BookJack follows the new novel by American science fiction writer John Crowley, "Ka: Darr Dubrawi in the Ruins of Ymr". The protagonist of the story is an immortal crow, able to show the living the kingdom of the dead, to become their guide. Despite the complex mythology, Crowley's new novel is amazing.
John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942; his father was then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 15th volume of fiction (Endless Things) in 2007.
American John Crowley is one of the authors who can force the reader to renounce his most painful and seemingly unshakable convictions without visible effort. So, his most famous novel "Big, Small" - the story of a strange mansion in the distant environs of New York, growing with its back side into the country of elves, received the highest praise from almost the main snob of American literary criticism of the second half of the twentieth century, Harold Bloom, in general - something related to fantasy with blatant contempt. The four-volume epic "Egypt", almost against will, drags on, involves even those who are confident that the topic of historical conspiracy has been fully disclosed and exhausted by Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum". Well, the last novel by the seventy-seven-year-old master, "Ka: Darr Dubrawi in the Ruins of Imra", seems to be specially addressed to those who, like the author of these lines, are convinced: there is no surer way to total reading anhedonia than to make the speaker of the "adult" book the hero and an anthropomorphic animal or bird.
Indeed, the protagonist of "Ka" Darr Dubrawi is a crow, but, as usual, the crow is not quite ordinary. The first of all his fellow tribesmen (by the way, the author describes the life of a flock of crows very reliably, with great knowledge of the matter) he receives his own name, and then, like the biblical Adam, bestows the names of his relatives and friends. But most importantly, it is he who first realizes and learns to use the invaluable advantages that cohabitation with people can give crows. In ancient Britain, he becomes a friend of a shaman woman, goes with her in search of immortality and miraculously turns out to be the owner (or, rather, a long-term keeper) of this dubious gift.
Now he does not die for good, but is reborn at regular intervals, preserving the memory of previous lives. And in each of his births, Darr Dubrawi again and again finds himself in the same role: he, the crow, serves as an intermediary between the worlds, a guide who knows the way to the kingdom of the dead and knows how to show it alive.
With an unnamed Brother from the medieval abbey, he descends into the underworld to help him cleanse himself from the sin of murder. Caught up in a hurricane, Darr Dubrawi is transported to the New World, where he becomes a companion of an Indian nicknamed One-Eared, a storyteller and joker, weaving the story of an immortal crow into his endless tales around the fire. Reborn again on the eve of the confrontation between the North and the South in the United States, Darr Dubrawi first, together with his fellow crows, pecks up the countless corpses left by the war, and then helps the woman-medium to find and return home the souls of the dead who were stuck in the twilight zone between life and death (and here, of course (It’s hard not to see parallels with Joseph Saunders’s recent booker novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which is entirely devoted to this topic). Returning to life for the last time, the hero becomes a companion and interlocutor of a lonely widower living in the near (and very bleak) future - and, as usual, a new acquaintance Darra Dubrauli needs his feathered friend in order to find out the way to the kingdom of the dead. In the intervals between all these deeds and exploits, the hero Crowley makes a couple of lonely forays into the world of death - so, like Orpheus, he tries to free his beloved from there, but - just like him - suffers a tragic defeat as a result.
From a recognizable character of Celtic mythology overseas, Darr Dubrawi becomes the same recognizable hero of North American mythology - a trickster sung by the great Claude Levi-Strauss, the famous deceiving crow, eternal thief, rogue and at the same time the only living creature that gives the living hope to meet the dead ...
However, this meeting is illusory - like the very existence of the kingdom of death (and, for that matter, the existence of Darra Dubrauli, entangled in human stories and legends). This thought - in fact, the main idea for the whole novel - looms gradually, Crowley leads the reader to it in a winding path, deliberately dodging, confusing and confusing tracks. And nevertheless, with each subsequent journey into the world of the dead, it becomes clearer and clearer that this world is quite real and actually exists, but paradoxically it is not on the other side of the mortal gates, but on this one. The world of the dead is a construct invented by the living, a projection of their own fears, hopes and expectations. The real world of death is unattainable, impenetrable and unknowable, it is impossible to penetrate into it, whether you are a crow or a man.
Needless to say, around the second round of approaching this most beautiful and extremely difficultly formulated idea, the very fact that the main character is a talking crow ceases to seem to be any significant - well, or, in any case, it no longer causes negative emotions. The willingness to follow the writer, unconditional trust in him and in the hero invented by him with a devastating score prevail over any initial prejudices. In short, as usual with Crowley, all the initial fears and phobias of the reader are dispelled to dust, leaving a feeling that is difficult to define - a cross between awkwardness and a clear realization of a miracle (not to say strictly literary) that just happened right before your eyes.
This article was sponsored by Yasmin Abuzid
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