‘Ghost Mountain was Ghost Mountain’. This is the refrain throughout Rónán Hession’s mesmerising third novel. It is about a mountain that suddenly appears. It is about the meaning and intentions people attribute to the mountain. It is about Ghost Mountain’s lack of meaning and intention. Ghost Mountain is like a stone dropped into a pond. Hession fills his book with the ripples.

Ghost Mountain arrives quietly, misting into view:

It was, in the ordinary sense of the word, a mountain. Emerging from the surrounding unfamous landscape, it was higher than all around it, though not very high. Limpet-shaped, its crest was bare and rounded, like a knee. It faced in all directions without preference, as mountains do.

The beginning of Samuel Beckett’s Murphy comes to mind: ‘the sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.’ Ghost Mountain’s opening is as perfectly crafted, but the lucid and captivating style is Hession’s own. It takes a special kind of writer to spot a mountain in the middle of a Venn diagram between a limpet and a knee.

Hession’s previous novels, Leonard & Hungry Paul (2019) and Panenka (2021), explore companionship and love in an unforgiving, noisy world. These themes and the wit and clarity of Hession’s writing return in Ghost Mountain with stranger and sharper edges. It has elements of fairy tale and the fantastique, yet the book is richly human in its depiction of the various ways characters search for intimacy and significance.

We meet the novel’s sizeable cast over three ‘Books’ spanning 25 years. We first encounter Ocho and Ruth as they eat soup, the former restive and distracted, the latter calm. Ruth is warmed by her meal; Ocho’s goes cold as he holds it too long in his mouth. Ruth is soon drawn to Ghost Mountain out of spiritual curiosity. Ocho petulantly denies the mountain’s importance and declares it a place for Satanists. Elsewhere, a dog we have known for a page chokes on a tennis ball he found on the newly arrived mountain. In her despair, the dog owner, later named Elaine, forgets the mountain that has come out of nowhere and is only reminded when she recounts the dog’s death to the local butcher. She resolves to report the mountain to the police:

In the end, with the benefit of a night's sleep, she typed up the report herself on her computer in Times New Roman, 12 point, double spaced, and printed it on her slow inkjet printer before attaching it to a brick and throwing it through the police station window.

Ghost Mountain’s humour, and it is a very funny book, is often startling, yet oddly natural. Elaine’s message-by-vandalism introduces the town drunk, later Dominic, who also has a penchant for contacting the police with projectiles. The mountain then induces bureaucratic wrangling the likes of which will make any Kafka reader feel at home. ‘The police had leaked the story about the new mountain to the local paper,’ we learn, ‘as a way of flushing out leads.’ ