Joy Wilkinson’s latest foray into Sci-Fi Bulletin territory is an adaptation of Hope Mirrlees’ 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist, broadcast on Radio 4 at Halloween. The writer of The Witchfinders for Doctor Who is currently working on the new Lockwood & Co.TV series, and chatted with Paul Simpson about the challenges of this version of a lesser known classic.

 

I really enjoyed Lud-in-the-Mist. It wasn’t a story I knew, which I will be rectifying. So when did you first come across it?

There are pockets of academics and fans where it looms very large but in general not at all and even though I’ve been in that world a long time, I hadn’t come across it. So I only came across it when Abigail le Fleming, the radio producer, contacted me asking me if I wanted to do it. She sent me the book which is very beautiful – it wasn’t like anything I’d ever read.

It’s really unusual and extraordinary and begins with a real, almost geographical introduction and then a sociological introduction to the land and then becomes the story of Nathaniel. It’s really unique and becomes a detective story later on – that was something that we had to contract because we only have an hour.

Like you it was a new one on me and it’s been really heartening since it’s been announced to see the number of people pop up and say ‘This is my favourite book!’

It’s really hidden and I don’t know why. I guess Hope only wrote those three novels and the first two aren’t fantasy per se so I guess it’s been forgotten. I guess it’s the same old story with female writers and not being as prominent or as in the canon but I think Neil Gaiman’s championing of it in the introductions has made a massive difference. There’s a biography called Hope in the Mist that he’s done an introduction for as well. So, I think it’s emerging but we’re nearly 100 years down the line!

I think there is a whole swathe of writing from that period, male and female authors where there’s a tendency to dismiss them as ‘Oh they must be…’ insert as appropriate – anti-Semitic, homophobic etc – and, actually there’s a lot from that period that isn’t.

Yes, I think that’s a real boon of the fantasy and sci-fi genre generally, that because it’s dealing in alternative realities and generally with a wider acceptance of what it is to be human, they don’t fall into those traps. Even as a big Agatha Christie fan, her books can be very problematic (laughs) and I guess the war overshadows that period a lot. I think things in the war periods get picked up more than the things between them maybe?

So yes, it’s pre-Tolkien. There’s obviously [Lord] Dunsany that you will hear of but this is a couple of years later and just not heard of.

There was this “period of prosperity” that this is written in the middle of that you’d expect to have generated more.

And she was around Virginia Woolf and all of those people but was obviously just very much one on her own. I think it was Virginia Woolf who called her, her ‘own heroine’ so she was a real one off, and this book is a real one off.

Those are the things that can slip through the net but also conversely that still work and have something to tell us a century later.

So what was your impression when you read through the book, before you were looking at it with your adaptor’s head on?

Yes, I had to part with ‘Oh my God, how are we going to fit this in?’…

It was the way she’d managed to walk this incredible line: it’s got a real knowingness to it where it’s ironic in a lot of ways and you’re held at a distance, sort of observing Nathaniel’s mistakes about refuting faerie and refuting art in life and so on and yet also, she manages to keep this tremendous mystery in it. I don’t know how she does it.

It was something that we wrangled with a lot, to try and keep that sense of absolute knowingness but absolute mystery at the same time.

That was what caught me most of all – the Note that she talks about and the longing that it creates in you. There’s a line about ‘A wistful yearning after the prosaic things he already possessed’ but feels like he’s lost. It’s that feeling that that is what it is to be alive, and there was that profundity in it, whilst also being this kind of comedy on some levels about human foibles and our sense of delusion.

It was really this remarkable achievement of being a great plot and a great world that she’s created but also poetic at the heart of it, I think. And the speeches of Endymion Leer about what it is to try and make men out of the people of Lud, that he couldn’t make them as wise as trees but he had hoped ‘to make us men’. Every single speech that Endymion makes I was – not as an adaptor, just as a reader – drawing lines next to it going ‘Ah, this is profound.’

I must admit, I was expecting from the description for it to be far more ‘Look at the funny little people’…

Oh OK… interesting.

…these are the odd people who are living in this town and there to be almost a Hans Christian Andersen type feel to it. So when it was what it was, I really didn’t know where this one was going.

No, that’s exactly the feeling I had and it’s this deft way that she plays Fairyland as though it’s here. She manages to both tell a story that works about another country next to Fairyland, and a quest to go there and come back, but at the same time just play this trick on you, of going ‘Here could be Fairyland, if you just look at it in a different way.’ That’s the bit that catches me: the light on the trees could be faerie or that feeling that you sometimes have when you look at something and it isn’t quite as you thought it was. So she manages to put the magical into the everyday, herself.

So it’s an incredible achievement and then you circle back to the…’Right, how do we do that on the radio?’

