Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

Hope Mirrlee's 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist is a very British fantasy novel, set in a small, comfortable land with no major human neighbors and only trade by sea. Dorimare is bordered on two sides by impassible mountains, on one by the sea, and the last by the the almost equally impassable Fairyland. It's small and rural, with one substantial city (Lud itself) that feels more like a regional capital, a center of local commerce and minor maneuvering among the petit bourgeois leaders.

There was an aristocratic past, rule by a line of Dukes that terminated in the flamboyant and erratic Aubrey, but that ended a few hundred years ago, to be succeeded by those fat burghers taking it in turn to be, basically, Lord Mayor of this small nation. The revolution was presumably somewhat bloody, but Mirrlees tells it quietly in deep retrospect, and is more concerned with the myth of Aubrey and the legends of his return than with what he was actually like as a man ruling a nation. There are Laws, there is something of a police/military force, but this is a land ruled by convention - again, very British. Small shopkeepers, small farmers, supposedly important men who are in reality fairly small-scale proprietors of businesses. They venerate cheese, tell the same jokes over and over again, live in each other's pockets, each with their own nearly identical small lives of prosaic pleasure rolling down through the generations.

Fairyland is the potential breaking point of that, always lurking on the horizon. You could say all the Doirmareites cling more tightly to their normalcy because Fairyland, and the Debatable Hills that are its marches, are always visible to the west, always available as an option.

Hope Mirrlees has a somewhat different vision of fairies than most writers, though. These are not small woodland sprites, or Tolkienian sages living through aeons. They are not part of the normal natural world of Dorimare at all. The fairies themselves barely appear in the book at all: they are more of an option, or a metaphor, or a different way of looking at life. The fairies are the dead, at least some of the time - or dead humans are legendarily said to be spirited away and reanimated by the fairies to serve them as slaves in their land. And those former friends and family members are the fairies the Dorimareites think about - their supposed ruler is Aubrey. Were there any "original" fairies? Is it all dead humans all the way down?

This is not meant to be a clear or precise metaphor. Fairyland is the lands of death, but also the wilds of art, the freeing of the human spirit, and several other things all mixed together. And it's not anyone's choice of what Fairyland will be for them: it is, and continues, and will always be.

The main product of Fairyland - again, so typical for a nation of shopkeepers - is fairy fruit. Some kind of sweet product of those far lands, smuggled in at large effort, eaten largely by the lower classes in secret, giving visions and dreams and sometimes unstoppable desires to go bodily to Fairyland. The burghers, we are told, never eat fairy fruit, but it seems to be endemic among the lower classes - you can see that as yet another British touchpoint, that the "better" people will be affected much more strongly and immediately by the touch of the ineffable, and need to guard themselves against it in ways the rougher "simple" people do not.

Mirrlees tells us this story in a wry, distanced tone, writing about a land far away in space and possibly in time. It's not quite a fable, but it is a story, rather than something we're experiencing right now.

So Lud and Dorimare has gotten out of touch with its fairy side, swung too far in the direction of stolidity and mercantile life. Lud-in-the-Mist is how it swings back, and who is caught up in that. There is a villain, but he, in the end, was not at the core of the larger changes - no one is, or could be. Mirrlees means us to understand this is how the world is, and a swing in one direction will bring a return swing inevitably.

The leader of Dorimare is Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, a self-satisfied middle-aged man who runs a business in what seems to be almost his spare time and has read deeply in the Law. He's better than he might be, as we learn eventually. His tween son Ranulph eats fairy fruit - like many things in the book, the details aren't always entirely clear, but it seems to have been secretly fed to him, as a jest or a stratagem. That disorders the boy's mind, which sets in motion much of the rest of the plot.

Somewhat simultaneously, the major finishing school for the young ladies of the burgher class is also fed fairy fruit, and they all simultaneously hare off to Fairyland, including Ranulph's sister. This is not as important to the novel as Ranulph, which is puzzling. Mirrlees' own father died while she was writing this book, and I wonder if there's some element of working out her own feelings and concerns in this tale of fatherly love purely for a son.

This is a fantasy, but not heavily so. There is no magic, there are no wizards or monsters. Just people, and fairy fruit, and a mysterious land of the dead or the inhuman, close enough to see, close enough to visit, but famously not close enough to be returned from. (That will change by the end of Lud-in-the-Mist, like so much else.)

The plot is largely concerned with the Law, and Mirlees repeatedly makes direct comparisons between the things of fairy (visionary, transformative, changing) and those of men's Law (equally all of those things, made up of legal fictions and pretenses to twist the world into whatever shapes the creators want). Nathaniel tries to help his son, then chases a villain, then, in the end, has to make the trip to fairyland to save his son (and, oh, by the way, also his daughter and all of the other girls, though that is clearly not as important).

Lud-in-the-Mist is a writer's book: it's intensely written and narrated, in ways that editors and writers love to trace and anatomize and try to follow in their own work. It's deep and quirky and often opaque, so those writers and readers can make varying interpretations, within a moderately wide framework, that all seem plausible. It's written in rich, complex prose that rewards close reading and deep thought. And it is ambiguous enough that most readers will find something they agree with in the ending.

It is a minor book, of course. But it's the kind of minor book that generations of new writers keep coming back to, and using as a touchpoint, one with wells of interest that seem, after nearly a century, to be close to inexhaustible. And that's pretty good for a minor book.