Book review: Beasts

Is an early novel by John Crowley, the third and arguably weakest of the immortal trilogy along with the intricate The Deep and the elegiac Engine Summer. The book is built around Wittgenstein's quote If a lion could talk, we would not understand him¹. True to the quote, and despite valiant efforts, Crowley proves unable to make his lions sufficiently incomprehensible and they turn into analogues of the Indians; it is well worth reading nonetheless. But your word-association with "beasts" will likely be very different to mine; the alternate title for this post was "Peace".

Re-read, 2022

I bethought me of this book and Abebooks delivered me a second hand copy with this cover, which is much better than the Gollanz classics cover.

On re-reading, I think my words above, whilst true, are too harsh and don't capture the book. I have failed to draw the connections that Crowley does between Painter, Reynard, and Sweets.

But I will repeat what I said in my review of Heart of Darkness: that the book puts forward, perhaps more as a gentle suggestion befitting the collapsing society it portrays than as a lesson for all times, that people grow weary of the burden of speech, indeed the burden of direction or thought. I don't like that as an idea; perhaps when taken as a warning it is valuable.

Something I didn't quite like is that too much is a little too specific: unlike The Deep, where everything has the universality of myth.

Notes

1. Another excellent quote from Big W, on being told that people thought the Sun went round the Earth because it looked that way, is "what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?".

Refs

This Goodreads review says what I think better than I have.