![]() Lud-in-the-Mist is a genre bending fantasy which is, by turns and sometimes all at once, an eerie fairy tale, a ghost story, a murder mystery, and an adventure. But very soon, the narrative takes a subtly menacing and sinister turn: Nathaniel Chanticleer, for all appearances the kind of peaceful, pleasant, happy, possibly rotund, gentleman one would hope to find in such literary environs, turns out to be an unhappy, even troubled, man-haunted by a blood-curdling, literally discordant, note he’d struck on a lute-like instrument, “when he was still but a lad.” We also discover that the Dapple has its origins in Fairyland. ![]() Nor was this to be wondered at, perhaps for beyond the Debatable Hills (the boundary of Dorimare in the west) lay Fairyland.” The surname of its protagonist, Nathaniel Chanticleer (= Rooster), Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist, is a further hint that we’re in fable territory. In the very first paragraph, though, we are told, rather matter-of-factly, that “towards the west, in striking contrast with the pastoral sobriety of the central plain, the aspect of the country became, if not tropical, at any rate distinctly exotic. The first couple of pages of Hope Mirrlees’s novel are filled with deceptively charming descriptions of the quaint and picturesque Lud-in-the-Mist, a city of merchants at the confluence of two rivers, the Dapple and the Dawl, in the country of Dorimare. ![]()
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