mysterious, and previously unknown, papers apparently secreted away by Ada’s son surface. They imply that a novel by the famed poet was written though it was subsequently destroyed by his daughter. There remain, however, some tantalizing crumbs that send our dogged researcher, Alexandra Novak (known primarily as "Smith" throughout), on a trail to unravel a secret buried since Ada’s death. This trail will lead her not only to academic discoveries, but also deeply personal ones.
Smith begins her journey by travelling to Britain in order to secure funding for her website, which aims to spotlight important women in history, from a British investor who has recently acquired the cache of Ada’s papers. What at first appears to be a set of notes (written by Ada) to a non-existent novel supposedly written by her father, and a sheaf of pages covered in numbers which seem to have no discernable relationship to any mathematical data she may have been working on, ultimately proves to be a key to something much bigger. In order to discover what this actually is Smith calls upon the aid of her partner Thea, a mathematician back in the states, and her own long-estranged father Lee, a famed director of documentaries and former academic who specialized in Byron. Lee proves to be something of a Byronic figure himself: long estranged from his daughter whom he has not seen since her birth due to charges of statutory rape that sent him into exile outside of the United States.
First and foremost this is a book about fatherless children, or rather about children with bad fathers. The novel within the novel is akin to an autobiography, an attempt by Byron at simultaneously justifying, and perhaps also condemning himself. The main character of Ali is certainly a thinly veiled Byron as his life begins to follow an eerily similar pattern to that of his creator. Born in Albania and living a childhood as an orphan, Ali is eventually taken back to England by his birth father, a lord who is looking for his heir. This is no fairytale transformation into a young prince, however, as Ali immediately comes to learn that his father, the ironically named Lord Sane, is a devious and violent schemer intent only on furthering his own malicious ends. In his naive nature and status as a victim Ali is no doubt something of an act of self-defense by the man notoriously considered “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”. As Ali’s story develops, however, we see another aspect to Byron’s eidolon develop that complicates this simplistic self-image. The doppelgänger and Jung’s Shadow definitely hang over the cloud-wracked gothic sky of this tale.
Yet while Ali’s story certainly fills the general role of advocate for the author to a public that misunderstands him, it is also Byron’s attempt at reaching out to a very specific individual: his daughter. Cut off from her due to the legal and moral failings that have estranged him from his wife (and society at large), not to mention his own self-imposed exile, it is perhaps the only way for the poet to communicate with his lost daughter. Of course, our researcher Alexandra has a history that strangely mirrors that of her subject, Ada Lovelace. The more she digs into the twisted history of the unhappy Byrons the more she sees similar aspects in her own life and begins to ask questions she would never have thought to ask before.
It’s a very good book. Perhaps not a tour de force (though the interlaced stories of past and present and the dovetailing of these two storylines into a thematic whole is satisfying) it is definitely a very worthy addition to Crowley’s oeuvre. It’s about romantic poets, gothic adventures, found and lost love, code-breaking, personal legacy, secrets and forgiveness & devotion. It’s ultimately about discovering who you are from where you came from. A very good read, especially for fans of Crowley.
This is probably one of Crowley’s least known novels, but I do think it is one of his best (though not my absolute favourite). In it Crowley does metafictional gothic melodrama, constructing a fictitious novel by Lord Byron and intermingling it with the correspondence of a modern researcher looking into the life of his daughter, the mathematician Ada Lovelace. In this sense I suppose it shares some commonality with a book like A. S. Byatt’s _Possession_ in which researchers drawn into an investigation of historical documents create a parallel story of past and future. Is this a wider thing? Is there a mini-genre of past/present research novels out there? Crowley’s conceit is that certain mysterious, and previously unknown, papers apparently secreted away by Ada’s son surface. They imply that a novel by the famed poet was written though it was subsequently destroyed by his daughter. There remain, however, some tantalizing crumbs that send our dogged researcher, Alexandra Novak (known primarily as "Smith" throughout), on a trail to unravel a secret buried since Ada’s death. This trail will lead her not only to academic discoveries, but also deeply personal ones.
Smith begins her journey by travelling to Britain in order to secure funding for her website, which aims to spotlight important women in history, from a British investor who has recently acquired the cache of Ada’s papers. What at first appears to be a set of notes (written by Ada) to a non-existent novel supposedly written by her father, and a sheaf of pages covered in numbers which seem to have no discernable relationship to any mathematical data she may have been working on, ultimately proves to be a key to something much bigger. In order to discover what this actually is Smith calls upon the aid of her partner Thea, a mathematician back in the states, and her own long-estranged father Lee, a famed director of documentaries and former academic who specialized in Byron. Lee proves to be something of a Byronic figure himself: long estranged from his daughter whom he has not seen since her birth due to charges of statutory rape that sent him into exile outside of the United States.
First and foremost this is a book about fatherless children, or rather about children with bad fathers. The novel within the novel is akin to an autobiography, an attempt by Byron at simultaneously justifying, and perhaps also condemning himself. The main character of Ali is certainly a thinly veiled Byron as his life begins to follow an eerily similar pattern to that of his creator. Born in Albania and living a childhood as an orphan, Ali is eventually taken back to England by his birth father, a lord who is looking for his heir. This is no fairytale transformation into a young prince, however, as Ali immediately comes to learn that his father, the ironically named Lord Sane, is a devious and violent schemer intent only on furthering his own malicious ends. In his naive nature and status as a victim Ali is no doubt something of an act of self-defense by the man notoriously considered “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”. As Ali’s story develops, however, we see another aspect to Byron’s eidolon develop that complicates this simplistic self-image. The doppelgänger and Jung’s Shadow definitely hang over the cloud-wracked gothic sky of this tale.
Yet while Ali’s story certainly fills the general role of advocate for the author to a public that misunderstands him, it is also Byron’s attempt at reaching out to a very specific individual: his daughter. Cut off from her due to the legal and moral failings that have estranged him from his wife (and society at large), not to mention his own self-imposed exile, it is perhaps the only way for the poet to communicate with his lost daughter. Of course, our researcher Alexandra has a history that strangely mirrors that of her subject, Ada Lovelace. The more she digs into the twisted history of the unhappy Byrons the more she sees similar aspects in her own life and begins to ask questions she would never have thought to ask before.
It’s a very good book. Perhaps not a tour de force (though the interlaced stories of past and present and the dovetailing of these two storylines into a thematic whole is satisfying) it is definitely a very worthy addition to Crowley’s oeuvre. It’s about romantic poets, gothic adventures, found and lost love, code-breaking, personal legacy, secrets and forgiveness & devotion. It’s ultimately about discovering who you are from where you came from. A very good read, especially for fans of Crowley.
April 9, 2025
Crowley does an incredible job channeling Byron's voice into a fabulously Gothic novel, and its setting within the present-day framing story with all its parallels and cross-references is really well done. In fact there are tales within tales within tales here, all looking at and reflecting each other: Byron's story, Ada's story, the story Byron has written (which is largely a reflection of his own story including his daughter), Ada's reflections on Byron's story and on the story Byron has written, Smith's story, Lee's story, the story of Lee and Byron, the story of Smith and her mother and Lee, Lee's reflections on his own story including his daughter, all interwoven like Russian nesting dolls in a hall of mirrors, or a complicated tapestry. In the end all the stories -- both the Gothic and the modern -- resolve beautifully; everyone gets what they deserve and I found it deeply satisfying. This is definitely not a "beach read" or something you can dip into casually, though; it works best if read slowly and attentively, in sustained chunks, so as to absorb fully all the various pieces and how they fit together.
May 10, 2021
This is a *brilliant* book! And due to the staff work of the Omnipotence, I read it at the same time that I was adapting Tom Stoppard's ARCADIA for reading in British Lit class. How uncanny; they're incredibly complimentary books. Just throw in Ann Byatt's POSSESSION & you'd have a glorious three-part fugue on love, literature, scholarship, and science.
