Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Lud-in-the-Mist is an odd, but beautiful novel - attributes which, contemporary accounts suggest, it shares with its creator, Hope Mirrlees. It belongs to the category of eccentric, fantastic novels written in the earlier half of the last century, works such as those of Lord Dunsany, CS Lewis and Tolkien, which prefigured the development of the fantastic genre as a recognisable, even definable category of fiction.

The story itself is fairly straightforward - Lud-in-the-Mist is a law-abiding trading town ruled by the merchant class. Life in Lud is mundane and peacable, and has been since the merchants ovethrew Lud's aristocracy some 200 years before this story commences. However, the lawless, forbidden lands of Faerie lie close by, and despite the heartily unromantic Luddites' best efforts, its wayward influences surface in Lud from time to time.

The novel deals in the main part with Mayor Nathaniel Chanticleer, a fervent upholder of law and an utter materialist (he takes comfort in reflecting on the notion that human life is just a passing phase in the larger currents of the world and has no intrinsic value or significance). Nevertheless, he is haunted by intimations of the weird - which is perhaps what drives him to present such a down-to-earth persona.

Chanticleer's children are exposed to the prohibited faerie-fruit by agents of Faerie, and commence to behave in wayward, often disturbing ways. The first to be effected is his son, Ranulph. Chanticleer consults with the physician Endymion Leer, against his better judgement, and winds up sending Ranulph for a rest-cure in a farm owned by one of Leer's friends, a widow with a rather shady past. In the meantime, Chanticleer's daughter is exposed to the contraband fruits at her finishing school, and one day all the young ladies of the merchant class begin to act strange, and proceed to run away, at superhuman speed, towards faerie.

Things get more complex now, with Leer manipulating to ensure Chanticleer's disgrace, and Chanticleer unearthing a vast Faerie conspiracy against Lud which leads to him undertaking the fearsome journey to that fabled land to rescue his son.

To give away more of the plot at this point would be indiscrete - however, I will say that the book climaxes not with a confrontation and mortal combat between Luddites and the forces of Faerie, but, oddly, with a reconciliation of sorts. The people of Lud realise that in proscribing all trace of Faerie whimsy from their lives, they have also banished all wonder, beauty and art. A sort of truce is arrived at - the forces of Faeries remain safely in their own lands (for the most part), but trade in Faerie fruits is made official. The consumption of these delicacies - in moderation of course - adds a new touch of grace and beauty to Luddite life.

On one level, this can be read as an allegory on the importance of striking a balance between the mundane and the fantastic. And yet, that balance seems just a little too - balanced - for a novel that is accounted a classic of the fantastic genre. Rather than telling us to embrace the fantastic, Mirrlees seems to be telling us to give it its due - and no more - and get on with the usual course of our lives. A slightly lukewarm message, even if it does bear a certain ring of common sense.

I suppose you could also read the book as an allegory of narcotic drugs and prohibition. And several other things. But the real reason to read Lud-in-the-Mist is the sheer beauty of its deceptively simple and lucid prose, the wonderful descriptive passages, the deft shifts in tone from comedy to suspence to pathos, and for the joy of discovering a story that's as different from anything you'd find in the often over-domesticated pastures of modern mainstream fantasy as Faerie fruit is from the genteel delicacies earlier favoured by the Luddites. This is a book held in high esteem by several fantasy authors - from Neil Gaiman and Tim Powers to others closer home, and I'd certainly add my endorsement to theirs, despite the questions I've raised.

 

[ravenus]

Great review JP...although I doubt I will pick this one up...my taste runs a little darker. HOW would you compare it to Bradbury's Something Wicked... which shares some of the themes, likely in a more diabolical vein

One thing, you must forgive my inordinate amusement at...FAERIE-FRUIT

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

You old fruit you. Give it a shot though - you may find bits of it precious (knowing you) but there are dark veins here - especially in the opening chapters describing Chanticleer's morbid fixation on the familiar.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Excellent review, JP!

