Lud-in-the-Mist

"Lud-in-the-Mist is a very interesting book, because it occurred before genre-fantasy was a thing. There was not yet a genre that was fantasy. There weren’t fantasy readers. It was being read by ordinary people. Mirrlees was a friend of TS Eliot’s , and a modernist, but she wrote this very unusual novel in 1926. There’s a very bourgeois English town, Lud-in-the-Mist, which is on the borders of Fairyland – but they don’t talk about Fairyland. They don’t go there. They trade with them, but they pretend they don’t. And this story is about a mayor of this little town, who is described as being very middle class and red cheeked. In childhood, he heard a musical note that was full of magic, and it changed his life and the way that he feels – he can always hear this magical note in the background of everything. So he’s not content and stolid, because the note is there. The fairy fruit that comes from Fairyland is, in a way, a metaphor for drugs and intoxication and the forbidden; and in another way, it’s a metaphor for homosexuality. Mirrlees was a lesbian, and lived with a female lover for years and years. Fairy fruit is the forbidden fruit – literally. So we can see it metaphorically as all those things, but also it’s coming out of a tradition where it is the numinous and magical. That’s what Lud-in-the-Mist is about: you have a life that is mundane, and it needs the fairy fruit to make it special, to make it real. You’ve got to accept that, and you can’t lock it away and pretend that it doesn’t exist. You can’t pretend that Fairyland is the other side of a closed border when, in fact, the border is open and you are exchanging what’s there. But Fairy also needs Lud – needs the mundane, the real world and the people of the real world. It can’t manage on its own. Yes – Nathaniel, the mayor, does go into Fairy. There are all these people who are trying to have communion with Fairy, trying to connect with it in various ways, but they are not the ones who actually succeed in going there and getting the adolescent son back. Nathaniel goes there with his normality and brings the two realms together in a very interesting way. Other early 20th-century British women writers, like D. E. Stevenson and Rumer Godden , were writing about how women can live in this changing world – a world where you can work now, but it’s hard to support yourself and there are still traditional roles. This book is like those books, except that it’s got magic, and it’s set in a magical Renaissance England. It’s interesting to compare to the mundane books that were written at the same time, and to the actual fantasy novels that were written later. And you’ll notice Lud-in-the-Mist is in print – it’s available in different editions in the US and the UK, and there’s an e-book – whereas most of the mundane books that I would compare it to are very much not in print. This is a book that was important to people who Mirrlees was not imagining as her readers: people who came along later and loved The Lord of the Rings , and wanted more things like it. Lin Carter found it and republished it in the Ballantine adult fantasy series , and it got a new lease of life after having been forgotten for thirty years. It came back then and has been back ever since."