May 10, 2009
Took about 7 attempts to get in to this, glad I did. The book is on three tracks: Byron's novel, Ada's notes on Byron's novel, and modern readers working their way through both. Once all three start gelling the pace picks up nicely, but the Byron novel is slow going even for folks like me who like the occasional Romantic novel (and Crowley does Romantic Novel very well). Extra points for having the modern protagonist being a lesbian and having that be only mildly relevant to the plot, and in no way Scary or Tragic. Extra *extra* points for thinking about Ada's son, a mostly forgotten figure. Plus, bears and zombies!
December 16, 2023
Combina un estilo novelístico (plagado de notas de autor, que distraen mucho de la trama) con un intercambio de emails entre personajes. Este mix no me ha gustado nada, tampoco he sido capaz de empatizar con ningún personaje y no me ha generado ningún tipo de interés la historia.
February 11, 2010
What if George Gordon, Lord Byron, had written a novel? He started one, of course, on that famous night in Italy with Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, but quickly abandoned it. Instead, John Crowley asks what if he'd finished it, and it had come into the hands of his daughter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace? Lord Byron's Novel is an intricately intertwined three-part story: Byron's novel, which we get in its entirety; his daughter's annotations and notes; and the researchers who discover the novel.
For me, the earlier parts worked better than the modern-day ones. The novel felt convincingly Byronic; I've read little of his poetry and can't speak to his use of language, but the themes were certainly there: the Albanian setting of much of the novel, the brother-sister incest, and the thinly disguised version of his own wife. Even more convincing, and heartrending, were Ada's annotations; she barely knew her father, who separated from her mother when Ada was very young, and Crowley beautifully portrays her attempts to establish a connection with Byron through the pages of his novel.
The modern-day sections didn't work as well, at least not for me. Smith, the researcher who discovers the novel, just happens to have an estranged father, who just happens to be a Byron scholar; in the course of their email correspondence about the novel, we find out more about Smith and Lee's history. I just felt that it was too pat and predictable in its parallelism with Byron and Ada's relationship, which I was more interested in anyway. I'd have been much happier with more Ada and less Smith and Lee (and Smith's annoying lover, Thea). Overall, though, I did enjoy the book, and I might well read it again for the Byron and Ada parts, which were marvelous.
For me, the earlier parts worked better than the modern-day ones. The novel felt convincingly Byronic; I've read little of his poetry and can't speak to his use of language, but the themes were certainly there: the Albanian setting of much of the novel, the brother-sister incest, and the thinly disguised version of his own wife. Even more convincing, and heartrending, were Ada's annotations; she barely knew her father, who separated from her mother when Ada was very young, and Crowley beautifully portrays her attempts to establish a connection with Byron through the pages of his novel.
The modern-day sections didn't work as well, at least not for me. Smith, the researcher who discovers the novel, just happens to have an estranged father, who just happens to be a Byron scholar; in the course of their email correspondence about the novel, we find out more about Smith and Lee's history. I just felt that it was too pat and predictable in its parallelism with Byron and Ada's relationship, which I was more interested in anyway. I'd have been much happier with more Ada and less Smith and Lee (and Smith's annoying lover, Thea). Overall, though, I did enjoy the book, and I might well read it again for the Byron and Ada parts, which were marvelous.
February 6, 2012
I read this book ages ago and, coming across it again recently, decided to renew my acquaintance with it. But ... 100 pages in, I'm giving up. The thesis is interesting -- a novel purportedly written by Lord Byron surfaces in modern times, along with notes for the manuscript written by his daughter Ada. That's very cool, not only because the novel contents are entertainingly romantic, but Ada's annotations are informative, based on Byron's actual life, and a neat nod to Ada's efforts in writing Notes for Charles Babbage's writings. Ada is a wonderful historical figure, and I enjoyed seeing (fictional) echoes of her here.
What doesn't work, and is EXCEEDINGLY tedious, is the frame story about the modern characters who find the manuscript / notes and are trying to determine whether it's real. This should work fine, but this part of the story is all told through emails (no narration) and it's clunky and boring to read. It's also oddly out of sync now (e.g., the main character's father asks "What is strongwomanstory.org? I suppose I should know how to look for it on the Web, but..." She then proceeds to tell him how to click in the address bar and type in a URL. Really?! These people are communicating by email and he doesn't know how to enter a URL to go somewhere on the web? The book was written in 2005 -- it's not ancient or anything.
So, eventually, I gave up because these modern characters got so annoying. Left alone, I'd totally read the rest of Lord Byron's Novel and Ada's annotations -- but other things are calling for my attention.
What doesn't work, and is EXCEEDINGLY tedious, is the frame story about the modern characters who find the manuscript / notes and are trying to determine whether it's real. This should work fine, but this part of the story is all told through emails (no narration) and it's clunky and boring to read. It's also oddly out of sync now (e.g., the main character's father asks "What is strongwomanstory.org? I suppose I should know how to look for it on the Web, but..." She then proceeds to tell him how to click in the address bar and type in a URL. Really?! These people are communicating by email and he doesn't know how to enter a URL to go somewhere on the web? The book was written in 2005 -- it's not ancient or anything.
So, eventually, I gave up because these modern characters got so annoying. Left alone, I'd totally read the rest of Lord Byron's Novel and Ada's annotations -- but other things are calling for my attention.
November 26, 2018
A pesar de lo que anuncia la contraportada, ésta no es una novela de misterio. Con el agravante de que, tal y como está narrada, no da pie en ningún momento a crear interés por la investigación que fantasea con la localización del texto perdido de Byron. De hecho, los pocos misterios que hubiesen podido elevar un poco la tensión (la descodificación del texto cifrado, o el misterioso personaje que lo tenía en su posesión) se resuelven de un capítulo para otro, o se olvidan sin más.
La recreación de una novela decimonónica es un trabajo interesante, sobre todo a nivel de vocabulario, pero fallido porque no consigue atrapar al lector. Desde el principio queda claro que es una biografía fantaseada del mismo Byron, sin más. Quizás, si se ignora por completo la historia personal de Byron y su hija, Ada Lovelace, la narración gane enteros por los datos biográficos que se van aportando. En otro caso, dudo que se puedan divertir demasiado.
La recreación de una novela decimonónica es un trabajo interesante, sobre todo a nivel de vocabulario, pero fallido porque no consigue atrapar al lector. Desde el principio queda claro que es una biografía fantaseada del mismo Byron, sin más. Quizás, si se ignora por completo la historia personal de Byron y su hija, Ada Lovelace, la narración gane enteros por los datos biográficos que se van aportando. En otro caso, dudo que se puedan divertir demasiado.
October 24, 2022
Crowley calls this book an "impertinence", but I suspect it’s one that Byron would smile on. The epistolary frame tale concerns Alex, a modern-day researcher who comes upon what may be a previously unknown manuscript of Byron’s, enciphered by his daughter Ada Lovelace. So we are also treated to Byron’s supposed novel itself and Ada’s frustrated footnotes.
The rich prose credibly captures Byron’s voice, commanding and cynical, yet humane and good-humoured. ‘His’ gothic romance concerns absent fathers, abandoned children, bears, zombies, hypnotists, duels, continental travels and a lust for liberty. The dying Ada’s affecting commentary finds in the story messages and insights about her relationship with her father, whilst Alex is obliged to seek help from her own estranged papa, who is (wouldn’t you know it?) a Byron expert.
Consequently there are endless fruitful reflections on mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, through time and in and out of fiction, and we are treated to three diverse endings. The inner novel can be read as Byron’s explanation and apology to his daughter, cunningly dividing his doubled character in a manner appropriately reminiscent of other novels of his time like Caleb Williams, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and of course Frankenstein. History and biography appear diligently researched, but Crowley delivers them with a light touch. While Ada tells us that Byron eschewed the supernatural elements in his work, Crowley includes a hint of one, undercut by a mischievous anagram. It’s original, ingenious, colourful, moving and satisfying.
