Blog about John Crowley’s novel Beasts

I finished John Crowley’s 1976 novel Beasts this morning. Loved it.

Beasts is not quite 200 pages, each of its nine chapters centering on a different character’s perspective. Crowley’s writing is rich and poetic here, as readers of his 1981 opus Little, Big might expect. In that novel, likely his most famous, Crowley conjures a vast, deep, detailed world; Little, Big is big big.

Beasts is little big: each of its nine chapters might be read as a short story in which we get a glimpse from one perspective at a balkanized, dystopian post-USA. A species of genetic hybrid called leos are corralled on reservations or outright hunted by the militant Union for Social Engineering; what remains of the Federal Government vies for control with various Autonomous zones; utopian cultists try to hide from the world; slavery has returned under the guise of contractual indentured servitude. A mutant fox, the trickster Reynard, plays kingmaker behind the scenes. The nine chapters refuse to explicitly connect the pieces of the world the present; that is the job of the reader. As Joachim Boaz puts it in his excellent, thorough review of the novel,

Beasts embodies a fascinating dialogue between nature and civilization, man and animal…  Do not expect a straightforward narrative for many chapters function more as mood pieces.  Each is part of a mosaic of images, characters, and philosophies that struggle to survive, or are altogether snuffed out, in a rapidly collapsing Old Order.

That imminent collapse is where Beasts leaves us, its final line a utopian promise: Shall we begin?