Hope Mirrlees. Lud-in-the-Mist (Cold Spring Press, 2005)
Absurdly smug burghers with fantastical names and tangled genealogies who devote themselves to pipe smoking, eating and all the comfortable arts face a supernatural onslaught from Faerie. A 50-year-old hero who is outwardly the smuggest of them all, but who inwardly is screaming and is haunted by dreams of "a long, straight road," sets out to save them.
Sound familiar? Well, it's not The Hobbit or anything by Tolkien. Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist was first published in 1926, a full 11 years before The Hobbit. Moreover, in the Introduction to the Cold Spring Press reissue of Lud-in-the-Mist, Douglas Anderson explains that although they lived in the same Oxford suburb for a time, Tolkien and Mirrlees never met. There is no evidence that they were even aware of each other's work.
It must've been something in the water. How else can one explain these mysterious similarities between Tolkien's Middle Earth and Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist? Perhaps it was that the two drew from the same well: folklore and mythology, linguistics (Mirrlees spoke five languages), and the writings of British fantasists such as William Morris, E. R. Eddison and Lord Dunsany.
While Tolkien struggled for most of his life to acquire and retain middle class status, Mirrlees was upper crust. The daughter of a wealthy merchant, she was educated at Cambridge at a time when few women had university degrees. She traveled in exalted literary circles: her close friends included luminaries such as T.S. Eliot, André Gide, Katharine Mansfield, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and William Butler Yeats. Her writing was championed by Viginia Woolf.
This reissue by Cold Spring Press appears to be the third edition of the book since its original publication in 1926. In addition to the original text, it features a beautifully written Foreword by fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, who describes Lud-in-the-Mist as one of the finest fantasy novels in the English Language, "It is a little golden miracle of a book, adult, in the best sense, and as the best fantasy should be, far from reassuring." There's also an introduction by Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson that summarizes Mirrlees' life and career.
Though the text for this edition was set from the original 1926 edition -- a time when publishers were said to take editing seriously -- it suffers from slapdash proofreading. There are frequent paragraph breaks where no paragraph breaks should be, and a proofreading glitch has Mistress Ivy Peppercorn running a "ship" for several pages instead of a "shop." Mirrlees' sprightly, polished prose deserves better!
Mirrlees' tale begins in the invented land of Dorimare when Nathaniel Chanticleer, Mayor of the town of Lud-in-the-Mist, discovers that his son has tasted the forbidden fruit of fairyland. Ingestion of fairy fruit causes even the most practical-minded to yield to the siren call of the irrational; to write poetry, compose music and engage in non-productive, "degenerate" pursuits. Soon the vice of eating fairy fruit has infected all the upperclass youth of the city, and they are all tripping off over the mountains to the neighboring kingdom of faerie. The story deals with diffident Nathaniel's attempts to overcome this threat to his comfortable existence.
The Dorimarites are hobbits stripped of all their endearing qualities -- no hairy feet, no cuteness. They are shallow, greedy and stupid. While the hobbits had minimal government, the Dorimarites have rigid laws and a rigid class structure. The senators, at the top of the heap, lord it over those below them. The senators are especially vigilant against incursions from the neighboring fairyland because they fear that the delusions of faerie may undermine the delusions of Law, the source of their authority. The fairies are probably no better than the senators. They see the people of Dorimare primarily as butts for their practical jokes. The common people cherish an absurd longing for the whimsical, arbitrary and capricious Lord Aubry, an aristocratic master of misrule who has been forced into exile in fairyland.
It's a compelling tale, but it's not a completely satisfying one. Mirrlees abandons her hero right on the border of fairyland and switches to a rather contrived murder subplot. (Isn't it great when a murder victim takes the time to write up a detailed description of his murder, complete with a list of witnesses?) The payoff from this subplot isn't big enough to compensate for the reader's loss of an opportunity to visit fairyland. And, since fairyland and its inhabitants remain an unknown quantity, it's impossible to discern whether the fairy invasion is a good thing or a bad thing.
Given the arc of the story, I'd expected it to end with a ringing defense of fairyland/imagination against utilitarianism. Instead, Mirrlees gives a very grudging endorsement of fairyland, which can be summed up by paraphrasing an old cliché: "The id, you can't live with it and you can't live without it."
Mirrless keeps herself at an ironic distance from her story. Her tone constantly reminds the reader that this is a jeu d'esprit, a tale of inconsequential and rather silly folk. The sense of awe and the wistful melancholy that pervade Tolkien's work are nowhere to be found. Mirrlees' provides a charming description of the fairy fruit, but if Tolkien had written the story, he would have left his readers pining for it for the rest of their lives.