----------------
A sonnet on it:
Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land (John Crowley)
Alex finds a long-lost manuscript
That Byron wrote, a rare foray in prose,
Which daughter Ada laboured to encrypt
And Thea labours later to disclose.
It tells of Ali, bastard son of Sane,
Heir to lordly lands of little worth;
Sweetheart to Iman in pasha's reign,
Though marked, and wild at heart as wild at birth.
Bears and zombies, gambling dens and murder,
Doomed romance, law courts and deadly duels:
All befalls our unprepared goat-herder,
Beset by trials and troubles, fops and fools.
Absent fathers, children long bereft
Are punchcards of the Jacquard's warp and weft.
The rich prose credibly captures Byron’s voice, commanding and cynical, yet humane and good-humoured. ‘His’ gothic romance concerns absent fathers, abandoned children, bears, zombies, hypnotists, duels, continental travels and a lust for liberty. The dying Ada’s affecting commentary finds in the story messages and insights about her relationship with her father, whilst Alex is obliged to seek help from her own estranged papa, who is (wouldn’t you know it?) a Byron expert.
Consequently there are endless fruitful reflections on mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, through time and in and out of fiction, and we are treated to three diverse endings. The inner novel can be read as Byron’s explanation and apology to his daughter, cunningly dividing his doubled character in a manner appropriately reminiscent of other novels of his time like Caleb Williams, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and of course Frankenstein. History and biography appear diligently researched, but Crowley delivers them with a light touch. While Ada tells us that Byron eschewed the supernatural elements in his work, Crowley includes a hint of one, undercut by a mischievous anagram. It’s original, ingenious, colourful, moving and satisfying.
----------------
A sonnet on it:
Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land (John Crowley)
Alex finds a long-lost manuscript
That Byron wrote, a rare foray in prose,
Which daughter Ada laboured to encrypt
And Thea labours later to disclose.
It tells of Ali, bastard son of Sane,
Heir to lordly lands of little worth;
Sweetheart to Iman in pasha's reign,
Though marked, and wild at heart as wild at birth.
Bears and zombies, gambling dens and murder,
Doomed romance, law courts and deadly duels:
All befalls our unprepared goat-herder,
Beset by trials and troubles, fops and fools.
Absent fathers, children long bereft
Are punchcards of the Jacquard's warp and weft.
May 23, 2019
Crowley is a very inventive and interesting writer, and this novel is complicated in a way that demonstrates his strengths and weaknesses. The plot revolves around a novel Byron wrote, thought to be destroyed, but actually encoded by his daughter in the hopes that it would survive. It is found and decoded by some 21st century women. So the book is part detective novel (told through emails, mostly) and part 19th century adventure novel (the text of the discovered novel). Very clever, and it kept me turning pages. Problem is that the characters, in either century, don't have much weight, and seem to exist to serve the plot. In the end I didn't much care.
November 13, 2017
I've said variations of this before but its quite possible that if someone John Crowley conspired to have me kidnapped by Martians to work in their red dust mines, I'd still be praising his writing to my fellow red dust miners. While some books hit harder than others, there's a level of lyricism and thoughtfulness in each one that feels carefully considered. He doesn't do anything for the heck of it, even if it involves extraterrestrial bodysnatching.
This time out, and much like the last one I read of his, "The Translator", he shies away from fantastic elements and focuses on more mundane elements, specifically regarding the text of a novel allegedly written by famed Romantic poet and all around good time Lord Byron, one that was supposed to have been burned by his wife after his death and was somehow hidden by a daughter that he never had the chance to meet.
That all sounds like a good excuse for a genre pastiche but Crowley has to go and complicate the heck out of things by not only giving us the full Byron novel but also the footnotes to each chapter written by said daughter and in between e-mail exchanges between people who are trying to decipher the importance and authenticity of the novel. Each section has its own wrinkles and mini-plots to move things forward, just to keep things interesting, with the theme of fathers and daughters rediscovering each other little by little.
If this sounds like Crowley wanted to write a Lord Byron tribute and was forced to stick other elements into the book in order to get it to sell to more than Romantic poet cosplay conventions, you may not be that far from the truth. The novel itself (called "The Evening Land") gets the bulk of the pages but the actual plot seems to lie in the other sections, as his daughter Ada's notes seem to indicate that she's trying to understand him through the story, while the e-mails are a series of exchanges between Alexandra (or "Smith" as she sometimes goes), her lover Thea and eventually her father Roman Polanski-er, Lee, who is a Byron expert but someone she's been estranged from for years due to a crime in his past. Will they bond while seeking to uncover Ada's secrets or will she eventually lose her patience and sign him up for every spam list she can?
It makes for a very strange beast, not the least because we're never quite sure what we're supposed to be focusing on. The Byron novel is literally the entire novel and not being one for poetry I don't know much about Lord Byron so I can't even say what parts of the novel are supposed to be autobiographical. Knowing Crowley the style is probably as accurate as he could swing it which means if you aren't already a fan of novels from that period you might find it rough going . . . it took me about three chapters of the novel to finally settle in to the rhythms of it, much like when I go see a Shakespeare production. To modern eyes it comes off as drastically overwritten and even if that is how they wrote back then, the parts of the novel that seem to work the best are where Crowley dials back the Romantic tendencies slightly and focuses on just telling the story. It doesn't help that the story itself isn't amazingly great shakes and probably more interesting to Byron fans . . . telling the story of a young man with a beastly father making his way through the world. Its got twists and turns in the best melodramatic fashion, with sudden deaths, unexpected children, unexpected other relatives but being that you're already reading a novel about a fake novel there too many layers of artifice involved for me to really get into it.
The footnotes are another curious beast . . . on the one hand they're trying to flesh out Ada as a person, highlighting her loneliness and slight despair (she died in her mid-thirties of cervical cancer and not pleasantly either), her cloudy moments and the times when she's desperately trying to understand the father she never met, looking for parallels to his life in the novel and even in herself at times. But the footnotes are too infrequent for any real momentum to develop and beyond having her text break off into almost literal cries of pain, there's not much he can do to make them feel immediate. And again, even though he does his best to incorporate actual historical facts into this layer of the narrative (she was buried near her father and may have been the first computer programmer, which is an aspect the novel continually flirts with but never seems to fully relay the impact it wants to) its hard to forget you're reading a made up novel to begin with.
The e-mail exchanges have the most promise and show that if Crowley wanted to go and write a full modern day epistolary novel he'd probably do a fairly decent job of it. He captures the rhythms of all the participants and how people's styles tend to change depending on how they're talking to . . . for some reason he has Thea write in a teenage no punctuation style that even Alexandra comments on is annoying as heck but the meat of the conversations are between Alexandra and her father as they gently push and probe at each other, not wanting to go too far but aching to fully reconnect, or at least see if its worth the attempt. Their shared exuberance and moments of tension are conveyed well and what was interesting was how Crowley was often able to convey the emotion behind the text, giving you an idea of what isn't said in the e-mail itself, which can be just as important as what someone writes. The emotional heart of the story seems to lie in these sections and while I think he lets Lee get off a bit too easy (while he admits to his crime, he's allowed to cloud the issue by noting he was the only one caught) the story isn't really about his redemption as much as a father and daughter understanding each other for the first time as adults, far away from the parent-child dynamic that they have no choice but to approach it fresh. That he almost makes it work as a separate novella is more remarkable yet.
