Crowley graduated from Indiana University in 1964, placing him right beside Kit during the main intrigue. Now, Crowley is a teacher of fiction writing at Yale, a documentary writer and a longtime novelist. Often called a writer’s writer, he is no longer writing science fiction and fantasy books; the novelist whose career has included such surreal masterworks as Little, Big and the Aegypt tetralogy (in progress) here absorbs the historical interest of the documentary writer. Mainly due to vagueness of its historical theories and its reliance on cultural archetypes in lieu of deep characterization, his book gives a sense of not having quite adjusted to the genre restrictions of the historical novel.
If “poetry is power,” as the inscription from Osip Mandelstam reads, Crowley’s The Translator almost convinces us of it.
books
The Translator
By John Crowley
William Morrow
295 pp., $24.95