Review - Lud-in-the-Mist

How has it taken me so long to write this post? I don't know. I could probably blame essay madness: currently the entire rational part of my brain is busy trying to prove that the cure for vampirism in ladies is marriage and a good bit of pregnancy (you think I'm joking, don't you? I'm not joking), and I need to use all of the rest of my mental powers just to perform basic tasks like eating and watching 4OD.

Also, in the last week I've resigned my Litro internship (leaving behind me a blog about endings, a blog about recreational drugs and a blog about my lizard Watson) and started one at the British Museum Press, which is extremely interesting but also quite time consuming.

But anyway - no excuses, really. Life happened, I read Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees, and then it refused to magically write a review about itself. I think that was very unfair of it. I'm going to have to dock it half a star for being so lazy and just write my own.

First impressions first: I violently hate my edition's cover. I hate it so much. By some trick of the mind, whenever I look at it from far away, or upside down, or just without paying much attention, all I can see is a squashed sad panda, decorated with ribbons. I don't know who commissioned that excrescence of a drawing, but they should take mandatory retirement, effective immediately. Luckily, I didn't choose the book because of its cover, otherwise I'd never have read it.

Actually, I have to thank Neil Gaiman for leading me to this book. It featured on a list he made of his top ten books of all time (which now, of course, I can't find). I was attracted by the title (Lud-in-the-Mist. What is it? Who is it? Why does it sound so interesting?), but mainly by Neil Gaiman, who not only can do no wrong as far as books are concerned (I'll leave the life choices out of it), but also used to hang around with Diana Wynne Jones, who is my Number One Top Writer Person Ever. So I had to give Lud-in-the-Mist a try.

Now, don't worry if you don't know who Hope Mirrlees is. I'd never heard of her either - until I saw the Gaiman list, after which point she began to turn up everywhere. She was born in 1887, went to Cambridge, became friends with a lot of modernist writers (she actually appears fleetingly in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as well as, more recently, The Children's Book) and wrote three books in the 1920s, the most famous of which was Lud-in-the-Mist.

So that's Hope Mirrlees.

On to Lud-in-the-Mist itself. It's all about a town of 'ordinary' people who live on the borders of Fairyland, but never visit because they're too afraid of what they might find - until one guy decides to go. Sound familiar? If you've ever read Neil Gaiman's Stardust, you'll know what I'm talking about. The two books share not just a basic scenario but a tone - sort of old-world-with-a-wink, slightly naughty and very clever. I'm not suggesting that Gaiman's stealing at all, just that he's obviously hugely indebted to Mirrlees. Now that I've read Lud-in-the-Mist I realise that Stardust is essentially a loving homage to a book that's influenced his imagination enormously.

As well as getting backwards influence from Gaiman, Lud-in-the-Mist reminded me enormously of Lord of the Rings - or at least the parts of it that are set in the Shire. If I had to describe Lud-in-the-Mist in four words, those words would be 'Hobbity, with a bite'. It's all very charming and mannered - the inhabitants of Lud-in-the-Mist (it's the name of the town as well as the book) go gallivanting about hunting moths and eating cheese like happy little hobbits, but underneath they're all a bit mean and spiteful and bad. I'm not sure there was a character that I actually liked - which is unusual, since I liked the book itself very much. It has a strong flavour of what would happen if Tolkien had a love child with Christina Rossetti: fairy-tale jollity but with a strong spike of nastiness behind it. At times it's actually down-and-out creepy, all the more so because of how simply the creep presented. People just turn around and casually say things like 'Excuse me, sir, you're going to die soon', or 'Do the dead bleed?' and then you get heart palpitations and have to take a reading break.

We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots?

Unusually for me, because I think that a lot of influence doesn't much matter, I'd say that if you haven't read Rossetti's Goblin Market you're really going to miss a lot of what Mirrlees is doing. (Side note: if you haven't read Goblin Market, you've got to. That's an order. It's an amazing poem and basically a top-notch fantasy story in and of itself).