And that's the crux of it . . . the e-mail material is so well written and the relationships thought out that the Byron stuff is kind of weird bonus material making it odd to understand who this book is even for . . . Byron fans may see this as an okay imitation of the master and would probably rather have the full Byron rather than the footnotes mystery and the Alexandra-Lee stuff but people who are more into the latter are going to be turned off by having to wade through a novel that is two-thirds written in a style that went out of fashion when gaslamps did. Crowley's talent makes it manageable but you keep waiting for the sections to blend together symphonically, building to some grand revelation or emotional payoff when each kind of ends on its own simply, without paying much attention to what the other is doing. I expected more interlacing of the different parts and instead we got not quite three novels in one, but a novel, a novella and an experimental short story. Its all done tastefully and with reverence but considering the subject, its not impossible what would have happened if Crowley had injected more of Byron's spirit instead of his style.
This time out, and much like the last one I read of his, "The Translator", he shies away from fantastic elements and focuses on more mundane elements, specifically regarding the text of a novel allegedly written by famed Romantic poet and all around good time Lord Byron, one that was supposed to have been burned by his wife after his death and was somehow hidden by a daughter that he never had the chance to meet.
That all sounds like a good excuse for a genre pastiche but Crowley has to go and complicate the heck out of things by not only giving us the full Byron novel but also the footnotes to each chapter written by said daughter and in between e-mail exchanges between people who are trying to decipher the importance and authenticity of the novel. Each section has its own wrinkles and mini-plots to move things forward, just to keep things interesting, with the theme of fathers and daughters rediscovering each other little by little.
If this sounds like Crowley wanted to write a Lord Byron tribute and was forced to stick other elements into the book in order to get it to sell to more than Romantic poet cosplay conventions, you may not be that far from the truth. The novel itself (called "The Evening Land") gets the bulk of the pages but the actual plot seems to lie in the other sections, as his daughter Ada's notes seem to indicate that she's trying to understand him through the story, while the e-mails are a series of exchanges between Alexandra (or "Smith" as she sometimes goes), her lover Thea and eventually her father Roman Polanski-er, Lee, who is a Byron expert but someone she's been estranged from for years due to a crime in his past. Will they bond while seeking to uncover Ada's secrets or will she eventually lose her patience and sign him up for every spam list she can?
It makes for a very strange beast, not the least because we're never quite sure what we're supposed to be focusing on. The Byron novel is literally the entire novel and not being one for poetry I don't know much about Lord Byron so I can't even say what parts of the novel are supposed to be autobiographical. Knowing Crowley the style is probably as accurate as he could swing it which means if you aren't already a fan of novels from that period you might find it rough going . . . it took me about three chapters of the novel to finally settle in to the rhythms of it, much like when I go see a Shakespeare production. To modern eyes it comes off as drastically overwritten and even if that is how they wrote back then, the parts of the novel that seem to work the best are where Crowley dials back the Romantic tendencies slightly and focuses on just telling the story. It doesn't help that the story itself isn't amazingly great shakes and probably more interesting to Byron fans . . . telling the story of a young man with a beastly father making his way through the world. Its got twists and turns in the best melodramatic fashion, with sudden deaths, unexpected children, unexpected other relatives but being that you're already reading a novel about a fake novel there too many layers of artifice involved for me to really get into it.
The footnotes are another curious beast . . . on the one hand they're trying to flesh out Ada as a person, highlighting her loneliness and slight despair (she died in her mid-thirties of cervical cancer and not pleasantly either), her cloudy moments and the times when she's desperately trying to understand the father she never met, looking for parallels to his life in the novel and even in herself at times. But the footnotes are too infrequent for any real momentum to develop and beyond having her text break off into almost literal cries of pain, there's not much he can do to make them feel immediate. And again, even though he does his best to incorporate actual historical facts into this layer of the narrative (she was buried near her father and may have been the first computer programmer, which is an aspect the novel continually flirts with but never seems to fully relay the impact it wants to) its hard to forget you're reading a made up novel to begin with.
The e-mail exchanges have the most promise and show that if Crowley wanted to go and write a full modern day epistolary novel he'd probably do a fairly decent job of it. He captures the rhythms of all the participants and how people's styles tend to change depending on how they're talking to . . . for some reason he has Thea write in a teenage no punctuation style that even Alexandra comments on is annoying as heck but the meat of the conversations are between Alexandra and her father as they gently push and probe at each other, not wanting to go too far but aching to fully reconnect, or at least see if its worth the attempt. Their shared exuberance and moments of tension are conveyed well and what was interesting was how Crowley was often able to convey the emotion behind the text, giving you an idea of what isn't said in the e-mail itself, which can be just as important as what someone writes. The emotional heart of the story seems to lie in these sections and while I think he lets Lee get off a bit too easy (while he admits to his crime, he's allowed to cloud the issue by noting he was the only one caught) the story isn't really about his redemption as much as a father and daughter understanding each other for the first time as adults, far away from the parent-child dynamic that they have no choice but to approach it fresh. That he almost makes it work as a separate novella is more remarkable yet.
And that's the crux of it . . . the e-mail material is so well written and the relationships thought out that the Byron stuff is kind of weird bonus material making it odd to understand who this book is even for . . . Byron fans may see this as an okay imitation of the master and would probably rather have the full Byron rather than the footnotes mystery and the Alexandra-Lee stuff but people who are more into the latter are going to be turned off by having to wade through a novel that is two-thirds written in a style that went out of fashion when gaslamps did. Crowley's talent makes it manageable but you keep waiting for the sections to blend together symphonically, building to some grand revelation or emotional payoff when each kind of ends on its own simply, without paying much attention to what the other is doing. I expected more interlacing of the different parts and instead we got not quite three novels in one, but a novel, a novella and an experimental short story. Its all done tastefully and with reverence but considering the subject, its not impossible what would have happened if Crowley had injected more of Byron's spirit instead of his style.
April 20, 2024
Wow, okay. This book could not be any more entirely my jam if it tried. The Romantics, Byron in particular, have always fascinated me, and I love when contemporary novelists play around with the prose styling of their literary heroes of the past - although of course in Byron's case, his prose isn't exactly what he's remembered for. Also, I love a good epistolary/mixed medium novel, and I love, love, love, stories that have interesting things to say *about* stories. Why we crave them, why we hunt them down and prioritize them. What they mean to us generally and as individuals.
I legitimately wept during the last chapter of The Evening Land when the character of Angus took on the care of his daughter - "She I was able to liberate, and carry to freedom--whatever Freedom may mean--self-government is to be a part of it--of that I have evidence already." This imagined novel of Byron's, wherein he splits himself neatly in two so that he may be a political liberator and a dedicated father of a talented, precocious, clever daughter, all at the same time... wow. Every time we got to a part that squeezed my heart in my chest, I'd look for that little number next to the paragraph and wonder what Ada would say about it when I got to the chapter notes. Truly moving, to think of a daughter finding this kind of evidence of her father's regrets and hopes. All that might have been but never could be. They both died in their thirties, isn't that something?
I will say, one potential issue I had with the novel was the Lee-and-Smith, Byron-and-Ada parallels. I thought it was a wonderful idea and there were things about it executed very well. I was moved by Smith's recurring concerns later in the text over what might have been had the world been different: what if Ada and Byron hadn't both died so young, what if Ada had been empowered to go visit him, or he her, what if Ada's mother hadn't been so bitter as to keep them apart once Ada was grown. And that is in fact her own situation with her estranged father. Just the very last bit of text in the book confirms that they were able to meet, as Smith evidently does go to meet Lee in Kyoto, as he'd suggested.
But I think the reveal of what Lee's crime was - statutory rape - leaves something a little bit muddied about this comparison. I understand the impulse here; Byron is known to anybody who knows anything about him at all, as an early example of the "sex scandal"; he was constantly getting himself into immoral and uncomfortable scrapes when it came to his sexual proclivities. Married women, his own half-sister, MEN...
So I think having Lee out of the picture because of a sex scandal makes sense, but this somewhat muddied decision to have it be specifically this, sex with a minor at a party where he can kinda-sorta exculpate himself because maybe he didn't know her exact age... I don't know. It's a little too murky, and I'm not entirely sure the comparison works. I think maybe I would have liked it better if it had been, like, he'd slept with a male colleague or something, and broken up two marriages in the process - or hell, make it incest, like with Byron, have him sleeping with a half-sibling or first cousin or what have you. Byron's whole deal with his half-sister was scandalous and also considered very unusual, whereas gross old men sleeping with teenage girls is a grotesque but much more mundane type of scandal, only elevated to the honor of real "news" because Lee was a public figure in Hollywood.
This is all a ramble to say: I think I understand the reasoning of giving Lee a scandal of this type that would parallel with Byron's own, but I might have finessed the specifics in order to make it land better.
I do think giving the discovery and shepherding of the Byron novel into the hands of a young lesbian woman, a scholar of science history, was the perfect move. I'm always delighted to see male authors try their hand at embodying people with life experiences so different from their own, and doing it in a way that deepens empathy in the reader, and hopefully in the writer during that process of discovering the character. I really felt that while Crowley came to this novel with a preexisting fascination in and love for Byron, he came to feel connected more to Ada through the process of thinking about her, and creating Smith as a vehicle for that thought.
This was a fun book to read for someone who knows some, but not a ton, about Byron's biography and body of work - I kept getting glimpses in the core text of The Evening Land of stuff I thought I half-understood, and then I'd get to one of Lee's emails, or Ada's chapter notes, and feel really smart and excited to have understood the structure as it paralleled Byron's own life. The way the sinister figure, the crippled and abandoned man, the dogged shadow of Ali's life, winds up being the one who gets to be the loving and devoted father at the end... I don't know. It just really moved me. I felt the self-effacing, even self-loathing, characterization of Byron coming through in this fictionalized version of a novel he might have written. This deeply cathartic and relatable fantasy about being able to actualize the aspects of yourself you admire, and those you despise, split yourself into pieces, follow the threads of your worst and best impulses... achieve everything you think you ought to achieve, without sacrificing the warmth and care of a child's love...
I know Byron didn't really write this. And I know we can't ever fully understand how he felt about Ada. But I still felt the catharsis of this imagining through the text, and it really did make me think about why this shit matters, why we keep going back and studying the art made by the people who came before us. For deeply personal truths about those people and their hopes and fears, but also for more generalized ideas that apply just as strongly to our own lives today. The closest to spiritual communion with a higher power I ever get is when I read something someone wrote centuries before I was born, and find an emotional resonance within it. To know that people then were like people now has always been deeply moving to me.
And I think if you had to pick a trite, single-sentence description of the theme of this novel, that's what it would be. They're just like us, and they're worth remembering.
I legitimately wept during the last chapter of The Evening Land when the character of Angus took on the care of his daughter - "She I was able to liberate, and carry to freedom--whatever Freedom may mean--self-government is to be a part of it--of that I have evidence already." This imagined novel of Byron's, wherein he splits himself neatly in two so that he may be a political liberator and a dedicated father of a talented, precocious, clever daughter, all at the same time... wow. Every time we got to a part that squeezed my heart in my chest, I'd look for that little number next to the paragraph and wonder what Ada would say about it when I got to the chapter notes. Truly moving, to think of a daughter finding this kind of evidence of her father's regrets and hopes. All that might have been but never could be. They both died in their thirties, isn't that something?
I will say, one potential issue I had with the novel was the Lee-and-Smith, Byron-and-Ada parallels. I thought it was a wonderful idea and there were things about it executed very well. I was moved by Smith's recurring concerns later in the text over what might have been had the world been different: what if Ada and Byron hadn't both died so young, what if Ada had been empowered to go visit him, or he her, what if Ada's mother hadn't been so bitter as to keep them apart once Ada was grown. And that is in fact her own situation with her estranged father. Just the very last bit of text in the book confirms that they were able to meet, as Smith evidently does go to meet Lee in Kyoto, as he'd suggested.
But I think the reveal of what Lee's crime was - statutory rape - leaves something a little bit muddied about this comparison. I understand the impulse here; Byron is known to anybody who knows anything about him at all, as an early example of the "sex scandal"; he was constantly getting himself into immoral and uncomfortable scrapes when it came to his sexual proclivities. Married women, his own half-sister, MEN...
So I think having Lee out of the picture because of a sex scandal makes sense, but this somewhat muddied decision to have it be specifically this, sex with a minor at a party where he can kinda-sorta exculpate himself because maybe he didn't know her exact age... I don't know. It's a little too murky, and I'm not entirely sure the comparison works. I think maybe I would have liked it better if it had been, like, he'd slept with a male colleague or something, and broken up two marriages in the process - or hell, make it incest, like with Byron, have him sleeping with a half-sibling or first cousin or what have you. Byron's whole deal with his half-sister was scandalous and also considered very unusual, whereas gross old men sleeping with teenage girls is a grotesque but much more mundane type of scandal, only elevated to the honor of real "news" because Lee was a public figure in Hollywood.
This is all a ramble to say: I think I understand the reasoning of giving Lee a scandal of this type that would parallel with Byron's own, but I might have finessed the specifics in order to make it land better.
I do think giving the discovery and shepherding of the Byron novel into the hands of a young lesbian woman, a scholar of science history, was the perfect move. I'm always delighted to see male authors try their hand at embodying people with life experiences so different from their own, and doing it in a way that deepens empathy in the reader, and hopefully in the writer during that process of discovering the character. I really felt that while Crowley came to this novel with a preexisting fascination in and love for Byron, he came to feel connected more to Ada through the process of thinking about her, and creating Smith as a vehicle for that thought.
This was a fun book to read for someone who knows some, but not a ton, about Byron's biography and body of work - I kept getting glimpses in the core text of The Evening Land of stuff I thought I half-understood, and then I'd get to one of Lee's emails, or Ada's chapter notes, and feel really smart and excited to have understood the structure as it paralleled Byron's own life. The way the sinister figure, the crippled and abandoned man, the dogged shadow of Ali's life, winds up being the one who gets to be the loving and devoted father at the end... I don't know. It just really moved me. I felt the self-effacing, even self-loathing, characterization of Byron coming through in this fictionalized version of a novel he might have written. This deeply cathartic and relatable fantasy about being able to actualize the aspects of yourself you admire, and those you despise, split yourself into pieces, follow the threads of your worst and best impulses... achieve everything you think you ought to achieve, without sacrificing the warmth and care of a child's love...
I know Byron didn't really write this. And I know we can't ever fully understand how he felt about Ada. But I still felt the catharsis of this imagining through the text, and it really did make me think about why this shit matters, why we keep going back and studying the art made by the people who came before us. For deeply personal truths about those people and their hopes and fears, but also for more generalized ideas that apply just as strongly to our own lives today. The closest to spiritual communion with a higher power I ever get is when I read something someone wrote centuries before I was born, and find an emotional resonance within it. To know that people then were like people now has always been deeply moving to me.
And I think if you had to pick a trite, single-sentence description of the theme of this novel, that's what it would be. They're just like us, and they're worth remembering.
August 5, 2016
I started reading this book with great interest and then it just got confusing and boring and you know how I am with authors interjecting comments to the reader (Mark Twain!!!). We have a story supposedly written by Lord Byron. Manuscripts happened upon daughter Ada Lovelace who was to burn them but coded the whole novel into numbers so all was not to be lost then years into the future found again (ofcourse), decoded and published. This could almost be four stories. The story.. the novel is about, a history of Lord Byron, story of daughter Ada who is telling us the story, all this done by the one who discovers the manuscripts and all the while this whole revelations of things is comunicating by email to her lesbian lover and estranged father. Sometimes I wasn't with who the emails were to or from. A lot of nonsense talk going on about unimportant stuff. i just thought an interesting story (or what could have been) was ruined and became almost bothersome to stick it our and read to the end. I did...but oi!
iquit
August 18, 201358 pages in and I just couldn't do it anymore. I will commend the author on making the Byron segments as pretentious and ponderous as the real thing.
