Review of The Living Mountain

 The Living Mountain
Nan Shepherd
Publisher: Canongate Books
Date of Publication: October 2019 (my edition); first published January 1977

Hiking nowadays is a bit of a science. Food and water required are calculated based on duration and elevation. Duration and elevation are calculated based on exercise completed during the past week and earlier. Different gear is marketed to every conceivable type of hiker. All that calculation and preparation can impart more of a sense of conquest than contemplation. Nan Shepherd’s version of hiking was not a science. It was hardly even hiking. It was an expression of love for her mountains, Scotland’s Cairngorms, a quiet, open, enraptured investigation. The Living Mountain is a snapshot of Shepherd’s mountains in all seasons and all conditions, an effort to describe and understand the Cairngorms as a living and unpredictably tutelary entity.
Shepherd’s work, though just topping 100 pages, reads like Guinness and chocolate cake: rich, seductive, almost too much for the palate to take in one sitting. It was almost too much for Shepherd, too; though she spent most of her life on, or in the shadow of, her Cairngorms, it took her more than three decades to publish what she wrote. “[I]t is to know [the plateau’s] essential nature that I am seeking here,” she writes on the first page, claiming her quest as one almost spiritual in its honesty and intensity. From this quest, her prose takes on a variety of qualities. She explains to the experientially impoverished the mountains’ fickle and illusory shifts of fog and distance, and how to walk on certain grasses barefoot. She can be as lyrical as a bard about sleeping outdoors, and whispers, awed, of her encounters with birds and deer. Her writing gives a sense of frustration with the limits of human language and speech to convey the full scope of her physical and perceptual encounters. Yet her writing also shares a sense of intense joy from being able to write about the Cairngorms, a joy of being able to translate her experiences and wonder into words.
Shepherd’s writing, like her treks, is both enriching and almost exquisitely wearying, both dense and lighthearted. Her physical and linguistic exertions focus outward, reaching for her own comprehension even as she reaches for her readers’ attention. This is not to say she is without moments of simple joy and fear, wandering barefoot in summer or caught in a freak blizzard in winter. But her book is meant to create soft feelings for a hard rise of earth, a sensitivity to more than a sensitivity for[ku2.1] a landscape that nurtures and destroys in ambivalent, unpredictable turn. She is necessarily rooted in her own body, but her understanding of the Cairngorms is formed by constantly probing the capabilities, the joys, and furthest stretches of her physical and perceptual limits. She extends herself into the mountains, learning them by devoted attention and immersion.
The Living Mountain is a devotional. It is romantic, but it is also pragmatic, an invitational acceptance of those who open themselves to landscapes, as Shepherd has, and a dismissal of those who see mountains only as finite, conquerable points. Read it in bites. Savor this locally sourced single malt distillation of Shepherd’s lifelong sense of deeply rooted wonder.

Review of House of Names

House of Names
Author: Colm Toíbín
Publisher: Scribner
Date of Publication: March 2018 (my edition); first published May 2017

Ancient epics sing of a decade of war fought over possession of one woman and the pride of many men. They tell of the wrath of Achilles, the cunning of Odysseus, the pride and obstinacy of Agamemnon. They tell of Agamemnon’s return home, and his murder by his own wife in revenge for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia. House of Names is an imaginative adjunct to one of our oldest and most retold tales from the perspective of some if its lesser-known victims and perpetrators. This particular story begins with the rage and grief of Clytemnestra, a mother deceived, bereft, and abandoned, and spins out the story of herself and her children Electra and Orestes, a family twisted and wrecked by that rage and grief.
What makes this story so darkly credible is the corrosiveness of suffering and the relentless brutality. There are brutalities of all scales, from Agamemnon’s murder to the particular methods of rape and execution. This is not a happy story. It is not meant to be. The characters’ motives and circumstances impel madness and martyrdom. They give particular shape to Orestes, a child when his sister (Iphigenia) is sacrificed. Forgotten by a mother hell bent on infinite revenge, he is forced prematurely into manhood by the necessities of survival. He must kill, but he also clings to an ill-fated faith in love and companionship. It makes him likeable, and it also dooms him to obscurity because he is resistant to partaking in the cruelty that drives the power structures surrounding him. The anonymity that shapes Orestes’ adult life, and the impossibility of him experiencing normal, relatively easy partnership after the rending of his family, show the cost of lust for blood and power in ways both sharp and tender.
Perhaps the greatest challenge of this story is cohesively developing a family so irreparably damaged, untrusting, and unforgiving. Clytemnestra’s backstory and the sacrifice of Iphigenia are recounted—in a somewhat explanatory, unsatisfyingly declarative manner—and then she is developed into a character terrifying and terrifyingly naive. She fails to protect the family she kills for, including herself, and she tries to fix her grief and helplessness by committing atrocities similar to the ones for which she murdered her husband. These qualities make her complex, and parallel other characters of both The Iliad and The Odyssey, but they are developed somewhat independently from the stories of her children. Electra and Orestes’ lives are not self-enclosed, but their stories are self-enclosed. 
This is a story worth reading for the intention, even if ancient myths do not compel you. Different from its Homeric progenitors, this story is stripped of gods and their vagaries, leaving only human characters to bear the full weight of their darkness. The Odyssey is in many ways a story of human folly and visicissitudes of want and ambition. House of Names follows this thread of self-exploration, breaking from the way in which the epic is told but perhaps not why it is told. The characters are connected mostly by shared death and bitterness; that doesn’t make for an easy story to develop or read, but it is a story worth telling – and heeding. 

