Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926)
We end/begin the year with this piece
of old-school fantasy. Lud-in-the-Mist is the name of a town in a
faintly-described secondary world. This town is closely associated
with faerie, but in the novel's present, that is taboo, and "faerie
fruit," the consumption of which allegedly permanently changes
people in strange ways, is strictly illegal. However, this status
quo surely will not last. The city's sometime-mayor, Nathaniel
Chanticleer, is alienated from the world around him in subtle and
intermittent ways, but when his son is comes under apparent faerie
influence, he takes action.
I vaguely feel like there's some sort
of political allegory that I'm not quite grasping buried somehwhere
in here. There's this idea that the rational, human world is
governed by the laws that we make to tame it, but that the world
outside--the world of delusion, as the book terms it--has its own
law, which corresponds to ours. It's certainly something to think
about.
To tell the truth, the actual conflict
in this book--involving figuring out who's smuggling faerie fruit and
how to stop them--is not super-interesting. It all feels a bit
perfunctory. However, Mirrlees is very good in
terms of evoking the eerie, liminal world of faerie. One may be
reminded of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr.
Norrell, as well as John Crowley's sublime Little,
Big, and while Mirrlees isn't quite on the level of either
of those, she did get there substantially first,
and her novel is very good in its own right. She has a great
descriptive talent, and it's a shame that her literary career (this
is the third of only three novels--although she lived to a ripe old
age, writing seems to have been kind of a dilettantish interest for
her, and she didn't do much of it in her later life).
There really, really is something to be said for fantasy that has absolutely nothing to do with either Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons. I can't help feeling--no doubt I've mentioned this before--that the fantastic imagination has been significantly straitened in recent years. Please strike back against this phenomenon by reading books like this, and overlook, if you can, the fact that it's one of nine hundred billion classic genre books blurbed by Neil friggin' Gaiman.
There really, really is something to be said for fantasy that has absolutely nothing to do with either Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons. I can't help feeling--no doubt I've mentioned this before--that the fantastic imagination has been significantly straitened in recent years. Please strike back against this phenomenon by reading books like this, and overlook, if you can, the fact that it's one of nine hundred billion classic genre books blurbed by Neil friggin' Gaiman.