Fiction

The modern characters — a young lesbian historian, her mathematician lover and her father, a filmmaker in exile since the ’70s after a scandal involving an underage girl — appear entirely via their e-mails to each other. These alternate with sections of the novel and footnotes to it, written by Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, Byron’s daughter and the author of what many consider to be the first computer program. (An early programming language is named after her.) In Crowley’s fiction, she obtained her estranged father’s novel and, while bound by a promise to her mother to burn the manuscript, also created an encoded copy for posterity.

“The Evening Land,” Crowley’s version of Byron’s unwritten novel, is an extravagant gothic tale, beginning in the mountainous wilds of Albania and careening through a crumbling Scottish manse, the fleshpots of London, the slave plantations of the Caribbean, the decadent high society of Venice and back again to tribal Albania. The story’s hero, Ali, is the bastard son of a cruel and profligate Scottish laird. He suffers through a series of misfortunes — forbidden love, ostracism by peers, an unsympathetic wife, an unearned reputation for wickedness, and finally exile — all echoing events in Byron’s own life.

Alexandra “Smith” Novak, the historian, stumbles on the encoded manuscript while researching Ada, and this precipitates her first real contact with her father, Lee, once a Byron scholar. The parallels between Lee and Byron are plentiful, so much so that at one point, Crowley has Lee stipulate, “We’re not alike, though I confess I like him … I can apprehend him as a human person, and in that apprehension understand myself as human.” However, the movement of both stories, the rapprochement between a daughter and her vilified father, suggests otherwise.

You get the impression that Crowley also finds Byron sympathetic, a sympathy made easier by the fact that Byron’s worst “sin” was a consensual affair with his half-sister. Lee is a somewhat tougher case. Like Byron, he is a brave soul inclined to throw himself behind good causes (Byron died fighting for Greek independence; Lee makes documentaries about resistance movements in East Timor and New Guinea), but prone to self-pity, vanity and occasionally self-serving interpretations of “liberation.”

The point being that, however real and serious the excesses of the 20th century’s counterculture may have been, much of its idealism, like Byron’s, was also “honorable and generous” and worth preserving. Ada and Smith play the double role of the skeptical daughters trying to salvage the good from their father’s legacy in less indulgent times.

The villains, as Lee sees it, are types like Ada’s mother, a Victorian “monster” counterpoised to the Romantic monster she made Byron out to be, a “soft-spoken, self-controlled, bombazine-clad mass of self-deception, self-righteousness, appalling mental cruelty passing under the name of religion, morality, ‘higher’ feelings and ‘pure’ motives” — which ought to sound familiar enough to contemporary readers. (When Lee unjustly tries to cast Smith’s gentle, loving hippie mother and her “feminist” friends in this role, too, Smith nearly bites his head off.)

“The Evening Land” itself is spookily like Byron’s other prose writings, and wholly plausible as the work of his pen. (I can’t resist, though, registering a fan’s tiny objection that Crowley is a better novelist than Byron could have been, and I do miss his voice here.) The author’s sensibility nevertheless does seep through; like all Crowley novels, this one has a tinge of the mystical, the hint of mysterious forces at work. His fictional Byron prefigures the death and cremation of Shelley in “The Evening Land” and has inklings of Crowley’s own work when he muses, “for that is the way of Life, to begin (or continue) one tale, even as another runs out — even as wave follows wave, and wave returns on wave.” Sometimes, though, the next tale is even better.

Read more of our reviews of this month’s best fiction

Both of these novels ask questions as difficult as those posed by any serious writer: Why do we suffer, why must we die, and what meaning can be found in any of it? More important, they are not afraid to respond to these questions unflinchingly. These books are often — very often — funny, but they aren’t frivolous. I can think of a dozen acclaimed contemporary adult novelists who blunder through this territory, wallowing in sinkholes of sentiment, tangling their narratives in thickets of saccharine fabulism. It makes no sense that the maudlin goo that is “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” should be classified as a work for adults, when “The Fault in Our Stars,” a far more mature rumination on the same themes, is regarded as a children’s book. Likewise, why should grown-ups be subjected to the cutesy “The Life of Pi” while teenagers get to revel in an astringent fable like “There Is No Dog”?

