Engine Summer - John Crowley

 Engine Summer (1979) is a post-apocalyptic coming of age story.   A millennium or more in the future, Rush That Speaks grows up in Little Belaire, a town of truthful speakers.   The Storm has knocked humankind back into the stone age.   They have no writing or literature but pass on history as stories.   Here and there relics and ruins of former glories linger on, regarded as the work of angels and thus unfathomable.   Saints wander the land, spreading insights and speaking of other settlements elsewhere.   Rush That Speaks dreams of becoming a saint when he grows up.

But first he must deal with adolescence and his love for Once a Day, a neighbour belonging to a different cord but taught by the same teacher, Painted Red.   One day members of Dr Boot's List visit Little Belaire, as they do every year, to trade.   Once a Day decides to travel with them, and leaves.   Rush cannot fathom this.   Why would anyone want to leave Little Belaire?   Why would Once a Day leave him?   He expects her to return.   Everyone does.   But she doesn't return.   Finally, he feels he has no choice but to track her down and rescue her.

People have no transport, but believe that Road leads everywhere.   Rush gets distracted by a hermit called Blink, who lives up a tree and hibernates.   Rush had heard Blink called a saint, though Blink flatfly denies any such thing.   Ultimately Rush finds Once a Day in Service City.   The List have different skills and practices.   They lives with large cats and emulate the feline lifestyle.   Once a Day doesn't want to leave so Rush decides to stay with her.   He is assimilated into the List.   Finally, he is taken to meet Dr Boots, and learns his destiny, a revelation that sends him reeling, half-mad.   Visions, hallucinations, insights - until it is revealed who he is telling his story to.

From the very first page it is clear that Rush is speaking to someone other than us.   Every now and then someone asks italicized questions.   There is mention of crystals which seem to be recording what Rush says (recording? we wonder, in a world without machines?).   There are four crystals and each facet is a chapter.   The answer, when it comes, is quite something.

It is a boy speaking, so the style is straightforward and provides a framework in which we learn alongside Rush how to navigate his world.   The half-remembered names of things from Before the Storm is a fun device.   The title for example, try saying it aloud.   Avvenging and avengers took me longer to figure out.   Dr  Boots is best of all.   Rush's tortured pubesence is of course timeless, instantly familiar.   The characters are nicely defined, the locations differentiated.

All in all, an intriguing classic of the post-apocalypse.