The Crowlings

by Louise Lawrence

Back cover:
He saw smoke from the camp, and flames where no flames should be. A tiny sound came from the fallen twigs at his feet. Small and black, a single crowling fed on the rotting matter beneath the trees, reminding him of who he really was: no warrior, no hunter, no defender of his people. A scratcher in the dirt for other people's leavings. Crowling.

When young Ben Crowling unexpectedly finds himself leader of his clan, his one thought is to build a new life on the land granted to him by the star-people. But as the time goes on, some are not happy with the traditional ways: Mikklau, his grandson, dreams only of the bright lights and easy money in the big cities, and Linni Crowling, in her turn, prefers the comfortable life he can provide. But the wheel is completing the circle: no longer can their planet provide for its people, and its enemies grow invisibly in number – until it is almost too late. Only then does Linni realise what she must do to save her people, and their land, and the way of life she has always rejected.

Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Elizabeth Holden, better known by her pen name Louise Lawrence, is an English science fiction author, acclaimed during the 1970s and 1980s.

Lawrence was born in Leatherhead, Surrey, England, in 1943. She became fascinated with Wales at a young age, and has set many of her novels there. She left school early on to become an assistant librarian. She married and had the first of her three children in 1963. Her departure from the library, she recalls, gave her the potential to turn toward writing: "Deprived of book-filled surroundings, I was bound to write my own."

Reviews

[SBC · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really didn't enjoy this book. It was very similar in structure to Children of the Dust with a three part generational narration and was also a postapocalyptic story, although this novel covers the evolution of the apocalypse and ends at its beginning.
The three focalising characters, Ben Crowling, his son Mikklau and his great-granddaughter Linni. All are fairly unlikeable characters with lots of selfishness and angst and then a sudden transformation into being a better person.
My main dislike of the story was that I found the premise completely unconvincing. Humans are colonising another planet in exactly the same way that the USA was colonised, because apparently humans of the future are all white with blue eyes and aliens of the future somehow look like and live like Native Americans and there is the same slow push west with the removal of the natives to reservations. Human behaviour hasn't improved at all and the future humans repeat the same prejudiced and unecological patterns of the past, overcolonising and killing the new planet until it's no longer livable and the rich flee to go despoil the next world.
The story is hugely moralistic and didactic with some really conservative messages about gender and the ultimate idea that 'primitive' life lived in nature is better than civilisation, which is unnatural and will lead to corruption and destruction. There were also generalisations about how 'natives' have more insight and survival instincts even generations down the line.
One interesting thing was some structural echoes in the storytelling - both part 1 and part 2 start with boy characters sitting, fasting, doing their spirit quest to become an adult, and both part 1 and part 3 have an exodus of children led by a boy and a girl, one away from the land and one back to it. However, the exodus at the end was completely unbelievable (why would all the parents give their children away and not try to escape with them?! It was very fatalistic and mystic and unconvincing).