Book Review: Lud-in-the-Mist

[osprey_archer]

I actually finished Hope Mirlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist a couple weeks ago, but the intervening time has been largely swallowed by existential panic so I didn’t write a review at the time.

However, I did enjoy it very much. It’s a pleasure to read for its own sake - I particularly liked the surfeit of lovely and poetic names; there’s something to be said for naming one’s hero Chanticleer; and the writing as a whole is beautiful and fluid. And it’s also interesting to think of it in conjunction with the fantasy genre as a whole, because Lud-in-the-Mist was written long before Tolkien became the presumed template for fantasy novels and therefore flouts the template without even meaning too.

There is a quest in Lud-in-the-Mist, for instance, but it doesn’t start until the book is almost over. Most of the book is about Nathaniel Chanticleer’s life in the determinedly bourgeois capital city, Lud-in-the-Mist - it’s as if the first two books of The Lord of the Rings were set in the Shire - and the adventure plot only kicks in at the end, and even then we only get about half of it. He sets out on his quest, and we see him he complete part of it, and then he crosses the border into Fairyland and... we follow only partway in, and then cut forward to his successful return.

It’s fantasy as a domestic novel rather than fantasy as an adventure yarn (with a little adventure yarn thrown in at the end for spice).

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear you liked it, even if existential panic threw you off for a while.

The names are great! And I agree it's fun to read a fantasy novel that isn't engaging with Tolkien in any way, but is drawing on some of the same sources. And it's such a terrifically assured book.

But in a way, the quest was with Nathaniel all along - I mean, with the Note always turning up in his dreams and all. Which you could probably say of a lot of other people in Lud, as much as they struggle to hide it.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

It was a nice distraction from existential panic! I just couldn't pull my thoughts together enough to write a review of it for a while.

It occurs to me that the quest plot in Lud-in-the-Mist is mostly internal. Nathaniel has to stop pushing away the Note as hard as he can and instead come to terms with it and come to a deeper understanding of life and fairyland etc; by the time he's on his actual physical quest, it's almost an afterthought, because his real quest has been becoming the kind of person who would even think of going to fairyland in the first place.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read "Smith of Wootton Major," by Tolkien? It's a really lyrical novella about a boy upon whom a pass to faery is bestowed. It sounds like it maybe would be a closer relation to this story than the ring trilogy.

There's a PDF here (http://tolkien.ro/text/JRR%20Tolkien%20-%20Smith%20of%20Wootton%20Major.pdf), but it lacks the beautiful Pauline Baynes illustrations--which were so nice that I copied one, colored it, and put it on my wall as a kid.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I have not! But it looks like the library has a physical copy, so I'll have to see if it has the illustrations.