June 28, 2015
way too boring...I actually gave up half way through.
May 2, 2020
Ambitious and clever, but disappointing.
February 10, 2019
Lord Byron, of course, never wrote a novel - except perhaps the beginnings of one. Or, if he did, it is lost to the mists of time. Crowley’s conceit here is that Byron completed it, and that his daughter, Ada Lovelace, “the first computer programmer,” burned it due to her batty mother’s insistence, but, before she did so, encrypted it in a series of numbers. Those numbers have turned up in papers belonging to Viscount Ockham, Ada’s son. A website called strongwomanstory has gained access to these and sent a reporter to look them over. This aspect of Crowley’s novel is related in a series of emails and letters between the reporter “Smith” and her mother “Thea” but expands to include her father. Smith’s relationship with her father is much the same as Ada Lovelace’s with hers – sexual indiscretions resulting in estrangement - except the modern story holds the promise of reconciliation. Included in these exchanges is the observation that Ada’s story contains ‘a monster parent, but it’s not her father-it’s her mother’ and the observation about Byron’s notorious lack of punctuation “Printers in those days could punctuate. Imagine. Now hardly anybody can.”
It would of course be impossible to proceed with this scenario were the “novel” by Lord Byron not to appear in these pages and it does take up by far the largest part of the book. Crowley has done an impressive job in ventriloquising the poet’s voice even if at one point he does have Byron pre-echo Tolstoy with the thought, “Happy endings are all alike; disasters may be unique.” Its protagonist, Ali, born in Albania as the result of a liaison with a wandering British aristocrat, Lord Sane, is in young adulthood sought out by his father to become heir to the Sane estate, somewhere in Scotland. This tale, The Evening Land, is as Gothic as you could wish, involving a gruesome death, misplaced accusations, possible amnesia, an impersonator, a clandestine seduction – everything you would expect from a book with such supposed origins and complete with the verisimilitudinal inclusion of archaic spellings such as dropt for dropped, segar for cigar and soar’d for saored. We are also given Ada’s commentary on the text of The Evening Land, in the form of “her” notes on each chapter, wherein she wonders if her father could ever have imagined a family not riven by disputes. (There is, too, a respect in which, notwithstanding the fact that The Evening Land’s contents bear resemblances to incidents in Byron’s life, this overall endeavor might be said to be more about Ada than Byron.)
Then we have the wonderful cover illustration featuring Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog ,) and the rough-cut page edges making the book resemble one from the early 19th century show a pleasing attention to detail.
Crowley came to my attention back in the 1970s with books such as Little, BigEngine Summer and Aegypt (I note here the appearance in the text of The Evening Land of the spelling Æschylus) but dropped off my reading register till I noticed this book. I’ll be looking for more of him now though.
It would of course be impossible to proceed with this scenario were the “novel” by Lord Byron not to appear in these pages and it does take up by far the largest part of the book. Crowley has done an impressive job in ventriloquising the poet’s voice even if at one point he does have Byron pre-echo Tolstoy with the thought, “Happy endings are all alike; disasters may be unique.” Its protagonist, Ali, born in Albania as the result of a liaison with a wandering British aristocrat, Lord Sane, is in young adulthood sought out by his father to become heir to the Sane estate, somewhere in Scotland. This tale, The Evening Land, is as Gothic as you could wish, involving a gruesome death, misplaced accusations, possible amnesia, an impersonator, a clandestine seduction – everything you would expect from a book with such supposed origins and complete with the verisimilitudinal inclusion of archaic spellings such as dropt for dropped, segar for cigar and soar’d for saored. We are also given Ada’s commentary on the text of The Evening Land, in the form of “her” notes on each chapter, wherein she wonders if her father could ever have imagined a family not riven by disputes. (There is, too, a respect in which, notwithstanding the fact that The Evening Land’s contents bear resemblances to incidents in Byron’s life, this overall endeavor might be said to be more about Ada than Byron.)
Then we have the wonderful cover illustration featuring Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog ,) and the rough-cut page edges making the book resemble one from the early 19th century show a pleasing attention to detail.
Crowley came to my attention back in the 1970s with books such as Little, BigEngine Summer and Aegypt (I note here the appearance in the text of The Evening Land of the spelling Æschylus) but dropped off my reading register till I noticed this book. I’ll be looking for more of him now though.
May 30, 2017
I'll admit at the outset that I have been thoroughly inducted into the Crowley cult. Little, Big is my favorite novel of all time and I will read anything Crowley has written, even if I'm not interested in the synopsis. I am also an avid reader of Romantic literature, so when I heard about Lord Byron's Novel, I was completely excited.
I won't pretend it's not a slog. Crowley's impersonation is so good that it is often boring and tedious to read the sections written in Byron's voice. The portions written in e-mail form were interesting and beautifully characterized, but devoid of Crowley's unique and gorgeous prose. It all feels real, a little too real. Yes, this is what Byron's novel would be like. Yes, this is what a bunch of people e-mailing about the manuscript would be like. But I'd much rather read a book in John Crowley's usual voice than in Byron's voice and some e-mailers' voices. If you've already become a fan of Crowley's usual style, this book won't be what you expect, and you may be disappointed. I didn't find myself particularly attached to any of the characters, or invested in what happened to them. I read on because I wanted to see, in a disinterested way, how Byron's seemingly disparate plot threads would somehow work themselves out, and because I enjoy reading Crowley's writing even when he's not at his usual top form.
It's still a thoroughly clever book. Byron's novel parallels both his own life and the lives of the modern people who find themselves tangled in it. Like much of Byron's work (at least for me), it seemed devoid of that final stroke of meaning, that "ah-ha" moment that makes literary conclusions satisfying. Both the novel-within-a-novel and the frame story involving Smith, Thea, and Lee seemed to be leading to a grand conclusion about fathers, daughters, and redemption, but ultimately ended inconclusively and a little flatly. I suppose Crowley to be brilliant enough that this is part of the point, that all of the elements in Romantic fiction are often tied together sloppily at the end, in ways we didn't expect. But it doesn't make it any less unsatisfying when one is used to reading Crowley's usual endings, which, even when mysterious, are satisfying, moving, and eloquent.
I don't want to give too much away about the plot, but I will say this much: a large portion of the modern frame story revolves around the repercussions of the sexual assault of a young girl, and the character involved in this plot point can be interpreted as a rape apologist. I found these sections of the book very difficult to read. Crowley doesn't exactly condone his characters or their actions (nor does any author), but the character in question takes an attitude that I cannot even read in fiction without becoming upset and disgusted. Anyone sensitive to this kind of trigger, be warned.
In all, it's a book that is extremely well-written and interesting in an academic sense, but not as enjoyable or emotionally satisfying as Crowley's other works.
I won't pretend it's not a slog. Crowley's impersonation is so good that it is often boring and tedious to read the sections written in Byron's voice. The portions written in e-mail form were interesting and beautifully characterized, but devoid of Crowley's unique and gorgeous prose. It all feels real, a little too real. Yes, this is what Byron's novel would be like. Yes, this is what a bunch of people e-mailing about the manuscript would be like. But I'd much rather read a book in John Crowley's usual voice than in Byron's voice and some e-mailers' voices. If you've already become a fan of Crowley's usual style, this book won't be what you expect, and you may be disappointed. I didn't find myself particularly attached to any of the characters, or invested in what happened to them. I read on because I wanted to see, in a disinterested way, how Byron's seemingly disparate plot threads would somehow work themselves out, and because I enjoy reading Crowley's writing even when he's not at his usual top form.
