Hope Mirrlees only wrote one fantasy novel, but it is one of the finest in the English language.
The country of Dorimare (fundamentally English, although with Flemish and Dutch threads in the weave) expelled magic and fancy when it banished hunchbacked libertine Duke Aubrey and his court, two hundred years before our tale starts. The prosperous and illusion-free burghers of the town swear by “toasted cheesecrumbs” as easily as by the “Sun, Moon, Stars and the Golden Apples of the West.” Faerie has become, explicitly, obscenity.
But fairy fruit is still being smuggled over the border from Fairyland. Eating it gives strange visions and can drive people to madness and beyond. The fruit is so illegal that it cannot even be named: smugglers of fruit are punished for smuggling silk, as if the changing of the name will change the thing itself.
The mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist, Nat Chanticleer, is less prosaic than he would have others believe. His life is a fiction he subscribes to, or would like to, of a sensible life like everyone else’s—and particularly like the dead that he admires. His world is a shallow thing, though, as he will soon learn: without his knowledge, his young son, Ranulph, has been fed fairy fruit.
Now the fairy world—which is also, as in all the oldest folktales, the world of the dead—begins to claim the town: a puck named Willy Wisp spirits away the lovely young ladies of Miss Crabapple’s Academy for young ladies, over the hills and far away; Chanticleer stumbles upon the fruit smugglers, and his life takes a turn for the worse; Duke Aubrey is sighted; old murders will out; and, in the end, Chanticleer must cross the Elfin Marches to rescue his son.
The book begins as a travelogue or a history, becomes a pastorale, a low comedy, a high comedy, a ghost story and a detective story. The writing is elegant, supple, effective and haunting: the author demands a great deal from her readers, which she repays many times over.
The magic of Lud-in-the-Mist is built from English folklore—it is not such a great step from Aubrey to Oberon, after all; Willy Wisp’s “Ho-ho-hoh” is Robin Goodfellow’s, from a song they say Ben Jonson wrote; and it will not come as a surprise to the folklorist that old Portunus says nothing and eats live frogs. The “lily, germander and sops in wine” song is first recorded in the seventeenth century, under the name of “Robin Good-Fellow; or, The Hob-Goblin.”
I have seen editions of Lud-in-the-Mist which proclaim it to be a thinly disguised parable for the class struggle. Had it been written in the 1960s it would, I have no doubt, have been seen as a tale about mind-expansion. But it seems to me that this is, most of all, a book about reconciliation—the balancing and twining of the mundane and the miraculous. We need both, after all.
It is a little golden miracle of a book, adult, in the best sense, and, as the best fantasy should be, far from reassuring.
Originally published in the “Curiosities” section of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1999.