At Master Nathaniel Chanticleer's dinner table, death comes with a sweet treat, and a dark twist. His wife Marigold serves a traditional pudding called Death's Violets.
All his guests are having a splendid time, but none dare mention the “Silent People,” even if they have a sneeking suspicion that they too are all around.
In Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), a prosperous town has become skilled at superficially enjoying all the comforts of life while avoiding its most unsettling questions. If it sounds familiar, it’s because we too live largely by ignoring what comes beyond.
Halloween seems the right evening to pull up a chair, grab your copy and be spooked.
Click here to order your copy of recently released Time Warp Edition of Lud-in-the-Mist.
The pudding is perfectly respectable
The first dish was called "The Bitter-Sweet Mystery"… followed by "The Lottery of Dreams." Then came "True-Love-in-Ashes," a special way of preparing pigeons; and last, "Death's Violets," an extremely indigestible pudding decorated with sugared violets.
— Chapter III
Mirrlees gives her dinner guests a farce they can swallow, but with consequences for the digestion. Death has long been included on the menu.
But, it becomes rather less welcome when anyone dares to take it seriously.
The same institutional denial runs through Lud's laws and manners. It is a legacy from when the Dukes were overthrown by the Merchants, and the mysteries of the human experience were banned from sophisticated society.
Fairyland officially does not exist.
Even the word fairy is unfit for polite conversation. Yet its traces survive in old songs, household objects and the graveyard above the town.
Who are the Silent People?
The country people, indeed, did not always clearly distinguish between the Fairies and the dead. They called them both the "Silent People"; and the Milky Way they thought was the path along which the dead were carried to Fairyland.
— Chapter II
This is the haunting at the heart of Lud. Its border with Fairyland opens onto the question of where the dead have gone.
Entering the largely forgotten “fairy tale” we learn that to suppress the language of enchantment is to lose a very human way of experiencing the world.
Mirrlees explicitly connects poetry and visions with an “ever-present sense of mortality.”
The merchants have made their town prosperous and practical. Somewhere in the process, the deepest uncertainty of being alive became just plain bad manners.
A pumpkin on the porch is an unanswered question
Memento mori: remember that you must die.
Halloween is the time of year when the thought of the afterlife is given a grinning face. We take skeletons from our closets and put them in the garden. We light a candle inside a hollow head, and invite the dead to be entertainment for an evening of tricks and treats. The good people of Lud operate like this all year round.
The book is charming and unsettling, well worth a read, or three.
Death as a temporary masquerade can be celebrated with costumes and parties, and yet the thought of our own death is continually postponed.
Modern life gives us one distraction after another, to keep us from facing the inevitable.
For anyone grieving, those ultimate questions may already be painfully present. But even then, ordinary conversation and the rush of life can quickly return us to the mundane. Thoughts of death get buried, temporarily, but never really disappear.
What happens when we die? Are there unseen realms existing alongside us? What happens to the richness of life, and art, when we fail to keep these questions close at heart?
These questions remain unresolved even as we celebrate the 100th year of Lud-in-the-Mist. Those who know it tend to re-read it, unconcerned that the rather cultish classic is mostly unknown even in literary circles. Indeed they may even treasure that fact.
Mirrlees spins up a spiritual comedy, wraps it in fantasy packaging, and delivers us a page-turning murder mystery that provokes introspection at a level many will not expect. She is a skillful guide to the universal mysteries of human experience.
Nathaniel's old nurse, finds the mystery sitting quietly among her possessions:
I often think it's strange how bits of chiney and brittle stuff like that lives on, long after solid flesh and bone has turned to dust.
— Chapter X
Please don't kill the moon
Back at supper, Nathaniel raises his knife over a great round cheese.
His son Ranulph cries out that he must not kill the moon: all the flowers in Fairyland will wither. It rattles the partygoers, as the child breaks the taboo of speaking of fairies, and the cheese is left uneaten.
Though persistently denied by the sophisticated classes of Lud, an awareness of Fairyland was still preserved in various corners of the State of Dorimare:
In out-of-the-way country places it was still believed that corpses were but fairy cheats, made to resemble flesh and bone, but without any real substance—otherwise, why should they turn so quickly to dust? But the real person, for which the corpse was but a flimsy substitute, had been carried away by the Fairies, to tend their blue kine and reap their fields of gillyflowers.
— Chapter III
Ranulph's distress eventually breaks through his father's embarrassment. Master Nathaniel discovers a tenderness he had scarcely known himself capable of. The forbidden world triggers an ability to listen to his own child.
And then Ranulph runs away… to Fairyland?
Fairy fruit penetrates the inscrutable town of Lud. It corrupts the finishing school for the girls of the elites. It suddenly gives their world a dangerous sweetness. Contraband disturbs the lives it touches, and its allure carries a cost.
In Lud, as in life, we feel the temptation and the fear. Will we allow ourselves a taste of the forbidden fruit?
The dead yet have something to say
It is a comedy of manners, a commentary on the faults of law, and a biting murder mystery.
Suspicion gathers around a forgotten death. A town's habits of denial become a problem for the newly annointed detective, Master Chanticleer.
It is the most gripping, and charming, non-traditional fairy tale, you’ve probably never heard of, but definitely need to read.
There's no more foolish proverb than the one which says that dead men tell no tales. To help dead men to find their tongues is one of the chief uses of the Law.
— Chapter XVIII
Follow him into Lud this Halloween: for the macabre jokes and luminous fruit, and for the uneasy feeling that the Silent People may actually be hanging around even if you don’t hear, or see them.
This year, don’t let this Memento Mori pass you by once again… Life is too short.
Explore the world of Lud and our new Time Warp Edition, with Lee Raymond's introduction, an original map and endnotes to guide you through its legendary folklore and sarcastic legalese.
You'll find the Amazon purchase link there.
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