OK, this book right here is why I embarked on this project. I'd read a lot of classic fantasy as a child but I'd missed a lot of it too and left a lot of unread on my shelves. Acknowledging that, along with my plans for an ongoing zine, prompted my journeying back into classic children's genre fiction to see what I had missed and what I really shouldn't have. I'd never even heard of 'Lud-in-the-Mist', a 1926 novel by a female British author, Hope Mirrlees, until I did some research, but it may now be my favourite classic children's genre novel of them all. Certainly Neil Gaiman thinks that highly of it, describing it in his introduction as "the single most beautiful, solid, unearthly and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century."

It's immediately obvious how much influence it had on him, because it takes just a couple of pages to see what he copied. The description of Lud-in-the-Mist, a town in the fictional land of Dorimare, sounds like the description of Wall in Gaiman's 'Stardust'. I'm not saying he stole the town, as they differ in many ways. I'm saying he borrowed the structure of how it's described, a more grounded but still whimsical take on how fairy tales are placed. It also puts this town close to Fairyland, so it can explore how the two influence each other over time. Gaiman consistently did the same thing, not only in 'Stardust' but also 'Neverwhere' and even 'Good Omens'.

The difference is that this is old-fashioned and may well have seemed that way back in 1926. It isn't our world, so there's no connection to our calendar but Lud-in-the-Mist feels like a rural village in the British countryside, just like the Shire did decades later when J. R. R. Tolkien came to fantasy, but back in time when the pace of life was slow and there was plenty of time for the sort of run on sentences that Mirrlees favours. Tellingly, they flow gorgeously and simply ache to be read aloud. This is a prose novel, but it's also fantasy as an oral art. If you can't get into this language because it's old fashioned, then turn off your distractions and have someone read it aloud to you.

Just the names alone roll off the tongue like honey. Lud-in-the-Mist sits on the coast where a pair of rivers meet, the sprawling Dawl and the trickling Dapple, which flows from Fairyland under the Debatable Hills. The current mayor, the principal character in the novel, is Nathaniel Chanticleer, of the time honoured Chanticleers. He goes by Nat, his wife is Marigold and their son Ranulph. In time, we'll meet Ebeneezor Prim, Ambrose Honeysuckle and Diggory Carp; Ivy Peppercorn, Miss Primrose Crabapple and the Widow Gibberty. And there's the villain of the piece, Endymion Leer, who's introduced as the most trustworthy doctor in Lud-in-the-Mist but who becomes increasingly suspicious.

Whatever Leer is planning becomes noticed when Ranulph Chanticleer starts to rave incoherently. His father is throwing a party, at which he'll cut into a brand new cheese, but Ranulph is suddenly horrified that he'll kill the moon. We soon learn that Willy Wisp (there's another peach of a name) has sneakily fed him fairy fruit, which is exactly what it sounds like but which is also treated in Lud-in-the-Mist as a drug so taboo that the laws against it are coded in language that doesn't mention it at all. Leer suggests that he hasn't eaten fairy fruit at all, but he should be separated from his father for a while to recover. So to the Widow Gibberty's farm at Swan-on-the-Dapple, which is not at all far from Fairyland.

Things escalate, as things tend to do in novels like this. Miss Crabapple is the local schoolmistress and her students are known as the Crabapple Blossoms, but they've all vanished, soon after she sent away all the servants and replaced them with an altogether different set of staff, like a Prof. Wisp, who's exactly who you think. Where have they gone? Clearly to Fairyland, leaving all of the great families of Lud-in-the-Mist mourning their loss. What's more, Leer, who's clearly in on all of this, cunningly spreads rumours everywhere he goes that it's all the fault of the mayor.

If you think you know where this is going from there, you're probably going to be right and wrong both. The mystery deepens, eventually trawling in a murder mystery, a cold case at that, the killer long ago caught and dealt with. Nat, who finds himself drawn to investigate, wears disguises and adopts aliases, in order to do so. Other characters aren't who they seem either, with the mystery only solvable once their true identities are exposed.

This is also an adventure within a fantasy world, an overdue righting of many wrongs, and at one crucial point, it even becomes a legal thriller. There are attempted murders in the present, many examples of slander and coming-of-age moments. There are powerful men who lose their power and powerless children who find theirs. There's a lot here in around two hundred and fifty pages, all of it masterfully grounded in character.

During my research, I found many who adore this book but some who couldn't stand it. Often their complaints were consistent: the old fashioned language and the first two chapters, which are not far off being flowery infodumps. If they made it past those, they were more likely to rate it higher but the language was still an obstacle for many. I found it an absolute marvel but I can see why it's not for everyone. However, some called out a lack of characterisation and that boggles my mind.

What Mirrlees does perhaps better than anything is ground us in a place and, to her, a place is its people. She doesn't just build them as individuals, though she certainly does that; she builds the town's culture and history around them. One of the most important characters in the book, Duke Aubrey, a hunchback with the face of an angel, died generations earlier but many believe that he will one day return. In Mirrlees's hands, history ages into legend, which becomes superstition. I'd suggest that most writers worldbuild what's there now and would benefit to no end from reading this novel to see how it should be done.

For instance, there's a paragraph early in the book that's really just an aside. It doesn't have any real meaning in the grand scheme of things, just a brief story that's part of the collective memory of Lud-in-the-Mist. A particular character was accused long ago of not mourning his father-in-law, given that he was caught wearing a pair of brand new bright yellow stockings. He tries to bluff his way out of it in hilarious fashion, proclaiming, "Anyway, it's a blackish canary!" And that's it, just a moment in time preserved by those who know him, but as an insight into the character of one Nat Chanticleer, for it was he, it's glorious. There's more character in this one paragraph than in some entire novels.

It's fair to say that I adored this book and I read more of it aloud to myself while speeding through its story than I can remember, certainly more than the last time I remember doing that copiously, which was Ursula K. LeGuin's 'A Wizard of Earthsea'. It's not perfect, though. It meanders with an abundant charm but it meanders. That opening pair of chapters definitely comprise an infodump, even if Tolkien would have managed a pair of books to do likewise. And, for all that I fell deeply in love with the language, it is certainly outdated. I had to look up a bunch of words to find out what she was talking about. I merely didn't have a problem with that.

I don't know if this is the most "unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century", as Gaiman put it, but it's certainly up there with them. Sure, this clearly influenced him massively, so anyone he's influenced owes a debt by proxy to Mirrlees. However, it clearly influenced Tolkien too, even if he took fantasy in a different, more epic direction, and urban fantasy clearly owes a lot to 'Lud-in-the-Mist' as a pivotal look at the boundary between our world and Faerie as the core of a fantasy novel. Unfortunately this was one of only three novels to bear her name and the only one to sit in the fantasy genre. ~~ Hal C F Astell