Flint and Mirror

John Crowley — 2022

"Crowley is generous, obsessed, fascinating, gripping. Really, I think Crowley is so good that he has left everybody else in the dust."—Peter Straub From award-winning author John Crowley comes a novel that masterfully blends history and magic in Flint and Mirror. As ancient Irish clans fought to preserve their lands and their way of life, the Queen and her generals fought to tame the wild land and make it English. Hugh O'Neill, lord of the North, dubbed Earl of Tyrone by the Queen, is a divided man: the Queen gives to Hugh her love, and her commandments, through a little mirror of obsidian which he can never discard; and the ancient peoples of Ireland arise from their underworld to make Hugh their champion, the token of their vow a chip of flint. From the masterful author of Little, Big comes an exquisite fantasy of heartbreaking proportion. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Reviews

Mark Wadley@markplasma

Jul 31, 2022

In this historical fantasy, the Irish earl Hugh O’Neill struggles with dual obligations to his ancestral land and to Queen Elizabeth I, who communicates with him through a black mirror crafted by the legendary magician John Dee.

This novel expands a story by the same name that appears in Crowley’s collection AND GO LIKE THIS (which I read—and loved—last year), beginning with Hugh’s early encounters with Dee’s magic and the Sidhe of his native Ulster and ending with his death in exile.

It was interesting to read FLINT in close succession to THE CRYSTAL CAVE. Whereas CAVE historicizes myth, FLINT mythologizes history—and they end up in a similar place, though in FLINT's case, I think I could have done with more myth and less history.

While FLINT certainly contains the real-world/fairy-world tensions that characterize so much of Crowley's work, the scope of this story necessarily requires more time spent on things like troop movements than on the esoteric weird shit I love so much.

That said, Crowley manages to filter a decades-long political conflict through a personal lens, the tensions between Ireland and England embodied by a real, fallible man. It's an impeccably written, evocative book—though now I mostly want to go back and re-read THE SOLITUDES.