The first time I read Lud-in-the-Mist was in 1970, when Lin Carter published it as part of Ballentine's groundbreaking fantasy line. Since then, I've misplaced the book twice in moving and replaced it twice (the second time it turned out not to be missing but I held onto the second copy anyway) because this is one of those books I do not like to be without.

From which it ought to be obvious to all and sundry that the book is one of my favorites. I don't however, recommend it to everyone. Any reader who feels that a good fantasy requires plenty of blood-and-guts is advised to look elsewhere, because they won't find any of that here. (Although one part of the story is a murder mystery, the murder in question happened long before the novel begins.) And readers who prefer their books to move right along like a diesel engine at a fast clip, without taking any time for descriptions, or for reflections about life and mortality, or for the turn of an enchanting and beautifully constructed phrase -- Lud is not the book for them, either. Back in 1926, when it was published for the first time, people didn't have such a variety of amusements at their very fingertips, and it seems they were in no particular hurry to finish a good book when they found one, being inclined to savor their pleasures.

So what are the pleasures of Lud-in-the-Mist? The prose, certainly, as JP observes. The variety of eccentric and well-drawn characters. The fact that even after all these years there is nothing else very much like it out there. A quality it has that in so few pages (and in spite of the fact that interesting things do happen, albeit at a less than breakneck pace) Mirrlees is able to so thoroughly evoke the sights and sounds and customs of Lud and it's environs. The Freestate of Dorimare (where Lud is located) feels more real and complete than Tolkien's Shire (which resembles it slightly), or Lewis's Narnia, or LeGuin's Earthsea.

I am not sure that I agree with JP's conclusion about the message of the story being a tad lukewarm. I believe that Mirrlees is saying that while it is dangerous to give ourselves completely over to fantasy, we ignore the fantastical at our extreme peril. It's true that many of the characters who turn their backs on Faerie and its products suffer nothing worse than the lack of a certain "touch of grace and beauty" (nice phrase, JP) -- but for three of the characters their unrequited need for the fantastic turns inward and becomes a sickness. In Nathaniel Chanticleer's case the sickness is relatively minor and does him no real harm, in the case of the other two, one commits suicide and the other is executed for murder.

However, the novel is subtle, and is open to many different shades of interpretation. Mirrlees herself declares, at the end of the book, that the written word can be tricky and elusive, and advises her readers to take warning.

I also have to admit that even at their most mundane, Lud and its inhabitants have, for me at least, something magical about them. Of course this may just be the result of lingering influences from the Duke Aubrey era, before Dorimare and Faerie were estranged. But it suggests another interpretation: that the fantastic is with us always, even in everyday things, and that efforts to banish and deny it only make us ludicrous -- like those courts in Lud that prosecute smugglers of fairy fruit under the legal fiction that they are illegally importing silk! -- and in the end bring us no closer to reality than we were before. We merely trade one illusion for another.

There is one more thing that I'd like to say about Lud-in-the-Mist, which is that the book is exactly the right length, neither too long nor too short. It wraps up too soon after the grand climax to try a reader's patience, and yet brings everything to a satisfying (if somewhat ambiguous) conclusion. After I read it, I'm not left begging for more. Yes, it would be wonderful to find something different that is just as good, but more of the same would probably break the enchantment.

 

[Carolyn Hill]

I see why many laud Lud-in-the-Mist. The prose is as delicious as fairy fruit, the sentences in the style of Virginia Woolf—intricate, laden with clauses like grapes on the vine, and as heady as wine, full in the mouth and producing a ringing in the ears that lingers long after you’ve closed the book.

The ambition is likewise admirable: philosophically meaningful commentary on the human condition, the importance of art in mundane life, the equally delusional nature of law and fantasy, and so much more, climaxing in clever tail-swallowing exhortation to beware the lying written word.

Yes, it’s the kind of book that one can write a dissertation on, find levels of meaning and message in, revisit and dissect and be enriched by. But it’s not one I can love, not one I can feel in my bones, not one I can don like a skin and walk the world in.