It's still a thoroughly clever book. Byron's novel parallels both his own life and the lives of the modern people who find themselves tangled in it. Like much of Byron's work (at least for me), it seemed devoid of that final stroke of meaning, that "ah-ha" moment that makes literary conclusions satisfying. Both the novel-within-a-novel and the frame story involving Smith, Thea, and Lee seemed to be leading to a grand conclusion about fathers, daughters, and redemption, but ultimately ended inconclusively and a little flatly. I suppose Crowley to be brilliant enough that this is part of the point, that all of the elements in Romantic fiction are often tied together sloppily at the end, in ways we didn't expect. But it doesn't make it any less unsatisfying when one is used to reading Crowley's usual endings, which, even when mysterious, are satisfying, moving, and eloquent.
I don't want to give too much away about the plot, but I will say this much: a large portion of the modern frame story revolves around the repercussions of the sexual assault of a young girl, and the character involved in this plot point can be interpreted as a rape apologist. I found these sections of the book very difficult to read. Crowley doesn't exactly condone his characters or their actions (nor does any author), but the character in question takes an attitude that I cannot even read in fiction without becoming upset and disgusted. Anyone sensitive to this kind of trigger, be warned.
In all, it's a book that is extremely well-written and interesting in an academic sense, but not as enjoyable or emotionally satisfying as Crowley's other works.
January 19, 2020
John Crowley continues to amaze with the breadth of his creativity. His 2005 book, Lord Byron’s Novel, explores the life of the notorious poet and his near-unknown daughter Ada, later Ada Lovelace, a mathematician who, mentored by Charles Babbage, foresaw the capabilities of computers, even in the 1850s. The vehicle is a single page of a destroyed manuscript which refers to a full-length novel penned by Byron, burned at her mother’s request by Ada. But this single page contains a cipher – a number series which when decoded, applies to columns of numbers written on a stack of pages in Ada’s papers.
The researchers, in 2002, suspect that Ada burned the manuscript out of deference to her mother, but not before rendering it in a code only broken by their diligence. Crowley’s novel is the result, with footnotes by Ada commenting about the likely personages and encounters her father’s novel refers to. Meanwhile, a thread of communications between researchers introduces another story. In effect, this novel is three: Lord Byron’s itself, The Evening Land, is everything one might hope for from a poet, adventurer, ne’er-do-well, a rebel dubbed “Satan” by his detractors. Ada’s chapter-by-chapter observations offer a counterpoint to his words. The communications of his 21st century discoverers open yet another view onto a man who lived fully and died young.
What is it about Crowley? What muse has come to dwell with him, giving unique insight to his subjects, which themselves range from the fairy tale Little, Big; to his novel Four Freedoms, about Americans who during WWII moved from the margins to center stage while the young white male (dominant) group was overseas at war: women, racial minorities, cripples – their efforts were needed to supply military materiel, so they were allowed economic power and privilege previously closed to them. Crowley explores the mystic undercurrents of modern life in his Ægypt trilogy. Then, his novel The Translator is patterned on the life of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, expatriate due to official persecution. In this deceptively short work, we see the poet, teaching a seminar at an American university, cultivate an undergrad woman – not a Russian speaker/reader – to translate his poetry into English. Their simpatico relationship enables her to express his words, not literally but from the heart, in another language.
And here we have him reaching into the past, resurrecting a poet of faltering reputation, along with his daughter never given due recognition. Crowley seems engaged in a sort of literary healing, in which his clear insights rescue people from the niches into which society has confined them, setting them on a path of honor and respect. If curiosity drives what you read, Crowley should be on your list, on your bookshelf, and his voice in your mind.
The researchers, in 2002, suspect that Ada burned the manuscript out of deference to her mother, but not before rendering it in a code only broken by their diligence. Crowley’s novel is the result, with footnotes by Ada commenting about the likely personages and encounters her father’s novel refers to. Meanwhile, a thread of communications between researchers introduces another story. In effect, this novel is three: Lord Byron’s itself, The Evening Land, is everything one might hope for from a poet, adventurer, ne’er-do-well, a rebel dubbed “Satan” by his detractors. Ada’s chapter-by-chapter observations offer a counterpoint to his words. The communications of his 21st century discoverers open yet another view onto a man who lived fully and died young.
What is it about Crowley? What muse has come to dwell with him, giving unique insight to his subjects, which themselves range from the fairy tale Little, Big; to his novel Four Freedoms, about Americans who during WWII moved from the margins to center stage while the young white male (dominant) group was overseas at war: women, racial minorities, cripples – their efforts were needed to supply military materiel, so they were allowed economic power and privilege previously closed to them. Crowley explores the mystic undercurrents of modern life in his Ægypt trilogy. Then, his novel The Translator is patterned on the life of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, expatriate due to official persecution. In this deceptively short work, we see the poet, teaching a seminar at an American university, cultivate an undergrad woman – not a Russian speaker/reader – to translate his poetry into English. Their simpatico relationship enables her to express his words, not literally but from the heart, in another language.
And here we have him reaching into the past, resurrecting a poet of faltering reputation, along with his daughter never given due recognition. Crowley seems engaged in a sort of literary healing, in which his clear insights rescue people from the niches into which society has confined them, setting them on a path of honor and respect. If curiosity drives what you read, Crowley should be on your list, on your bookshelf, and his voice in your mind.
October 24, 2019
I have mixed feelings about this book. It is an interesting project and it's quite well researched and exhaustively done, I acknowledge that. However, I thought it was a bit slow-paced at times, especially the parts that are supposed to be Byron's novel, which is crazy as his poems are anything but slow-paced. Also, I understand what the author tried to do here, others have done it too (Lord of the dead by Tom Holland) and while I could see it at times, there were many other parts in which I disagreed wholeheartedly with the view he portrayed of Byron, his life, vision, interests and all. Maybe that was my main problem: as someone who's quite interested in the English poet, who has read all his work, letters, diaries, most biographies, etc. I couldn't really believe or accept the premise of this novel most of the time, it just didn't work 100% and thus I wasn't able to suspend disbelief.
There's a lot of bibliography about Byron and, more recently, about Ada too. Therefore this was quite an ambitious project and that's probably why it fails, somehow, at least for me.
I thought there were some interesting reflections and enjoyed especially the email correspondence by the researchers in modern-day and Ada's notes.
About Byron's supposed manuscript, it didn't sound like him at all. I must say I enjoy his work a lot more than I did the novel.
There's a lot of bibliography about Byron and, more recently, about Ada too. Therefore this was quite an ambitious project and that's probably why it fails, somehow, at least for me.
I thought there were some interesting reflections and enjoyed especially the email correspondence by the researchers in modern-day and Ada's notes.
About Byron's supposed manuscript, it didn't sound like him at all. I must say I enjoy his work a lot more than I did the novel.
December 5, 2023
No he sido capaz de terminarlo, y no me pasa a menudo. Me pareció interesante el estilo epistolar de algunos fragmentos, pero llegado a un punto me molesta más de lo que me interesa. Me pareció creativo que cierto personaje escribiera de forma no normativa, pero también ha acabado por demandarme más energía de lo que me aporta.
Estas son las partes más positivas. Los fragmentos novelados no han conseguido captar mi interés, aunque son la parte que mejor avanza con el relato. Pero aún así su estilo no me engancha, y lo narrado tampoco consigue despertar un interés activo por conocer más. Estos fragmentos y los anteriores se encuentran desconectados, se sienten como partes totalmente diferentes de un todo que no consigue serlo. En general, su lectura es algo difícil que requiere de una atención que no he sentido recompensada. No la recomendaría.
