Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A beautiful, richly textured fantasy, 24 Sep 2001
By A Customer
It would be hard to find fault with this beautifully written book. Hope Mirrlees, an English scholar, uses language with flamboyant precision to produce a richly textured world full of vitality and wonder.Larger than life characters inhabit Lud-In-The-Mist, a bustling town from which all influence of faerie has been banished long ago. The mere mention of anything magical is considered taboo and offensive, whilst the existence of the land of Faerie, just beyond the Debatable Hills, is pointedly ignored. They are therefore ill-prepared when strange, fey behaviour starts to afflict even the most respectable of Luds citizens, beginning with the pupils at Miss Primrose Crabapple's Academy for Young Ladies... Mayor Nathaniel Chanticleer, whose own family is affected by the crisis, finds his deepest fears becoming reality. A truly magical work, the like of which we will probably never see again; made all the more remarkable because it was Ms. Mirrlees only ever fantasy novel.
|
|
|
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magic fought the law and magic won, 30 Jul 2006
Lud-in-the-Mist is a small town nestled in a rural idyll, between the mountains and the sea. One of its two rivers, the Dapple, runs out of the Debatable Hills, the boundary between the normal, mundane world and Fairyland. Strange and exotic fruit occasionally floats down that river. The Ludites have assiduously avoided this fruit for centuries - ever since booting out the fairy-fruit eating Duke Aubrey and establishing a republic, thereby swapping a system of magical chaos for the rule of law. But the denizens of Faerie haven't given up on Lud. They have agents working to smuggle the fruit (which induces weird and disturbing mental aberrations in those who eat it) and feed it to the unsuspecting citizens of the republic. Mayor Chanticleer has a tricky job on his hands, finding the culprits and solving an old murder mystery. In the meantime, the promoters of magic are having some success and the law is fighting a losing battle.
About 30 years ago, when I was working in Spain for a few months, a friend lent me a couple of books from his fantasy collection. We couldn't easily get hold books in English so all we Brits passed round whatever we had, treated the books with great reverence and returned them promptly. These fantasy books were particular treasures and their owner lent them only very reluctantly. The other book was William Morris's "The Water of the Wondrous Isles". I've been looking for the books for years. It was hopeless. I couldn't remember the title or the Author of this book. I could remember the cover picture (red fruit floating on water) and I remembered two names from a little ditty that's haunted my mind since first reading it: "Before the cry of Chanticleer, Gibbers away Endomyion Leer". Putting the two names into a search engine found me this book - back in print at last, as is Morris's book (that's now ordered). Mirrlees is such an elegant and witty word-smith, it's no wonder this book has stuck with me all these years. What a pleasure to read it again!
I would say a little something about this particular publication: the Wildside Fantasy Classic version. I'm too grateful for having found the book again to be very critical but I'll warn you in any case that this edition seems to have been copy-typed rather badly from an earlier version. It's full of typos and other mistakes and was filtered through an American spell checker. Clearly, it wasn't proof-read before going to print and even though Hope Mirrlees used British English, this book has been "translated". Also, there's no list of contents or introduction. My 5* rating is for Mirrlees' book (still very readable and enjoyable as long as you can ignore the typos etc), not for this particular Wildside version.
|
|
|
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The right edition of the right book, 6 Nov 2001
By A Customer
Another fine book in the admirable line of Fantasy Masterworks - marred by the bizarre mis-ordering of the contents in its Dunsany omnibus, but that's another book. Even the introduction (by Neil Gaiman) is unusually intelligent, and far less self-indulgent than is now the norm for literary introductions.
Intelligent, spiky, witty, and with an extraordinary line in dislocating supernatural terror.
Very good, very odd, and even now quite unlike almost anything in English; just possibly slightly more like John Crowley's "Little, Big: or, the Fairies' Parliament" than it is like anything else, but that says more for its excellence than for its specific character. Buy, read.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Lord Dunsany
by Patricia A. Mckillip
by Ursula Le Guin
by John Crowley
by Roger Zelazny
With an Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificate, you can get them what they want (even if you don't know what that is). 
Amazon Home