The plot of Lud-in-the-Mist revolves around the illegal import of fairy fruit into Lud - if you know your Rossetti, you'll understand what a bad thing that's considered to be. The fruit, like Rossetti's goblin fruit, makes its human eater go mad with longing for Fairyland - which is against the law, since, after a revolution against Fairy, the inhabitants of Lud are supposed to be keeping things strictly anti-magical temptation.

As in all the best fantasy, Mirrlees is intensely logical when it comes to the details of her made-up world, and the result is that you're absolutely sold on the factuality of the fiction she's created. She's given Lud a history, economy and mythology so close - and yet so far - from turn-of-the-century rural England that it's like reading a particularly clever spot-the-difference picture. As a physical place, Lud feels entirely comfortable and relatable - and then Mirrlees pulls the rug out from under your feet with a single detail that makes you realise how utterly alien Lud is to your own experience. At one point, for example, she has a character look out over the countryside and see its old oak trees, thick hedgerows, gentle rivers and blue cows.

Yes, blue cows. Because Lud is next to Fairyland, and in Fairyland all the cows are blue, and over hundreds and hundreds of years there's been quite a lot of interbreeding of livestock - the result being blue cows in Lud. Even though everything from Fairyland is taboo in modern Lud, fairy influences have crept into its everyday life- people swear with fairy swearwords, for example, and sing fairy folksongs, without really being aware of what they're doing. It's all so brilliantly imagined and beautifully described (it looked absolutely lovely in my head) that the world of Lud jumps into life right off the page at you and hangs around in your head long after you've finished reading.

I do think the real virtue of Lud-in-the-Mist is Mirrlees's imagination. It's got a sweet but slightly inconsequential plot that's somewhat oddly resolved, and it does sometimes suffer from over-quaintness of metaphor. But her idea is so bloody great that I forgive her all of her small failures of execution. It's absolutely outstanding fantasy, and it deserves to be on top ten lists everywhere.

You know I liked a book if I recommend it to people, and so far I've told five friends about Lud-in-the-Mist and successfully lent it to one. Which I'm now regretting, because I want it back. It's that rare mix of incredibly comfortable and oddly upsetting, and I think I need to read it again.

Or maybe twice more.

4 stars.

Review - Constance

The wives of great men are boring.

At least, that's the opinion of Gertrude Stein in her book The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. Allegedly by her wife-in-all-but-name Alice and apparently the story of  'the wives of geniuses I have sat with', it's actually a biography written by Stein, and what it's really about is the geniuses themselves, because those are the people readers actually find interesting. So says Stein, anyway.

Stein's enormous ego aside, she does actually have something of a point. While she's in one room, hanging out with Picasso and Matisse and working out Cubism and Modernism (as you do), Alice is next door with Fernande Picasso, talking about... hats. Unfortunately, I know where I'd rather be a fly on the wall.

But at the same time, it's not only the geniuses who deserve to have their stories told. History isn't just big men in little rooms, and as both a historically-interested person and a woman I like hearing about women who took the bad historical hand they were dealt and made something of themselves despite the restrictions they had to operate under. So while, sometimes, I think the feminist reclamation initiative is reaching slightly (as in the case of Catherine Dickens - I've written about her in my blog for Litro), I do think it's an incredibly important project, and one that can yield some awesome results. And so it is for Constance Wilde, wife of the more famous Oscar.

The lady un-vanishes

The more I read of Constance, the new biography by Franny Moyle, the more I felt like I not only approved of Constance, but actually liked her. Constance, as a person, was great. She was smart (she put herself down on the 1871 and 1881 censuses as a 'scholar'), she was funny (her letters are masterpieces of sass), she committed herself to everything she could (including the 'healthy' dress movement, several cults and the beginning of women's lib) and all in all she was supremely uninterested in sitting on her behind and doing nothing.

In her own time, she was actually almost as famous (or notorious) as Oscar himself. If Hello! magazine had been around, she would have featured in it every week in a new and completely mad outfit. A slightly reluctant but very visible public figure, she was also - which I did not know - a fairly well-known children's writer. She published quite a few fairy-tale-style short stories, and there's even new speculation that she might be the real author of 'The Selfish Giant'.

