Hope Mirrlees: Lud-in-the-Mist

Lud-in-the-Mist is the capital of the free state of Dorimare, "scattered about the banks of two rivers, the Dapple and the Dawl":

The Dawl was the biggest river of Dorimare, and it became so broad at Lud-in-the-Mist as to give that town, twenty miles inland though it was, all the advantages of a port; while the actual seaport town itself was little more than a fishing village. The Dapple, however, which had its source in Fairyland (from a salt inland sea, the geographers held) and flowed subterraneously under the Debatable Hills, was a humble little stream and played no part in the commercial life of the town. But an old maxim of Dorimare bade one never forget that The Dapple flows into the Dawl.

We are in a Fantasyland, then, and an almost excessively charming one, whose inhabitants drink wild thyme gin and flower-in-amber, eat Moongrass cheese and smoked ham with pickled cowslips, and swear oaths like "Busty Bridget!" and "By My Great-Aunt's Rump". It's a kind of domestic Merrie England, not all that far from Tolkien's The Shire in its atmosphere, and with a touch of Shakespearean comedy, too. The hero, Nathaniel Chanticleer, a man of fifty, "rotund, rubicund, red-haired", has just been elected Mayor of this thoroughly bourgeois polis where the men are called Master, the married women Dame, everyone has an exaggerated respect for the Law, and the worst crime imaginable is to eat fairy fruit.

For, as the passage quoted above makes clear, this fantastic world has its dark side, the Fairyland where the River Dapple originates, on the other side of the Debatable Hills and the Elfin Marches. There was once commerce between the two, in the days of the legendary autocratic hunchback Duke Aubrey, whose sinister presence still haunts the psyches of the townspeople long after his mysterious disappearance: like the fairies themselves and their fruit, he embodies a chaotic force they dare not accommodate in their sunny lives. But it can't be suppressed for long. Mayor Nathaniel has a hidden neurosis, his obsession with a plangent note he once heard from an old lute, and this element of his personality seems to have been transferred to his son Ranulph, who is behaving strangely and claims to have eaten the fairy fruit. The respectable young ladies of Miss Primrose Crabapple's Academy go on the rampage; blood is seen leaking from a coffin; Nathaniel finds evidence of an old murder; and eventually he must journey to Fairyland itself in search of his missing son.

The central image of the book must owe something to Christina Rosetti's Goblin Market. More generally, it's in a tradition of fantasy that seeks to free the folklore of fairies from its sentimental trappings and recapture some of its old terror. In my last entry, on Robert Aickman, I mentioned Diane Purkiss's superb study of fairy stories; like Purkiss, Mirrlees understands the association of fairies with death. Her Fairyland is a land of the dead, and in order to be fully ourselves we have to reopen the borders and resume our relations with them, frightening as this is. If Lud-in-the-Mist seems cloying occasionally, the writing too pretty and whimsical, that's perhaps a consequence of Mirrlees's vision: for all the quaint comedy, the people of her world are suffering from a sickness, their failure to accept mortality and the violence, chaos and creative energy she sees as linked to it. They are meant to seem a little too good to be true.

Mirrlees was the author of a couple of other novels and what sounds like a very interesting modernist long poem called Paris. She lived with her former Cambridge tutor, the distinguished Classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, and was a respected figure in the intellectual scene of the early twentieth century, admired by Virginia Woolf for her elegance and erudition. Recently, Lud, first published in 1926, has been championed by Neil Gaiman, and reissued in Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks series. (Sophie Toulouse's brilliant cover illustration, shown here - if you think it's a mis-shapen pineapple, look again - gives a slightly misleading impression of a book more erotic than it is.) There is also a biography of Mirrlees by Michael Swanwick, and a website devoted to her, maintained by Erin Kissane. Like Aickman, Mirrlees seems poised for a long-delayed breakthrough, and with equally good reason. While she can overwrite (and I wish she wouldn't use speech tags like "she dimpled") her prose in general has the imaginative precision you'd expect from a poet-novelist: the sun shining on the brick Guildhall makes it look "like a rotten apricot", doves "with the bloom of plums on their breasts" waddle "on their coral legs", and the city has "little open squares where comic baroque statues of dead citizens [hold] levees attended by birds and lovers and insects and children". Beneath the comedy is a deep intellectual seriousness. Lud-in-the-Mist, part fairy story, part whodunnit (you can tell it was written in the Golden Age of the English detective story) part existential allegory, is a true cult classic.

Next time, a contemporary British comic novel that draws on the experimental techniques of the OuLiPo group.

Robert Aickman: Cold Hand in Mine

The book that has prompted the revival of this blog is a collection of short stories called Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman.

