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.