Constance was maybe a little whacky (witness the cults and her obsession with Spiritualism), and somewhat obtuse when it came to her husband's extramarital relationships, but I can imagine meeting her and finding that we genuinely had a lot to say to each other. (Contrast this to my imaginary meeting with Catherine Dickens, which would involve me saying "My, what a lot of children you have! Your husband is an awful man," and then the two of us staring at each other awkwardly until it was time to leave.)

A few months ago I read Richard Ellmann's tome of a Wilde biography (aptly entitled Wilde), and, exhaustive as it was, I couldn't help but feel that it missed something crucial. Wilde was an outrageous exhibitionist, mad, bad and fond of turning up places looking like a cello or a sunflower. Ellmann's book, though, manages to make him, and the life he led, seem boring. After Ellmann, I wanted a book that'd tell me the story of Oscar Wilde with as much shock and gossip as possible, and that's exactly what Constance does. Moyle's got a chatty, scandalous style that'll drive you mad if you want serious scholarship, but if you're looking to have fun with history you'll be delighted by it.

I think Moyle gets a good balance between showing Constance as an individual and talking about the experiences she shared with her husband. Constance, in Constance, isn't just a presence in the background, but neither is Oscar - and neither, interestingly, are their two sons Cyril and Vyvyan. If Ellmann largely forgot the wife, he most certainly forgot the children - Cyril and Vyvyan are just walk-on blobs in Wilde. In Constance, though, we get to hear more of how they felt, and what, as children of such weird, brilliant parents, their lives were like, and the result is fascinating.

Not that Moyle doesn't have her faults. At times she's a fairly lazy writer - you get infuriating sentences like

It would be a cause that in the fullness of time Constance would espouse more fully and formally.

Where was her editor? Never mind that, where was her brain?

She certainly isn't a rigorous academic. I suspect that Constance herself could school her biographer on study skills. Moyle has a habit of randomly generalising for the sake of her plot, and even though it didn't bother me unduly I had occasional raised-eyebrow moments. But, as I said, this book is meant to be fun, a razzle-dazzle joyride through an interesting woman's interesting (and ultimately very sad) life, and it succeeds in being exactly that.

Moyle's close to being the perfect biographer for the Wildes. Naughty, funny and irreverent, she conveys their scandalous lives in delicious (if not exacting) style, and ultimately managed to convince me that Oscar and Constance really did, in their own strange ways, love each other. I know! I was surprised too. But that's the nice thing about Constance. It's telling you a story you know, but in an entirely different way, one that, as I've said before, definitely deserves to be told.

Wives of geniuses, despite what Gertrude Stein may think, can be very interesting indeed.

3 stars.

Review - Howards End (AKA: Douchebags in Romantic Literature)

Gertrude Stein and her ego

I have come to a decision: if I read a book for my MA course, I do not have to review it on this blog. This is to prevent me from ending up in a gibbering heap of madness, hiding behind Watson the lizard's cage, and to prevent you from having to hear my thoughts on books with titles like Gendering the Natural: Virginia Woolf and her Use of Root Vegetables as Phallic Symbols in To The Lighthouse. (Actually, if I do ever read that book I will certainly write about it. It sounds great.)

Therefore, I do not need to take any more notice of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas here than to remark on the absolutely enormous size of Gertrude Stein's ego. It bursts up through the pages of the book like a rapidly inflating airbag and leaves the reader lying in a stunned heap upon the floor. Although maybe I would be like that if Picasso, Matisse and Man Ray had all done portraits of me. I don't know.

Crazy blurb edition

But anyway, I did read E. M. Forster's Howards End (yes, no comma), and that was not for my MA, and so I am now going to review it. So here we go.

My copy of Howards End is a Penguin from the 60s, era of charmingly hilarious back-cover blurbs (my all-time favourite is the back of The Waves, which informs the reader that 'Virginia Woolf is the wife of Leonard Woolf'. How times change), and true to form this one begins by cutting straight to the heart of the matter with the immortal line 'Mr E. M. Forster is not a prolific novelist.' How interesting. Did he perhaps like cheese? What was the name of his dog? This is all so relevant. Tell us more.