I first heard of Aickman from a gifted student with an interest in the fantastic: he was in the tradition of M.R James, my student said, but his books were practically impossible to get hold of. I'm always annoyed when people claim to know authors too obscure even for me, and to prove a point I dug around in my ghost-story anthologies and found a couple of Aickman stories. In comparison with James, whose work I've loved since my teens, and who may one day feature in this blog himself (though his cult status is dubious), I found them a bit disappointing, with inconclusive plots and a vaguely spooky atmosphere that didn't quite precipitate into genuine manifestations. But then, as tends to happen, the name kept cropping up - in fact, as we shall see, he's developing quite a presence on the web. And Faber and Faber, who publish my poetry, brought out three volumes of his stories in their print-on-demand series Faber Finds (hence the generic-looking cover in the image shown here).

I now realize I was reading those other stories with the wrong expectations. Aickman isn't really a ghost-story writer, and his writing seems more a reaction against James's work than a development of it. Take 'The Swords', which opens the volume - the opening sentence, in fact: "My first experience?" the narrator asks. Yes, he is talking about sex, a subject James scrupulously avoided. He's looking back on his early life as a travelling salesman, staying in squalid lodgings in postwar provincial towns. James's protagonists were often displaced, too, but their lodgings, though bleak, were usually picturesque with it: the East Anglian settings of 'O Whistle and I'll Come to You,My Lad' and 'A Warning to the Curious' are far removed from... Wolverhampton.

Not knowing the town at all, I had drifted into the rundown area up by the old canal. The main streets were quite wide, but they had been laid out for daytime traffic to the different works and railway yards, and were now quiet and empty, except for the occasional lorry and the boys and girls playing around at some of the corners. The narrow streets running off contained lines of small houses, but a lot of the hosues were empty, with windows broken, or boarded up, and holes in the roof. I should have turned back. but for the sound made by the fair; not pop songs on the amplifiers, and not the poundings of the old steam organs, but more a sort of high tinkling, which somehow fitted in with the warm evening and the rosy twilight.

The protagonist goes to the fair and is admitted to a tent where an all-male audience is watching, and taking part in a bizarre show, egged on by a rough-looking impressario. I'd call it indescribable except that Aickmann describes it in vivid detail: the girl in green face-powder and revealing, if tatty, costume, sprawled in a canvas chair on the stage, the pile of swords, 'stacked criss-cross, like cheese straws' with which the men are invited to stab her, without, apparently, any ill-effect. The narrator flees before his turn comes round, but later meets the impresario and the girl in a cafe, and is coaxed into making a private arrangement.

'The Swords' doesn't try to hide its Freudian symbolism, or the sexual nature of the narrator's fascination with the girl and her act. You could describe it as an allegorical account of a young man losing his virginity to a prostitute, but such a label would nothing to dispel its strangeness or the shocking nature of its ending. Sex and death are combined in a totally unexpected way. It's one of the most disturbing stories I've ever read, and, for me, the best in the book, though some of the others run it close. 'The Hospice' tells of a man who loses his way while driving and ends up having to stay the night in a very unhomely hotel / institution; it has a typical Aickman open ending, though in this case I have my own theory as to what is going on. An example of his anti-Jamesianism is the way the temperature, here and in some other stories, is unnaturally hot instead of unnaturally cold as one might expect - he likes to make you sweat rather than shiver. 'The Same Dog' is a great modern fairy story; as Diane Purkiss points out in her excellent book Fairies and Fairy Stories: A History, fairies and ghosts are almost indistinguishable in some folk tales. Finally, 'The Clock-Watcher', the second of two stories with a strong German influence, uses the uncanny imagery of clocks to brilliant effect, and has a superbly handled unreliable narrator, making the conclusion, once again, highly elusive. I should add that Aickman is a writer every bit as sophisticated as any of his literary-fiction contemporaries, in style, technique and characterization.

I am a bit slow catching on to the Aickman cult. You can find a lot about him on the web, including a bibliographical database and a recent radio programme on him by the writer Jeremy Dyson on BBC iPlayer. He lived from 1914-1981, was a key figure in the conservation of Britain's inland waterways, and wrote forty-eight stories as well as a novel, The Late Breakfasters and a novella The Model: A Novel of the Fantastic. From one of the sites I learn that his mother left home when he was in his teens and his father left not long afterwards, leaving the boy to look after himself in the family home: it's the kind of grim eccentricity you might find in his own stories. His Collected Stories are out of print and can only be obtained second-hand at exorbitant prices. Faber are doing a tremendous service by making these three volumes available; my first reaction on finishing Cold Hand in Mine was to order the other two, The Unsettled Dust and The Wine-Dark Sea.

Next time, I'll be writing about a dark and very original adult fairy-tale by a little-known modernist poet.