I’ve been a fan of Crowley’s fiction for many years. I seem to remember reading one or two of his early novels, The Deep (1975, USA), Beasts (1976, USA) or Engine Summer (1979, USA), although perhaps not The Deep, in the mid-1980s; and then seeing all the praise for Little, Big (1981, USA), and so reading that… but not really becoming a fan until I read Ægypt (1987, USA), AKA The Solitudes, the first book of the Ægypt Quartet, and completely loving it.
Anyway, I read Engine Summer sometime in the 1980s and remembered little of it other than it was set in a post-apocalyptic USA. But I always wanted to refresh my memory of it — and, of course, my memory turned out to be less than accurate. It is indeed set in a post-apocalyptic USA, but it’s a USA of the far future, after humanity has sent out probes to colonise other worlds, when technology was far in advance of now. Everything else about the story, I’d forgotten.
This time, I read the SF Masterworks edition, which includes an excellent introduction by Graham Sleight — although the introduction does imply the book is more complex than it actually is. I read the book, expecting it to need a close reading and not to quite fully grasp what was going on — because I know Crowley to be an extremely subtle writer, and it’s easy when reading his beautiful prose to miss something important.
In fact, Engine Summer proved to be a relatively easy read, and some of its ideas have been re-used so many times since, their meaning is far from obscure.
Rush that Speaks is a young boy in Little Belaire, a community of “truthful speakers”, who live in a sort of warren in a USA several centuries after “the Storm”, which was some sort of apocalypse that decimated Earth’s highly technological civilisation, known as the “angels”. There’s not a great deal of rigour here — some magical high tech, but also much that would be recognisable to a person alive in the 1970s. For example, they had “medicine’s daughters”, which appear to be some sort of genetic engineering rendering everyone immune to disease; but they also had clover-leaf junctions…
Rush that Speaks describes his childhood in Little Belaire, and gives some of the history of his people. He wants to be a saint, someone whose story, whose life, is told after their death by others, becoming more or less a legend but, in the way of the truthful speakers, also a teaching moment. Rush that Speaks falls in love with Once a Day, but she runs way with a visiting group from Dr Boots’s List, a distant community with a very different society. Rush that Speaks, on his fourteenth birthday, decides to go looking for Once a Day.
He has adventures. He meets a family with twin sons. He stays with an old man and hibernates with him through the winter. He finds Dr Boots’s List, who live in the ruins of Service City, and Once a Day, and stays with her, attempting to understand their society.
Their secret, if “secret” is the right word, turns out to be their annual use of some sort of angel device which imposes a personality from a mind-recording temporarily over their own personality. At the end of the novel, Rush that Speaks is told that the mind belonged to a cat, Boots, an experimental subject for the technology.
One of the conceits of Engine Summer is that it’s explicitly a told story, by someone who sees their life, and the lives of others, as a sequence of stories, which together can be seen as some sort of social code. And so it’s revealed in the final chapter that the Rush that Speaks whose story is the narrative of Engine Summer is himself a recorded personality, like Boots, and is now being used by a surviving community of angels in an airborne city because the personality traits they experience when temporarily becoming Rush that Speaks are better for them than those of the person they used before, a saint, one of their founders.
Having said all that, while the main point of Engine Summer is the story of Rush that Speaks, and the stories told by Rush that Speaks, it’s also about his journey. The journey he makes physically, south from Little Belaire to Service City, and then further south; but also the mental journey he makes as he learns more about his world, and the lessons he learns, and imparts to those experiencing his story.
Of course, Crowley is educating us, the reader, about the world of Rush that Speaks, not Rush that Speaks, who, let’s face it, is not all that interested in understanding the why of the events he experiences. He accepts the angels knew things he does not and never will, and have machines he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t even understand why his own society does some of the things it does — it’s not even as if they’re presented as mysteries, just that no one has any motivation to understand the why. Not needing to understand why, not asking for explanations, is something that all those who populate the novel have in common. Other than, that is, the anonymous person who, in italics, questions Rush that Speaks. And, more importantly, the actual reader of the book that is Engine Summer.
If Engine Summer was disappointingly less… chewy than I’d expected, its prose was still as good as I’d remembered. Crowley is one of US genre fiction’s best prose stylists, and every word he writes feels so very carefully chosen. In a story such as Engine Summer, set in an invented world, which obfuscates its plots through the voice of its narrator, this feels especially relevant. Engine Summer works, and works exceedingly well, because Rush that Speaks’s voice, and the narrowness of his vision, is so rigorously observed.
I’d not expected to enjoy Engine Summer so much on this reread, nor to find it such a straightforward read. I was pleased to see my expectations regarding Crowley’s prose were justified, and the book fully deserves its place in the SF Masterworks series (more so than a good many other books in the series). But it’s an early work, and Crowley went on to write books that are magnitudes better, not just the Ægypt Quartet, but also, for example, Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land (2005, USA), which also does some very interesting things with narrative structure.
Crowley is one of those writers whose books I buy in hardback as soon as they’re published. With good reason.
