Fairies

[flemmings]

Lud-In-The-Mist reads much better after you've read Susannah Clarke. I wish I'd known this in 1974 when I first read it, though it wouldn't have helped because back then Susannah Clarke was 15. 'In 30 years you'll be in a position to appreciate what this book is on about' isn't much comfort except in L-space.

Yes, I know the literary tradition works the other way, and I'm almost sure that Kingsley contributed to the nastiness of Clarke's fairies as well. But as it is, having seen the notion writ large in Jonathan Strange, I can now deal with it written small in Lud-In-The-Mist.

(I need a-- whatever: bibliography, genealogy, table of literary precedents for JS&MN and The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Because if pressed, I'd say The Rose and the Ring is an ancestor too. Not that I remember anything of it, just that it gave me the same icky antsiness as Clarke's Fairyland.)

Comments

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

Good grief, now I'm going to have to pull Lud-in-the-Mist off the shelf and reread it! I read it as a teen and don't recall anything about it at all, not even that it was about fairies. (Is it really about fairies? All I can remember is the rainbow on the cover art.)

Seems like what you need is a family tree for JS&MN.

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

LOL! The spouse remembers the author and what the story was about, drat him.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Men, said Jessica. I too remembered absolutely nothing about it, just that it didn't blow me away. But yes, it has fairies, the same not-nice and randomly unpleasant kind that Clarke writes, though Clarke's are far more brutish and violent. To get all kinds of deep, Merrilees' fairies are Dionysiac forces threatening Apollonian rationality and order; but they also have touches of that arbitrary, schizophrenic quality that Clarke's do.

Fairies, like animals, don't have moral values, but unlike animals do have rationality. This makes them look like monsters, or possibly like toddlers on a large scale: but the closest human equivalent is probably psychotics-- people incapable of making informed moral decisions because of how their brains operate.

I need to know what Clarke read as background to JS&MN, is what.

[flo-nelja.livejournal.com]

What is "The Rose and the Ring" ? I adored Susanna Clarke, and I loved Lud-in-the-mist even before reading her, so it seems interesting...

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Thackerey's Victorian fairy tale, and if it's icky, the ick was quite unintentional.

There's probably a reason why both the later works are set in post-18th century societies. The irrationality of fairydom stands in contrast to the assumed rational nature of society. (Practice of course is quite another matter.) Victorians who wrote fairies set out to make them sweet and cute, possibly because they sensed that fairies are actually dangerous monsters of the Id.