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jesssalexander's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
What a strange and wonderful little book! It was written in the 20s but reads older than that; very opaque and flowery language. The narrative itself is a bizarre mixture of things: part cold case murder mystery, part fairyland fantasy, part hero’s journey- but if the hero himself were a middle-aged rotund and comfortably bourgeois mayor with secretly crippling anxiety. And on top of that constantly peppered with wordy philosophical asides in the second person. I feel like I’m doing a terrible job convincing anyone to read this with that intro but I swear it was delightful. And haunting.
And very perplexing! So many unanswered questions! Was Endymion Leer playing them all the whole time? What did he mean by the tree and human speech? Were the fairies just spirits of the dead or an actual race of living beings? Did Nate return from the land of the fairies or like his wife sometimes suspected did he not and he was only a ghost of himself? Or was his return all one big final dream sequence like they possibly alluded to in his last conversation with Ambrose and actually he just died? Was Duke Aubrey like a fairy king or something? I love a book with mysterious lines and double meanings and strange symbolism that leaves you pondering long after you turn the last page.
Something I really loved about this novel was its exploration of the relationship between art and life, or rather between art and death. For the characters in the novel it seemed that art— be it in song, poetry, passionate speech or a single haunting note— caused pain and dread because it made the unflappably pragmatic citizens of Lud confront ecstasy and joy and sorrow and above all to face the bitter knowledge that life can be exquisite but is tragically and unavoidably temporary. Fairy fruit and fantasy and old nurse maids and crackpots reveal in the story hidden truths that cannot be expressed in words but can only be communicated through the art that the citizens of Lud so desperately repress.
For me, one mark of a great novel is if you can follow a narrator and think “I have felt that exact thing myself” and this book had a few of those but this one was my very favorite because it’s so true but also silly. I remember the exact moment in elementary school when I realized my younger sister was a real person and the fact that poor Nathaniel was a grown man having that epiphany is hilarious:
“Was it possible that Ranulph too was a real person? A person inside whose mind things happened? He had thought that he himself was the only real person in a field of human flowers”
And the way she writes it is just so lovely! And this is a short rambling side note but I find it deliciously mischievous how much she undermines Nathaniel as her protagonist. Characters comment on how no one in all of Dorimare could love their son as much as he but he literally just realized Ranulph was truly a person with his own unique consciousness. It’s ridiculous. Up until he had a public breakdown he wasn’t even aware that Ranulph was acting strange.
Okay another huge theme here that I loved: distorted perceptions. Pigeons flower the garden, pleached garden alleys become claustrophobic tunnels filled with the suffocating silence of trees, and my favorite: how it is foolish to judge the state of anyone else’s soul. I just dropped the whole quote in because it’s amazing:
“You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait - a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may be the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the "values," with every modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candlelight, when all the house is still.”
What. The. Heck. Gave me goosebumps. So the whole setting is very whimsical and Lewis Carroll-esque only there is an undercurrent of something more grim and menacing there like in the old fashioned fairytales. Let’s not forget that the triumphant Duke Aubrey who returns in the end was a rapist and also won a bet that he could make his jester kill himself. And there is no rabbit hole to wonderland, wonderland is all around them and the characters walk around with thinly veiled lunacy in this exaggerated world of reasonableness that denies art and beauty to the point of willful delusion. Another great quote along the lines of what I’m trying to say:
“There was that foolish feeling of his that reality was not solid and that facts were only plastic toys or rather that they were poisonous plants that you need not pluck unless you choose. And even if you do pluck them you could always fling them from you and leave them to whither on the ground”
This book was a masterpiece and I don’t understand why I’ve never heard of it before. The only explanation I can think of is that the title is so terrible that no one is interested in checking it out. I mean, how is it possible that the same author that comes up with names like Fields of Grammarly and Swan-on-the-Dapple, Endymion Leer and Clementina Gibberty chose the titular town to be dubbed Lud-in-the-Mist!
Ok last thing. I kept thinking throughout my reading that it would be revealed in the end that all the Ludites were actually the fairies and that the fairies on the other side of the Debatable Hills were actually the humans. Once I got the idea in my head there seemed to be a lot of evidence to support it! For one thing, in spite of the hatred for fairies look at their names! Moonlove and Ambrose Honeysuckle? Ivy Peppercorn? Dame Marigold? Their swearing consists of phrases like “By the sun, moon and stars and the golden apples of the west.” Like Endymion Leer’s Dorimarite history book tried to explain, there was a lot of intermarriage between the fairies and humans in the past, hence all the redheads. And just the whole mood of the book gave me the same heebie-jeebies that I got in high school when reading Nathaniel Hawthorn’s Young Goodman Brown. Like everyone is masquerading around by day but hiding these barely suppressed impulses behind the prim and proper exterior. And their reaction to fairy fruit reads more like a coming into themselves than a losing of themselves. I was holding my breath throughout Endymion Leer’s speech because I thought for sure he was going to say something along those lines. But alas, twas not the case
And very perplexing! So many unanswered questions! Was Endymion Leer playing them all the whole time? What did he mean by the tree and human speech? Were the fairies just spirits of the dead or an actual race of living beings? Did Nate return from the land of the fairies or like his wife sometimes suspected did he not and he was only a ghost of himself? Or was his return all one big final dream sequence like they possibly alluded to in his last conversation with Ambrose and actually he just died? Was Duke Aubrey like a fairy king or something? I love a book with mysterious lines and double meanings and strange symbolism that leaves you pondering long after you turn the last page.
