Virginia was sometimes puzzled and even exasperated by her younger friend (they were five years apart in age). Eliot lived for a time at her house in Surrey and wrote parts of the Four Quartets there-but was closest to Virginia and Leonard Woolf. She knew them all-during World War II, T. Reminds me considerably of Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood, in that they're both extraordinary works outside the common fantasy tropes - but Mirrlees is a far better writer than Holdstock.Ī partial list of words I didn't know: pleached, patibulary, negus, catechumen, herm, purblind (I should have known that), cicerone, raree-show, sillabub, frangipane, cheapjack, perorations, pattens, sumpter.One way to describe the brilliant Hope Mirrlees, the author of a great novel that still hasn’t found the readership it deserves, is as a satellite member of the Bloomsbury group in early twentieth-century London. One of the outliers of the fantasy genre that all fans of fantasy should read. The story meanders through an odd sequence of events that in hindsight wouldn't sound much like a modern fantasy story if I described them, but the writing is - as previously mentioned - wonderful, and will carry you along beautifully. He must deal with the smuggling of fairy fruit - an unmentionable item that will turn the most prosaic person into a fanciful creature full of strange longings. Nathaniel Chanticleer is the Mayor of the main town, Lud-in-the-Mist. The story is set in the country of Dorimare, a very practical place a little too close to the country of Fairy. I have a reasonably large vocabulary, and I can excuse part of this as a number of these words falling out of use in the last 90 years.
I spent more time with my dictionary over this one book than over the previous twenty I've read (I've included a partial list of words I had to look up below). The writing is lyrical, articulate, and challenging - both because you need to pay attention and because you'll probably need to spend a LOT of time looking up the words she uses. It's unusual in structure and tone, and she didn't really have any previous fantasy to model her work on. It is, indeed, an extraordinary piece of work - quite unlike other fantasy.
I have a lot of respect for Gaiman, and so I finally read the book. Gaiman gave the book a good solid push in a short article for Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1999. It remains available and occasionally spoken of in large part because of Neil Gaiman, himself a noted author of fantasy. Lud-in-the-Mist is, at this point, nearly 100 years old.
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