randy_byers | Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) (Reply)

I'm bereft! I didn't want this book to end! Even worse, it's a book I wish I had written. It seems like the type of book I would write if I only had the talent and gumption -- dreamy but full of precise details; homey but forlorn; arch but warm-hearted.

In a previous post I came close to pitching it as Dunsany meets Peake. More specifically, it's The King of Elfland's Daughter meets Gormenghast. Like Dunsany's equally great 1924 novel, it is about a human town on the border of Faerie, and about the place of magic and imagination in a commonsense, bourgeois world. Like Peake, it is full of eccentric, oddly tormented characters with eccentric names such as Endymion Leer and Polydore Vigil, Mumchance and Portunus. Yet of course Mirrlees is a far different writer than Dunsany or Peake, and the comparison shouldn't be taken too far.

One difference from Dunsany's book, for example, is that we barely see Fairyland (as it is called in Lud-in-the-Mist), while Dunsany takes us across the border a number of times. Mirrlees instead creates a geography in which a river from Fairyland, the Dapple, runs through the town, and the mischievous inhabitants of the land beyond the Debatable Hills try to sneak their magical influence past the bans placed on them by the burghers who have displaced the fairy-friendly aristocracy of old. The Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist, Nathaniel Chanticleer, is haunted by a strange, magical-musical Note that he heard in his youth, and the plot of the novel is driven by the threat that Fairyland magic poses to his family, particularly his son. (His daughter, too, but one of the odd structural aspects of the book is that her experience is mostly treated as secondary until the very end, where it suddenly erupts into a heart-wrenching resolution.) There is a murder mystery at the heart of the book as well -- a cold case that happened thirty years in the past. The various plot elements intersect at a cozy farm on the border of Fairyland where the murder happened and where Master Nathaniel's son is taken to rehabilitate after ingesting fairy fruit.

Another difference from The King of Elfland's Daughter (and a lot of other great fantasy novels, including Lord of the Rings and Little, Big) is that it's not about the dying away of magic. It's almost the opposite, in fact, and this may reflect a slightly sardonic take on magic on Mirrlees' part. It is explicitly called a form of delusion many times in the book (possibly playing off the common etymology for "fairy"), and her bourgeois characters are nothing if not deluded. Thus their very attempt to banish magic is a delusion, or form of magic, itself. But Mirrlees also compares magic to narcotics, dreams, and to the imagination, and she does not see modernity making an end of those things, far from it. So while she (the daughter of a wealthy sugar merchant) has a slightly wicked love of the banished aristocracy, she does not share Tolkien's yearning for a return of the old order. Duke Aubrey, the last aristocratic ruler of Lud-in-the-Mist, who is said to have vanished into Fairyland, is a complex figure, both noble and rapacious. The burghers who replaced him are more magical themselves than they care to recognize.

Well, I guess that's enough for now. I do, however, want to comment on the edition of the book that I read, which is from Cold Springs Press. I thought it was an incredibly poor production. Not only are there far more typos than is acceptable, but there were at least two places where a paragraph break came in the middle of a sentence. That's just embarrassingly shoddy work. The introduction by Douglas A. Anderson also contains at least one questionable statement, when he says that Mirrlees lived to see the 1970 reprint of her previously neglected book in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. While it's true that she was still alive, from what I've read elsewhere Lin Carter only made a perfunctory attempt to contact her, since the book was in the public domain. It's very possible, therefore, that the British Mirrlees was unaware that her magical novel had found new life and a new audience in America.