Something I really loved about this novel was its exploration of the relationship between art and life, or rather between art and death. For the characters in the novel it seemed that art— be it in song, poetry, passionate speech or a single haunting note— caused pain and dread because it made the unflappably pragmatic citizens of Lud confront ecstasy and joy and sorrow and above all to face the bitter knowledge that life can be exquisite but is tragically and unavoidably temporary. Fairy fruit and fantasy and old nurse maids and crackpots reveal in the story hidden truths that cannot be expressed in words but can only be communicated through the art that the citizens of Lud so desperately repress.
For me, one mark of a great novel is if you can follow a narrator and think “I have felt that exact thing myself” and this book had a few of those but this one was my very favorite because it’s so true but also silly. I remember the exact moment in elementary school when I realized my younger sister was a real person and the fact that poor Nathaniel was a grown man having that epiphany is hilarious:
“Was it possible that Ranulph too was a real person? A person inside whose mind things happened? He had thought that he himself was the only real person in a field of human flowers”
And the way she writes it is just so lovely! And this is a short rambling side note but I find it deliciously mischievous how much she undermines Nathaniel as her protagonist. Characters comment on how no one in all of Dorimare could love their son as much as he but he literally just realized Ranulph was truly a person with his own unique consciousness. It’s ridiculous. Up until he had a public breakdown he wasn’t even aware that Ranulph was acting strange.
Okay another huge theme here that I loved: distorted perceptions. Pigeons flower the garden, pleached garden alleys become claustrophobic tunnels filled with the suffocating silence of trees, and my favorite: how it is foolish to judge the state of anyone else’s soul. I just dropped the whole quote in because it’s amazing:
“You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait - a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may be the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the "values," with every modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candlelight, when all the house is still.”
What. The. Heck. Gave me goosebumps. So the whole setting is very whimsical and Lewis Carroll-esque only there is an undercurrent of something more grim and menacing there like in the old fashioned fairytales. Let’s not forget that the triumphant Duke Aubrey who returns in the end was a rapist and also won a bet that he could make his jester kill himself. And there is no rabbit hole to wonderland, wonderland is all around them and the characters walk around with thinly veiled lunacy in this exaggerated world of reasonableness that denies art and beauty to the point of willful delusion. Another great quote along the lines of what I’m trying to say:
“There was that foolish feeling of his that reality was not solid and that facts were only plastic toys or rather that they were poisonous plants that you need not pluck unless you choose. And even if you do pluck them you could always fling them from you and leave them to whither on the ground”
This book was a masterpiece and I don’t understand why I’ve never heard of it before. The only explanation I can think of is that the title is so terrible that no one is interested in checking it out. I mean, how is it possible that the same author that comes up with names like Fields of Grammarly and Swan-on-the-Dapple, Endymion Leer and Clementina Gibberty chose the titular town to be dubbed Lud-in-the-Mist!
Ok last thing. I kept thinking throughout my reading that it would be revealed in the end that all the Ludites were actually the fairies and that the fairies on the other side of the Debatable Hills were actually the humans. Once I got the idea in my head there seemed to be a lot of evidence to support it! For one thing, in spite of the hatred for fairies look at their names! Moonlove and Ambrose Honeysuckle? Ivy Peppercorn? Dame Marigold? Their swearing consists of phrases like “By the sun, moon and stars and the golden apples of the west.” Like Endymion Leer’s Dorimarite history book tried to explain, there was a lot of intermarriage between the fairies and humans in the past, hence all the redheads. And just the whole mood of the book gave me the same heebie-jeebies that I got in high school when reading Nathaniel Hawthorn’s Young Goodman Brown. Like everyone is masquerading around by day but hiding these barely suppressed impulses behind the prim and proper exterior. And their reaction to fairy fruit reads more like a coming into themselves than a losing of themselves. I was holding my breath throughout Endymion Leer’s speech because I thought for sure he was going to say something along those lines. But alas, twas not the case
Content Warnings
Minor: Rape
More...