Most fantasy heroes are not round, stodgy, middle-aged men who are respected pillars of the community.īut Hope Mirrlees' enchanting fantasy "Lud-in-the-Mist" defies many such fantasy cliches, written as if "The Hobbit" had been spun up by Lord Dunsany. The oddness of this story can be detected just by checking out the main character. Honestly, if you are the publisher, please contact me, because I want to describe the section of Hell you will be occupying in the near future. need I say more? Anyone who loves books will be outraged by such a shabby presentation of a wonderful story. The book looks like it was put together in someone's garage : the picture on the cover is a low resolution pixelated scan of a painting or something, the back cover type is so large it is hard on the brain, there is no publisher's information, no copyright information, the table of contents is formatted in a way that renders it difficult to read, there is no introduction, no forward, the text starts at the bottom of the end of the table of contents page. It has a green band at the bottom of the cover and is listed on the buy page as published by 'CreateSpace, Paperback, December 2008'. I am not going to talk about the story, only about the edition Amazon is currently (March 2009) selling, which is absolutely terrible. One warning: the Cold Springs Press edition, which is the most common, is fraught with typos. I recommend this book to any fan of fantasy, or to anyone looking for a great story that helps to disrupt the monotony of daily life. One of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman, wrote the foreword to Lud-in-the-Mist writes that this book "is, most of all, a book about reconciliation - the balancing and twining of the mundane and the miraculous." Mirrlees achieves this balancing act superbly, and she deserves a much higher place among the ranks of modern fantasy writers.
Is Fairyland a myth, or our all-important belief in Law and Order actually a myth? Our hold on reality is tenuous at best, and in order to regain control, sometimes we must choose to believe in things once cast aside, which is exactly what Nathaniel Chanticleer does. If we have control, why shouldn't the innocent be vindicated and the guilty punished? Mirrlees points out, rather uncomfortably, that we has humans, choose to believe in what we believe in, but nothing is at all certain.
Life is a story that we have control over.
One of the most important themes in Lud-in-the-Mist is the unreality of our reality. One may think that this sort of predictability would make the story dull and stale, but in fact, it elevates the story to a higher plane. In terms of good versus evil, right versus wrong, innocent versus guilty, every expectation is met. This is a very delightful story, and one that meets every reader's expectations of what should happen.
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