Estas son las partes más positivas. Los fragmentos novelados no han conseguido captar mi interés, aunque son la parte que mejor avanza con el relato. Pero aún así su estilo no me engancha, y lo narrado tampoco consigue despertar un interés activo por conocer más. Estos fragmentos y los anteriores se encuentran desconectados, se sienten como partes totalmente diferentes de un todo que no consigue serlo. En general, su lectura es algo difícil que requiere de una atención que no he sentido recompensada. No la recomendaría.
February 4, 2019
Such a great premise, and a fascinating blend of styles, from the mock Byron novel to the modern-age epistolary joy of emails and faxes. However, the actual story itself fell a bit flat for me, with the actual novel not being unique enough from Byron's actual work to give anything new. It was highly predictable, if punctuated with a Byron-like fervor, full of predictable lovers and situations that were just pulled from 'Don Juan' and 'Manfred' and 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.' A writing achievement but unfortunately a snoozy plot.
December 23, 2018
This book should've been right up my alley: a pitch-perfect pastiche of early 19th century prose, witty and erudite, by an author whose works I love. And yet... The novel never really feels alive; it feels like a waxwork in a museum -- a wonderful reconstruction, but not something you'd want to spend a lot of time hanging out with.
April 24, 2023
Swerves between a truly awful Victorian novel... I suspect this was supposed to be funny but there was too much of it for me... and an epistolary story that just didn't hold my interest. Just wasn't for me.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 4, 2020
No me ha parecido una novela muy entretenida. Parecía que iba a ser un tipo Código DaVinci y para nada.
August 7, 2020
Really enjoyed this. The multiple stories were heart warming and redeeming.
However, I really hate stories told through “texts”. That knocks a star off it.
However, I really hate stories told through “texts”. That knocks a star off it.
Want to read
April 14, 2023Thought I read this...?
December 29, 2012
In between the seven years between the last and penultimate installments of his Aegypt cycle, John Crowley wrote two standalone novels of a different tone to his hermetic story. Far from being the mystical prose readers of his acclaimed Little, Big had come to expect/demand, these novels delivered a much more straightforward story, tighter plot, and clearer message. Lord Byron's Novel is the later of the two.
The Evening Land has what appears to be a complex structure. It consists of a novel that is written (allegedly) by Lord Byron with annotations by his daughter and 'founder of computer sciences', Ada Lovelace. Throughout the book, we are also treated to some e-mail correspondences between Alexandra "Smith" Novak and her various associates: Her estranged father Lee Novak and lesbian lover Thea. These correspondences mainly serve to show how the novel was discovered and enciphered.
This structure actually flows fairly well, with some of the e-mails serving as a means of clarifying/adding insight to passages of Byron's fictional novels all ready read by the reader or preparing the reader for passages to come. Ada's annotations serve as a more immediate explanation for some of the eccentracies of the Byronic prose and also to present information on Lord Byron as a person as Ada learns about the father she never knew.
The book is replete with several themes: father-daughter relationships, celebrity issues, Liberty, and Coincidences to name a few. These themes get treated throughout the fictional novel, notes, and e-mail correspondence but are never really resolved. Not in any overt way, any way. From history we know Ada gets buried next to her father, and resolutions for our modern characters can be implied, but these themes are mostly presented and withdrawn from, usually with some snide, knowing remark from the fictional Lord Byron. It is enough to leave more ending-oriented readers with a sense of being left with an incomplete novel.
And in a sense, it is an incomplete work. Lord Byron and his novel take center with Ada and Smith being mostly there to bring these elements to life. In essence, it is only by their interactions with the psuedonovel that we get to know them much at all. It is enough, though. Anymore actual prose may very well have upset the balance and created a lot of bloat. Then again, I kinda wished for more on the modern characters... as it stands, though, they exist for and only in relation to Lord Byron's lost novel.
Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land has the potential to appeal to a wider audience than John Crowley's other more acclaimed works. It is wonderfully crafted and I am under the impression that this book could only be successfully written by Mr. Crowley. It will most appeal to those who are interested in learning about/considering the personage of Lord Byron. It is also replete with plenty of 19th century writing conventions, so the potential reader who has no interest in either would probably do well to wait on reading this book.
The Evening Land has what appears to be a complex structure. It consists of a novel that is written (allegedly) by Lord Byron with annotations by his daughter and 'founder of computer sciences', Ada Lovelace. Throughout the book, we are also treated to some e-mail correspondences between Alexandra "Smith" Novak and her various associates: Her estranged father Lee Novak and lesbian lover Thea. These correspondences mainly serve to show how the novel was discovered and enciphered.
This structure actually flows fairly well, with some of the e-mails serving as a means of clarifying/adding insight to passages of Byron's fictional novels all ready read by the reader or preparing the reader for passages to come. Ada's annotations serve as a more immediate explanation for some of the eccentracies of the Byronic prose and also to present information on Lord Byron as a person as Ada learns about the father she never knew.
The book is replete with several themes: father-daughter relationships, celebrity issues, Liberty, and Coincidences to name a few. These themes get treated throughout the fictional novel, notes, and e-mail correspondence but are never really resolved. Not in any overt way, any way. From history we know Ada gets buried next to her father, and resolutions for our modern characters can be implied, but these themes are mostly presented and withdrawn from, usually with some snide, knowing remark from the fictional Lord Byron. It is enough to leave more ending-oriented readers with a sense of being left with an incomplete novel.
And in a sense, it is an incomplete work. Lord Byron and his novel take center with Ada and Smith being mostly there to bring these elements to life. In essence, it is only by their interactions with the psuedonovel that we get to know them much at all. It is enough, though. Anymore actual prose may very well have upset the balance and created a lot of bloat. Then again, I kinda wished for more on the modern characters... as it stands, though, they exist for and only in relation to Lord Byron's lost novel.
Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land has the potential to appeal to a wider audience than John Crowley's other more acclaimed works. It is wonderfully crafted and I am under the impression that this book could only be successfully written by Mr. Crowley. It will most appeal to those who are interested in learning about/considering the personage of Lord Byron. It is also replete with plenty of 19th century writing conventions, so the potential reader who has no interest in either would probably do well to wait on reading this book.
August 18, 2011
This is a story within a story within a story. One level is a novel, the next level is footnote anotations to the novel, the third level is the correspondence of the people involved in discovering and decoded the encrypted novel. [return][return]At it's heart is the 'lost' novel by Lord Byron. It is a fictionalized autobiography of Byron in the form of Ali, the half-Albanian son of a Lord Sane. The next level is the actual story of Lord Byron, his wife, and their daughter, Ada Byron Countess of Lovelace, told through Ada's footnotes on her father's novel and the commentary of the modern academics. The most modern shell is the story of Alexandra "Smith" Novak, the young academic who discovers the manuscript, and her relationship with her estranged father, told through her emails and letters with her lover, her father, her mother, and her employer. [return][return]Lord Byron's novel fictionalizes his story of his relationship with his wife and daughter. Ada Lovelace's footnotes to her father's novel, and the correspondence between Alexandra Novak and her father Lee Novak, inform the reader of the actual relationship between Lord Byron and his family. The story of Alexandra "Smith" Novak and her father shows how Byron's relationship with his daughter could have played out in our modern times. The result is three different versions of a man's relationship with his controlling wife and estranged daughter. Or alternatively a daughter's relationship with her controlling mother and estranged father. [return][return]I learned a lot about Lord Byron and Ada Lovelace. It is an interesting and literary story.[return][return]My P.S. edition of the book includes an interview with John Crowley by Nick Gevers:[return]Nick Gevers: Well, Lord Byron's Novel does have many very exciting elements one might associate with genre fiction: the atmosphere of the Oriental fantasy tale; ferocious combat among Albanian clansfolk; an ancient crumbling mansion; a mysterious murder; a zombie rescuer; smugglers; battle scenes; doppelg
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