Thus Spoketh Terje

1926.
273 pages.
Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks.
Foreword by Neil Gaiman.

Where the rivers Dapple and Dawl converge is situated the small country port of Lud-in-the-Mist, capital of the free state of Dorimare. From here, the burghers send their trading ships out into the world, bringing back wealth to the upper strata of Dorimarite society. But Lud and Dorimare has a dark past. No more than two hundred years ago the burghers had themselves a revolution, where they deposed the Duke Aubrey and established a oligarchy. Being sensible people, they also banned the import of Fairy Fruit to county and town, as this forbidden fruit had a tendency of making people less sensible than the burghers would have them be. However, in spite of the ban Dorimarites, usually from the lower classes, continued to be discovered in various addled states by the town militia — a clear sign that “silk” (as the burghers referred to fruit as in their laws, refusing even to acknowledge the existence of anything out of the ordinary) still found its way down the Dapple, from across the Elfin Marshes and the Debatable Hills.

Nathaniel Chanticleer has been Mayor of Lud for a long time, and while he outwardly maintains a façade of respectability, he has a penchant for the strange and morbid, and enjoys few things more than wandering the Lud graveyard, reading epitaphs and wondering what his own epitaph will be. However, when a plague of Fairy Fruit addled minds spreads through even the ruling classes of Lud and things look as if they might fall apart very soon, Lud’s eccentric Mayor has to get his feet on the ground and save his town.

Above all else, Lud-in-the-Mist is an amusing novel. However, it’s not so much a laugh-out-loud novel as it is a somewhat more low-fi satirical novel, closer related to the works of Jane Austen than to , say, Terry Pratchett. In other words, there are exceedingly few silly elements in the novel, and the few there are, are usually products of an Austen-like narrator’s subtle and ironic ridiculing of his or her characters; that is, perceived silliness rather than more real sillyness.

Because the novel is also fairly realistic. Granted, it might be that it fails to fulfill many (if any) of Ian Watt’s five criteria for formal realism (if I’d read a bit faster when proof reading my sister’s Master’s thesis paper earlier today, I might have been able to say for sure), but it is obvious that it tries. For the society of Lud and Dorimare, the historical, economic, social and political context is given, sometimes, where required, fairly detailed, too, something not very common in less realistic childrens’ novels about fairies and such — although it is undeniable that Lud-in-the-Mist also have a lot in common with this kind of literature, at least in what pertains to subject matter.

Additionally, there are quite a lot of often very sordid crimes going on in Dorimare, and while the novel is almost completely devoid of outright action sequences — depending more on something of a detective story for its suspense — there is the occasional murder, morbid event and thorough, almost scientific description of the effects of certain poisons, to mention some examples — all of which illustrate that this is hardly children’s fiction, in spite of the fairies, and the funny and the slightly comical, clumsy adult protagonist.

The themes are also quite adult. As I believe I’ve stated earlier, I don’t have a good eye or head for metaphors, but I dare say I’ve got at least some inklings as to what the Fairy Fruit is supposed to be, namely artistic or individualistic impulses. Here, Lud-in-the-Mist is at its most Romantic, and displays most blatantly its genre’s roots in the anti-rational reaction to the Age of Enlightenment. (By the way, have I mentioned how much I love having a sister who’s aiming for a PhD in Literary Studies? ) The sensible world of the capitalist, bureaucratic and legalistic Dorimarite burghers is most often presented as a stale, boring, uninspiring place, while the pre-revolution era, when the Fairy friend Duke Aubrey ruled is put forth as lively, artistically experimental, and whatnot. Of course, this picture is hardly unambiguous, as Aubrey is also portrayed as mildly despotic, while the reign of the burghers is seen as stable and prosperous. Thus, Fairy Fruit becomes more than a simple allusion, as it can also be perceived as opposition to tradition, but opposition not without less positive effects, and Lud-in-the-Mist takes on the nature of a synthesis between Romantic and Realistic, with a central motif being the importance of balance between tradition and progress, stability and chaos.

Of course, the whole Realm of Fairy does at one point seem to evolve into a kind of metaphor for death, or something like that, and the novel has an ending I’m not quite sure fits into the synthesis model I outlined above (although I seem to remember that it did fit, too — weird), and I while I have some vague feelings about how this fits into the theme, it’s not something I think is solid enough to share. Unless, of course, I just struck gold with a random thought that just popped into my mind: You see, during Master Nathaniel Chanticleer’s journey to Fairy (not really much of a spoiler), he witnesses how this realm’s inhabitants seem to live in something resembling nothing as much as a perpetual fair, where people go around all day doing little else but having fun — as a kind of contrast to the world of Lud, where even the act of telling jokes have taken on almost ritual nature.

Of course, the whole death-thing still doesn’t fit, but I hope these last two paragraphs have given you at least an impression of how multi-faceted the themes of Lud-in-the-Mist are.

All in all, I think I quite liked Lud-in-the-Mist. It was a fun little novel, which managed to be both frivolous and serious, and the aforementioned detective story elements occasionally drove me onto the edge of the proverbial seat. 8.0/10.