Mountainhead

New Juche Mountainhead (2016)
I had a feeling this one would be worth a look based on my already having been bowled over by Stupid Baby, but I've a hunch Mountainhead may even be the best thing I've ever read, if that can be considered a meaningful statement. New Juche is a man who likes big tits and masturbation. I like big tits and masturbation, but this guy really likes big tits and masturbation. He lives and works in south-east Asia, so you've probably already done the math even before we've reached the end of the sentence, and you would almost certainly be wrong.

The point at which I realised I didn't ever want to have conversations with western travellers again came months later, shortly before I moved to the mountain, when I told a female tourist in a bar about the experience with the Burmese woman. I was trying to be honest both for her benefit and perhaps to solicit some casual therapy, but she found me offensive, to a dangerous degree, and I immediately realised that all conversation was hopeless and deceitful. There is experience outside of language and ideas that you assume and allow for, if you're not a cunt.

Mountainhead communicates that experience, and if the words are familiar, the patterns they form may not be. The experience communicated might justifiably be termed shamanic and could certainly be reduced to getting in touch with nature, which is sort of funny given that those who traditionally respond to such tie-dyed phrases would probably be horrified by Mountainhead, and specifically they would be horrified by its honesty. In Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood, William Shaw wrote:

All music is about geography, in a way. It's either about the place in which it's made, or the place where the maker wants to be.

I'd extend this observation to art in general, and it's demonstrably true of Mountainhead which is at core an account of the author becoming part of his environment, something existing within the fabric rather than upon its surface.

I feel I'm being slowly gathered up by the fibres and essences of the forest, beckoned and cajoled by the leaves and scents, and chased by plagues sent to precede me and to show me the way. My own face looks down on me from the trunks of these dark trees, the moist branches I grab are my own sweaty cock and the fluids that splash on me are my own issue.

The qualities which distinguish this novel - mostly autobiographical so far as I'm able to tell, but allowing for visionary interludes - from all that other crap about finding oneself through shunning Hostess products in favour of some delicious nourishing kale and how we met this really amazing old guy half way up a mountain in Baja California, are the facts of it being more about losing oneself in merging with an environment, and the unflinching honesty by which all elements of that environment are described. All the sexual effluvia of spunk, saliva, blood, sweat, bacteria, all the smells fermenting within unsightly wrinkles are celebrated as part of the forest mulch from which everything here is grown, including even the misery, grinding poverty, and casual cruelty.

Sex, like religion and drinking and smoking, is tied profoundly to ideas about place. Sick animals who graduate to Asia for sex graduate at their own pace through a succession of categories and locations, with a very defensive certainty as to their current, particular category and location. There is cruelty in it from wherever you stand, I absolutely believe that.

As a whole, and particularly as one approaches the end, Mountainhead has an almost biblical rhythm, human sacrifice yielding an encounter with God - here manifest as a life size biro rendering of Hitler drawn in a toilet cubicle at a children's school, and you can tell he's a sacred Hitler due to the halo of dobbers around his head - leading to apotheosis either with or as the mountain, which is arguably the main character of the novel; and like all of the best writing, it manages to keep hold of its sense of humour without digging you in the ribs and grinning every five seconds like Douglas fucking Adams.

Of all the books I've read, Mountainhead most closely compares to T.J. Knab's similarly sweat drenched A War of Witches, which represents the same sort of environmental immersion but amongst rural Mexican witches rather than Thai prostitutes; and like Knab's book it leaves the reader subtly changed by an improved understanding of human existence. It probably isn't the best thing I've ever read, realistically speaking, but right now I'm having trouble thinking of anything which impressed me more.