I think the music came in as a really important way of doing that because it is about where the words can’t take you.

Yes, you have got to be transported in something like this. This chimes with some of the best ways that the Doctor makes you see the ordinary through extraordinary eyes.

Absolutely.

I could see this being the basis for a Doctor Who story.

Of a place that they go? Yes, yes. I think that does touch on the Doctor in the way that we are an alien species to the Doctor and as full of wonder and strangeness and mystery as well as being the protagonist of it in some stories. The way that the Doctor walks that path between loving the ordinariness of his or her companions, and being grounded by that, but also finding a million different ways to challenge themselves with it.

It’s Matt’s Doctor I think…

Again, like the first reading of a book it’s in Matt’s bones, isn’t it? That sort of old soul, young guy, able to be very cool and with it and then very ancient and seeing the darkness in it.

I hadn’t made that connection myself at all but I can see it. I guess because I’ve been so immersed in Lud and Hope but from a more panoramic view it is in that space of a very human story but utterly strange and other.

What were the challenges that were specific to this adaptation? There’s obviously always challenges with taking X number of words of prose down to 57 minutes.

Of course, of course.

I would probably have liked it to be twice as long and put more of the second half of the novel in. We had to just get to Fairyland by that point.

Language was a huge thing because as you’ll see when you come to read it, it has entirely its own vernacular and that’s tricky. You don’t want to just have people being very cute with it but you absolutely need to embed it in that language. So that was a challenge, to drive the story but keep all the peculiarities of their way of speaking and her descriptions.

And also just to world build in that amount of time because there are so many detailed places. There’s a motif in the novel about Nathaniel’s pleached alley, where the trees grow: you walk into it and get lost in it, and there’s a timelessness and silence of trees. But because it’s not a plot thing, when you’re cutting in down, you’re losing the pleached alley! So I’ve still got it in there but only just.

It’s things like that, that are absolute treasures, that you just have to fight to keep hold of, wherever you can.

Did you ever contemplate doing it without a narrator?

Well, I absolutely did contemplate it because I am not a fan of narration generally! I always think if you’re dramatizing something, it should be dramatized and it should have scenes with conflict in and not be leading you through it, but actually it just is impossible with this because it’s so strongly Hope’s voice. I think you lose that if you don’t have the narration so we toyed with a lot of different things.

At one point I was toying with having Duke Aubrey turn out to be the narrator so that it was his point of view and you didn’t realise that he was telling it to you until later.

Which would have worked nicely if Neil had done that because we’re so used to hearing Neil narrate.

Yes, that would be cool but we just felt it would be really helpful, especially as there were so many male voices in it – and that isn’t an “agenda thing”; it’s literally on the radio you need some differentiation – to put the narration in, in Olivia Poulet’s voice. She’s not being Hope Mirrlees but there is a sense in which it’s got an authorial tone leading you through.

It’s sort of the way that Archie Scottney has used Martin Jarvis in the 007 Radio 4 plays. They credit Martin Jarvis as Ian Fleming but he isn’t although there is that feel.

Exactly. A presence, yes.

I think that made it better for me, with my narration problem, being able to go, ‘It is part of the drama, there is a character there in the narration, it’s not just exposition.’ There is a tone to it which again comes back to that irony and distance that Hope has, where she is kind of commenting on it. There is a sense in which she feels a bit sorry for Nathaniel at points and there’s a wisdom that we’re waiting for that’s held in that tone.

So yes, the narration is a tricky one but it absolutely needed it because it’s such a world and you do need guiding.

It can also be a Greek chorus and I think that does come across in this one. There are moments where you come out of a scene, there’s narration and it’s…’OK, that’s what I was thinking about it but…’

There is a tone, yes definitely.

When you were talking about it earlier I was thinking ‘It’s almost omniscient querying’.

Yes!

The narrator doesn’t quite know where it’s going but thinks that she does.

Yes and has that sort of tolerance of your mother when you’re a child going, ‘OK yes, you think that, let’s just see.’

And with the ending I think it’s really useful. Again in the book she does it beautifully, of just questioning what has actually happened and whether it’s a happy ending. It’s whether you can believe epitaphs and so on, and I think you really need that voice to come in and leave you with that.

There is a feeling that you could return there.

Good.

Would you like to?

I think it’s so much Hope… but I would only come back to this and do a bigger version of it! But yes, I’d like to do my version of a world like that, I guess.

Do you think it would work as a stage play?

Oh wow.

Because there’s that A Midsummer Night’s Dream feel to it.

I think there is that absolute theatricality of, again, being in a space that can be prosaic and can be magical so yes, there’s definitely something there. And possibly animation as well. A sort of strange animation where you can see something one way and see something another way. I think any of those transformational mediums would suit it.

Lud-in-the-Mist is available to hear now; read our review here