A review by jnzllwgr
The Other Side of the Mountain by Michel Bernanos

5.0

Cited by J Vandermeer as a huge influence on the Southern Reach Trilogy, I snagged a copy to read on the heels of a re-read. This 100-page novella written in a high-Modern, quasi-allegorical style is efficient and kicks off with our 18 year old narrator in the first person describing his decision, one night, full of drink with friends, to sign up for a RL Stevenson-onian adventure aboard a ship to South America. After just a few sentences we are placed aboard the ship where our young volunteer describes the horror of how his fellow sailors haze him and, ultimately, how they brutally treat themselves when the ship loses wind, is set adrift at the equator and things become desperate. The ship’s weathered cook takes our narrator under his wing and the second half of the book is set after all the disaster of the voyage and they —the only survivors— wash ashore onto what feels like a different universe. The sky ever-tinted red, the ground never supporting lush growth, signs of former human inhabitation, the two set to the far-off mountains with the belief that therein their salvation lies. Those who have read Poe and Lovecraft will find similar flavors of mystery, horror and existential dread. Those who have read Borges, may appreciate it although the language (blame the translation from French?) is not as highly crafted. Themes of man’s horrors in the first half shift to nature’s menace in the second half. It’s a quick, curious read that may be best to mine on a second (and possibly third) pass. Apparently, it is a highly revered work that quietly exists aside from the mainstream. This is a good reminder of how we live creatively in a continuum where ideas are borrowed and re-contextualized and the themes of isolation, loneliness and nature’s power that permeated the Southern Reach books have a deep heritage with 20th Century and modern life themes.