The book views art and sensitivity to art as a melancholic, vexed, even hexed, exchange that leaves one longing through a sleepless night, flinching at a harmless word, haunting a graveyard in nameless dread and envious of the impervious dead as one anticipates—oh! how sensitively!—loss of the present’s joys. If one suppresses one’s sensitivity, the agony intensifies, and one suffers—oh! how one suffers!—by turns achingly nostalgic for the prosaic present and drawn inexorably toward the tantalizing, fatal lands of Fairy. Feverish. Fearful.

But mine is a lumpen soul. These melancholic, elevated sensitivities do not speak to me. And thus, although the characters are fulsomely drawn, I don’t feel their plight: instead, I stand outside and observe the characters in their drawings rooms or kitchens or huddled in their beds, and I watch as the author shines her light on this foible, on that longing, on the other curious admixture of base and noble, or ordinary and extraordinary, or philosophical and practical—and I think, yes, intellectually, I recognize these attitudes, these attributes, the arms and legs and flashing teeth of characterization. But I don’t feel them.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

And to think I've known you all these years and never suspected that lumpen soul! What a terrible disillusionment.

 

[Carolyn Hill]

What a terrible disillusionment.

Well, you know that Mirrlees warns us against illusion and the breaking thereof.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Also against putting too much trust in the written word. Self-deprecating remarks, perhaps, least of all.

 

[billbunter]

I was never really charmed by Lud in the Mist. Much preferred Gormenghast and the darker stuff

 

[Brys]

I agree with the review pretty much - while I can see that it's a decent novel, I don't feel it's a masterpiece. Perhaps Gaiman was right with his comment, the greatest English novel of the 20th century - but I felt that sometimes it was simplified a little too far, the characters were never quite developed as much as they could have been, though they were certainly well developed and the prose, while certainly very good, just wasn't consistently amazing.

Much preferred Gormenghast and the darker stuff

Very true for me as well, but I did prefer Dunsany's King of Elfland's Daughter to Lud-in-the-Mist. Lud-in-the-Mist is one of those books that feels so close to greatness it's really irritating - it's a very good novel, but I get the feeling that a few changes here and there could have made it a masterpiece.

 

[j d worthington]

I must add my vote in favor of this very odd and rather complex little novel. (And for those who'd like a darker view of "faerie-fruit" -- though I'd argue that some elements and intimations in this novel are quite dark enough -- try "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti. This seems to have been one of those themes that ran throughout Victorian/Edwardian fantasy.) Not for everyone, but anyone who enjoys good prose and a new way of looking at the world is likely to at least find it worth their while to read once.

 

[Montero]

About half way through Lud in the Mist after seeing it in the February list. Prose is lovely - Mirrlees gets across a beautiful setting in a couple of sentences. I find some modern fantasy bogged down with masses of long description, but like Fritz Leiber she can set a scene concisely.
One thing I noticed that never happens (well I've never seen it) in the modern fantasy genre, is that the narration steps outside its world at one point. She compares the feelings that some ladies of Lud in the Mist had for the deposed Duke Aubrey, to the feelings that High Church Spinsters of the last century (19th) had for King Charles 1. Intriguing that it has become the convention not to make comparisons to the modern world at all - some scene setting would be a whole lot easier if you could say "it was like a giant Fiat Panda woven of daisies with marigolds for wheels" or whatever

I don't read much faerie type fantasy - just wondered - how much faerie based fantasy - played straight - is being published at the moment? (As in the last couple of years.)

 

[Ian Whates]

Personally, I consider this an astonishingly good book -- one of the finest fantasies I've ever read. Tolkien, Leiber, then Mirrlees.

And I'm convinced that Jack Vance must have read Lud at an early age and been impressed. Until I read Lud, only a few years ago, I believed Vance's style (which I love) to be a one-off, but after reading Mirrlees, I felt certain this book had been an influence.