“The Fault in Our Stars” is told in the first person, with the sort of fresh, irreverent voice that inevitably gets compared to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. This story, however, comes from a character infinitely more appealing than Holden. Her name is Hazel Lancaster, and she is dying. The thyroid cancer that will eventually kill her is being held in abeyance by an experimental drug, but she still needs an oxygen tank, and she spends a lot of time worrying that she’s an emotional “grenade” for her parents. “There is only one thing shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re 16,” she observes, “and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.” She’d prefer to limit the damage.

And yet, who could help but love her? Certainly not Augustus Waters, a survivor of osteosarcoma with a replacement leg he calls Old Prosty. The two meet at a support group, where they are suitably skeptical about the inspirational mottoes and the covert competition to end up among the 20 percent who’ll still be alive in five years. A tender, bookish, wisecracking romance ensues, fueled in part by the couple’s shared enthusiasm for a novel, “An Imperial Affliction,” Hazel’s favorite, yet something she mostly “can’t tell people about, one of those books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”

“An Imperial Affliction” ends in the middle of a sentence, and while Hazel thinks she knows why, she still wishes she could find out what happens to its characters. The author, who has written nothing else, lives reclusively in Amsterdam. The two young people hatch a plan to visit him and extract the answers to Hazel’s questions. It’s a quest complicated by the difficulty of traveling with oxygen tanks and prosthetics, but enabled by the sort of favors Hazel sardonically refers to as “cancer perks.” There will be grenades, but not in the places where you expect them.

The sparkling, satirical “There Is No Dog” extrapolates from a clever premise: If this world — “not just full of suffering” but “full of perversity, of things that go horribly wrong more or less at random. For the hell of it” — has a creator, the only deity messed up enough to have made it must be a teenage boy. His name is Bob, and he’s petulant, self-absorbed and hormone-addled. Most of the actual work gets done by the middle-aged Mr. B, a put-upon administrative second banana who spends his time frantically trying to limit the damage caused by Bob’s moods and negligence.

Bob got punted this job (“miles off the beaten track in a lonely and somewhat run-down part of the universe”) by his feckless mother, Mona, who won it in a celestial poker game. His initial efforts at creating light consisted of “fireworks, sparklers and neon tubes that circled the globe like weird tangled rainbows,” all of which Bob regarded as “very cool” even though they didn’t work. (The functional aspects of the solar system were executed by Mr. B while Bob napped.) Creating humanity in his own image (“one big fat recipe for disaster”) is this creator’s crowning misdeed and results in a long history of Bob falling in love with mortal women, an emotion whose agonizing ups and downs trigger bizarre weather and other natural disasters. “There is No Dog” begins just as a lovely assistant zookeeper named Lucy comes to Bob’s amorous and catastrophic attention.

Rosoff gets an impressive amount of mileage out of what might otherwise seem like a joke. This is largely due to a lively extended cast of characters who include Lucy’s mother, the dispirited vicar who pines for her, Mona’s terrifying poker buddy and his thoughtful daughter, Estelle. There’s also Bob’s neglected pet (“I don’t ignore him! Just last night I made him bring me some food!”) the Eck, an endearingly hapless “penguiny” creature, the last of his kind, in danger of being eaten by Estelle’s father.

It’s debatable whether Rosoff’s shrewd, trim prose might not occasionally fly just over the heads of teen readers. (Lucy’s mother is memorably described as “having the air of an expensive pony — sturdy, alert and well-groomed.”) But it’s rather thrilling to know that stylists of her caliber have dedicated themselves to writing for young readers, and that it doesn’t even seem to occur to her to pander to them. Not much in today’s culture inspires hope for the future — or at least not credibly so — but I count the knowledge that so many teenagers read and love books like “The Fault in Our Stars” and “There Is No Dog” as one of the bright spots.