2019 read #7: Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees.

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
319 pages
Published 1926
Read from February 19 to March 3
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Can books be rebooted? Wait, scratch that question—of course they can be. Reinterpretations of the classics are a mainstay of the publishing field, and some writers (cough, Gregory Maguire, cough) build their entire careers out of chewing up public domain works and regurgitating fan-fiction for mass consumption.

If any book would benefit from a modern reboot, it would be Lud-in-the-Mist. There are glimmers of beautiful strangeness here, a compelling vertigo of life and death and dreams that would be intoxicating in the hands of one of our modern masters of fantasy, such as Helen Oyeyemi, Catherynne M. Valente, or E. Lily Yu. As it exists now, however, Lud is just so obdurately 1926. The central character is a burgher caricature that Verne would have recognized; the narrative swerves and loses momentum updating the reader on the happenings around tertiary characters; the most gorgeous and evocative section of the book, in my opinion, is scarcely longer than a dream sequence. We're supposed to find the main character's stubborn resolve to find his son who has wandered off into Fairyland an admirable example of domestic heroism, yet when the same character's daughter danced off into Fairyland a few chapters before, he barely shrugged, and he only frees her as an afterthought.

There's magic here, though, of one of my favorite varieties: a tale of Fairyland written before Tolkien became the cultural pattern for fantasy for several ensuing decades (much like Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, from two years previous). I'm intrigued by how Fairyland is linked with the Land of the Dead; both are said to be reached via a walk along the Milky Way, while fairies and the dead alike are known as the Silent People. Master Nathaniel's dream-logic journey into the realm of the Silent People was positively Campbellian, yet felt fresh and compelling.

I would love to see some talented new writer approach an update and deconstruction of Lud, and bring the best of what it has to offer into something more like a readable modern narrative, with characters that are more than caricatures and dramatic flow that doesn't get lost in dead-end backwaters. And also maybe revise its ideological undercurrents. There's a lot to be unpacked from the deliberate parallels between the return of the deposed Duke from Fairyland, bringing with him the return of art and mysteries and commonweal to the stuffy mercantile republic of Lud, and the return of the Stuart monarchy after the Cromwells; while we can all agree that the common folk don't prosper under a government of capitalists, reinvesting in a mystic monarchy is not something my hypothetical reboot would champion.