This passage in particular ably captures the care and thought with which Mirrlees writes. It was as if he thought he had already lost what was actually holding in his hands. For it had generated in him what one can only call a wistful yearning after the prosaic things he already possessed. All these themes, Mirrlees weaves together with incredible deftness and tact in the space of a 200 page novel, while developing engaging characters who play out a plot that is both heartwarming and heartwrenching – the reader, with Nathaniel Chanticleer, is asked to consider whether or not he is truly satisfied what that means, and whence this small thorn of ache?īut after he had heard the Note a more stay-at-home and steady young man could not have been found in Lud-in-the-Mist. Life and death, parent and child, man and wife, the nature of law (serendipity in my reading, always I had no idea the book was so concerned with this intimate interest of mine when I picked it up), the role of art in life, the role of the individual in society, the endless tugging of sehnsucht within each person who truly pauses and listens – and whether it may truly find satisfaction. Thematically, Mirrlees is concerned with a rich assortment of ideas.

I will avoid further plot summary because the book is absolutely worth its brief read time many times over if you at all enjoy speculative fiction of any sort.

For mystery it is someone is smuggling the fruit of fairyland into Dorimare against the strictures of the law. It is this singularly alien yet identifiable element of the human experience that launches the reader deeper into this tightly woven mystery tale. In this poetic and pastoral setting, the reader is introduced to the character of Nathaniel Chanticleer – a man poisoned at heart with some ineffable and haunting sense of longing. Mirrlees published three novels, of which Lud is the final, and the only that receives credit for its seminal place in the canon of speculative fiction owing to Mirrlees setting of the action in the invented realm of Dorimare.ĭorimare is a former Duchy, now ruled by a Senate and Mayor/Seneschal since the ousting of the storied Duke Aubrey, a man whose legend has endured in the folk myths of Dorimare, an embarrassment to the ruling merchant class but folk hero to the common people, who, it is implied, to some extent resent the schism between Dorimare and Fairyland (to the west) that occurred with Aubrey’s ouster.

One I’ve recently read is Hope Mirrlees, author of Lud-In-The-Mist (1926). Some I have read, others await my perusal. In my article on Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus I mentioned that I had been exploring an interest in early speculative fiction. A constellation of names have drifted into my cognizance through Wikipedia clicks and Amazon “also purchased” recommendations, including Machen, Blackwood, MacDonald, Ashton-Smith, Dunsany, etc.

Lud in the mist review