In the eye of the law, neither F‑‑ryland nor f‑‑ry things existed. But then, as Master Josiah had pointed out, the law plays fast and loose with reality—and no one really believes it.
The aptness of this satire in 2025—in which the law is even presuming to rule on biological “reality”—draws attention to the similarities between the 2020s and the 1920s, which seem much closer to the present now than, say, the 1940s or 1950s. Like our current government, the good burghers of Lud-in-the-Mist can’t counter, or even account for, the ongoing collapse of the dominant symbolic order around their ears because they are unable to recognise on ideological grounds the very forces that are opposing them. This problem falls particularly on the son of the late Master Josiah, Nathaniel Chanticleer, the respectable Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist, who finds himself forced, virtually singlehandedly, to stem the illegal trade in fairy fruit and recover his son who has been abducted and taken to Fairyland.
However, first Nathaniel needs to overcome his own shortcomings, which are made apparent to us in the opening pages of the novel. Afraid of change, he is caught in a temporal loop in which “at times, he would gaze on the present with the agonizing tenderness of one who gazes on the past.” Afflicted by this “nostalgia for what was still there,” he takes refuge in such conscious self-deceptions as taking pleasure in being tucked up safe in his own bed while “enhancing thus his present well-being by imagining some unpleasant adventure now safe behind him,” or “taking a pride in knowing his way about his native town.” The narrative concludes that “though he did not know it, he was masquerading as a stranger in Lud-in-the-Mist.” In other words, Chanticleer has become alienated from life, trapped within a psychological state of denial.
Posted 4 days ago.
