My boyfriend wanted to read Lud-in-the-Mist after hearing that Neil Gaiman had said he thought that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was “the finest work of English fantasy written in the past 70 years,” and that “the only thing it could be compared to was Hope Mirlees’s novel Lud-in-the-Mist (see this piece in the Guardian). Having just re-read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, I was game to read this, too. I almost wish I’d had more distance between them: like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, this is a pretty slow-moving book (though not nearly as long) and I think I might enjoy it more on a re-read, when I already know what happens and can linger on the humorous bits and the lovely descriptive passages, of which there are many, like this description of evening’s approach:
And the sun would set, and then our riders could watch the actual process of colour fading from the world. Was that tree still really green, or was it only that they were remembering how a few seconds ago it had been green? (59)
Lud-in-the-Mist is set in a city of that name, which is the capital of a place called Dorimare, which is just east of Fairyland. Fairyland is where the dead go, and also is the source of a mind-altering substance called fairy fruit, but well-bred Dorimarites don’t talk about that: Dorimare and Fairyland have had no legal contact for hundreds of years, since a revolution in which the merchant class of Dorimare took power from the nobles, after which the old leader, Duke Aubrey, vanished, along with all of the priests. It’s said that Duke Aubrey still lives in Fairyland, and certainly fairy fruit is still smuggled into the city: the question of how it gets there suddenly becomes central after the twelve-year-old son of the city’s mayor is given some, and eats it without realizing what it is. The mystery of how the fairy fruit is smuggled into the city isn’t the only mystery in the book, though: there’s also a decades-old crime that gets picked up anew, which gives the plot a lot of its motion.
But that plot summary doesn’t really get at the dreamy strangeness of Lud-in-the-Mist, where the past is unknowable and foreign and the mayor is haunted by the memory of a note he played on an old musical instrument he found in the attic back when he was a child, and few of the characters are all that likable, but the book as a whole still is. Small annoyances: the print edition I read had rather a lot of minor typos, which was sometimes distracting, and the cover is a very generic fantasy-ish cover that has nothing to do with the book: I wish it were as cool as the cover shown on Jo Walton’s post about this book on tor.com, or the 1927 Knopf cover, or the original 1926 cover.
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