Ever since reading about Hope Mirrlees' 1926 fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist in the Curiosities section of F&SF back in 2000, I've had a hankering to give it a try, and finally found a copy of it in the Bath branch of Oxfam on Thursday.

Bear in mind that this is pretty much pre-genre; Amazing Stories was launched in the same year as it was published -in 1926-- and even the venerable Weird Tales was only three years old at the time.
 
Lud-in-the-Mist predates the three major fantasy influences of the twentieth century, Tolkein, Robert E. Howard, and Mervyn Peake, the last of which is probably closest to Mirrlees, although her setting is more pastoral than baroque.

The language is rich and the images are striking, yet I'm struggling to get into it, and the reason is that it refuses to bend and buckle to fit the standard narrative of the modern speculative-fiction novel. The first twenty or so pages are a travelogue outlining the setting for the novel, and only gradually does it ease into the main plot.

SF and crime are the most vibrant forms of fiction beacuse with their pulp origins they have plots, unlike most literary fiction which eschews narrative for contemplation, and which by contrast appears stagnant. Add to that the ideas inherent within SF and you have the reason for the success of the best SF novels, in that they combine ideas, characterization and actual narrative tension.

Lud-in-the-Mist presents a vision of what spec-fic might have been like had Hugo Gernsback stayed in Luxembourg, and for all the literati's up-tilted noses, I'm not sure that it would have been better. But it's also an interesting experience to realize that we are as much trained as readers as writers to 'fit' into the shape of the modern narrative, and heaven forfend the novelist who dares to break that mould.