The blurb goes on to say that

An attempt to outline the story of Howards End would do paltry justice... to the delicate pattern of its composition.

Which, like most literary brown-nosing, is nonsense. Howards End is about the two Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen (and their brother Tibby, but no one really talks about him) and their relationships with the Wilcox family, who are kind of assholes. When Mrs Wilcox (not a Wilcox by birth, so not actually an asshole) dies, she leaves a written request for Margaret to be given her beloved country house Howards End, but of course, because they are assholes, the living Wilcoxes ignore this. The rest of the book is a series of cosmic coincidences that end up with (you guessed it) Margaret and Helen getting possession of Howards End and the Wilcoxes being karmically punished for their assholitude. Simple.

Shut up woman get on my horse

Reading books like Howards End makes me realise just how very glad I am to have been born in the 1980s, into a world where the Pankhursts have already been and gone and made their point. It's true that there is still a long way to go in terms of women getting equal pay and not getting groped and laughed at for no reason, but all the same those 90+ years since 1918 have done absolute wonders for the mental state of eligible males as a group. It's fairly sobering to realise that, until really quite recently, men like Monsieur Paul and Mr Wilcox were, without a hint of irony, the good ones. If you wanted a husband pre-1970 you appear to have had to hope like hell that the one you found would just call you stupid and disagree with everything that came out of your mouth, rather than ignoring you, taking all your money or chasing you round and round the room with a stick.

Basically (giving the plot away somewhat, but Howards End isn't exactly a thriller), at one point Mr Wilcox falls for Margaret and proposes to her. Margaret's considerations on the subject go something like: "OK, so, he hates everything I stand for, and I disagree with him, and he's a soulless ass, and his forehead is weird, but hey, it could be so much worse." And so she marries him.

You can't tell, but she's barefoot and pregnant too

I can't really decide what E. M. Forster thinks about all this. I read A Passage To India last year and I was completely astonished by how balanced and understanding he was about racism and the effects of imperialism. But when it comes to The Woman Question things get a bit more dodgy. There's just an uncomfortable amount of "Women don't need the vote! They should simply be influencing their husbands with their eyes and breasts! Also most of them are stupid." I don't know E. M. Forster's life - and to be fair to him, Margaret and Helen get a hell of a moral victory on Mr Wilcox at the end of the novel - but there's still something that doesn't feel right about his attitude throughout. I guess that's another confirmation of my point: when you have a society that legally treated half of its members like drooling imbeciles, even good, sensible guys end up with idiotic opinions. And what's worse, those opinions tend to stick around.

It's interesting to read the big feminist books of the 60s and 70s (think The Golden Notebook and Lady Oracle) in light of this obvious but somehow easily forgotten point. Once you do, you realise that a very big part of the reason why all of the women in them are so horribly depressed all the time is because although they've bettered themselves, and accepted new ideas, when they start looking for a mate they realise that ALL THE MEN ARE STILL BUSY BEING ASSHOLES. They've got nothing else to choose from. Essentially, they're screwed.

I'd like to think in 2011 that we're (mostly) out of that dark, dark place. I possess two (male) housemates and a (male) boyfriend, all of whom have high-level cooking, cleaning and washing-things-up skills and, because they grew up in a world where women were seen as basically rational, functioning human beings, tend to treat the women they come across in the same way. At the very least, I don't think any of them would even consider unironically arriving at their mistress's house at ten o'clock at night and screaming WOMAN WHERE IS MY POT ROAST (this happens in The Golden Notebook, more or less). Call me crazy, but I find that sort of thing not particularly desirable in a man.

So hooray for Pankhursts (junior and senior) and also all the non-Pankhursts (both those run over by horses and those not), and thank god I don't need to marry a Mr Wilcox any more. Margaret, he's all yours. Have fun.

3 stars. And 18.38% completed.