Review of Piranesi

Piranesi

Author: Susanna Clarke

Publisher: The Folio Society Ltd. 2025

Date of Publication: May 2025 (Folio Society edition)

 

    In his whole world, two people live. In the whole world, the bones of less than twenty people have been found and honored. The world is a labyrinth of ancient halls peopled only by statues, tides sweeping their bottom layer and constellations lighting the top layer, the one livable floor in the center. For the narrator the halls and his sole fellow occupant are all the life he needs– until a third person appears, and the narrator begins to question what his halls and his mind might hide.

    There is a slippery quality to the writing that comes from the partially mad narrator for whom the book is named. Piranesi reveals the world in journal entry chapters. The reader learns of labyrinth life through his awe and curiosity, his reverence for unexplained statues and bones, and his careful documentation of the threats and resources of the tides. It is a method of world-building both frustrating and seemingly elementary. Piranesi queries the logistics of his world and admires its beauty, but seeks only to inhabit it fully, not know either its purpose or his within it. This leaves the reader equally alone to grapple with the improbability of his labyrinth and his incomplete conceptions of it, limited by the physical and mental bounds of his curiosity and experience. Piranesi must be trusted, skeptically – his is the only account of his world. The reader is held in suspense, not just skepticism, by the tension between his naivete (its own kind of madness) and his knowledge.

    There are two primary kinds of madness in Piranesi’s world. There is his own, revealed piece by piece as caused by others. And there is the madness of the Other, his one living companion, who demands of the labyrinth purpose and gifts, not just the requirements of survival. The greed and impatience of the Other alongside Piranesi’s patient, accepting contentment give Piranesi a comparative humanity that gentles the effect of his naivete on the reader. Yet just as the reader comes to trust him as a narrator, Piranesi loses trust in himself and his world. His grief and the maturity with which he approaches the massive uprooting of his life beg the question of what is more mad: accepting and embracing the world as it is, or trying to force it to explain and accommodate, as the Other does.

    The subtleties of this book made me appreciate it more after reading than during reading. The slow build of madness expressed as innocence, the vague sense of unease without one focal point, and Piranesi’s explanation of the setting in a way that only makes sense to him make the read unsatisfying at times. But the same things that leave the reader discontented are the ones that I found myself discussing days after finishing the book. Pick it up when you have time to be a quietly frustrated, a little sad, and willing to question whether Piranesi’s madness is more riddle or gift, what we lose when we ask the world to explain itself.

 

 

Review of The Da Vinci Code

 The Da Vinci Code

Author: Dan Brown

Publisher: Doubleday

Date of Publication: March 2003

 

In Paris, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call. The curator of the Louvre has been found, murdered, inside the museum. On his body remains a stupefying cipher, leading to hidden meanings in Da Vinci’s works. To solve both the murder and the cipher, Langdon joins forces with French cryptologist Sophie Neveu. Langdon and Neveu become involved in an intense race against an anonymous, powerful actor trying to solve the same mysteries. Unless they can beat their threatening opponent, the curator’s secrets, and critical historical truth, will be lost forever.

This book reads foremost as a page turner. There are car chases, villains on the edge of madness, and layers of riddles with answers just out of reach. The Paris setting gives Brown opportunities to divert characters’ attention to local scenery and tourist attractions when the characters—and sometimes the readers—need to catch their breath. The combination of the story’s reliance on real art and organizations, its nerdy protagonists, and the mystery thriller genre makes the book a reinvigorating read for students or academics accustomed to more dense literature.

Brown’s choice of genre does create some challenges. His story can sometimes feel like an unresolved conflict of interest between dangerous, fantastical adventure, and explaining the conspiratorial historical context on which the adventures rely. The opening scene, the murder of an art curator by an albino religious zealot, suggests that the real world will provide a physical launch point for the events of the story, but that the plot takes a less familiar path. Brown’s writing oscillates between two primary styles: paragraphs on art and architecture, and dialogue between Sophie and Robert. The culture sections read more as miniature lessons than transitional plot points. The research is impressive and interesting, and anchoring for a story whose progressive mysteries revolve in large part around ancient religious artifacts and famous art. However, given Brown’s interest in the pure history of the real works he uses, the dialogue between Sophie and Robert has to remind the reader why the lessons are relevant to the fiction. They are a bridge between action and elucidations. This comes at the cost of character development, and weakens the depth of scenes that rely on exchanges between the two.

Brown’s writing can also be a bit clunky when it comes to establishing a scene. He writes from a third person limited perspective, which suits the mystery genre. Yet a lot that has to be shown and made intriguing to the reader in every scene—why a particular riddle is so challenging to solve, why the codebreakers are on the run, etc. To show all the angles and risks involved without giving away the rest of the story, Brown switches between characters, often backtracking a bit when that switch occurs. It is an effective method of explaining different motivations and fears driving his character’s actions. However, it can create abrupt interruptions in both the flow of the story and the reader’s engrossed attention.

But like many a Paris adventure, The Da Vinci Code is fun. It is fast. It’s just a little crazy. The puzzle solving relies on the interweaving of real and imagined history, creating a desire to know what of that history is actual fact, what stems from religious or academic convictions, and whether the characters are driven by fictitious or legitimate beliefs. The riddles and puzzles require physical action and risk to solve, giving tangibility and immediacy to the characters’ experience. Even though the protagonists are not the most developed individuals, they are likeable and vulnerable. Hope for their survival and their victory propels the story, as does eager curiosity. Brown’s style may not be for every reader. However, his book is perfect for a day of travel, a stormy evening, a voracious late-night binge illuminated by a dimmed book light - whenever a reader is lucky enough to have time to let themselves be uncritically consumed by the thrill of fantastical questions, urgent dangers, and startling possibilities.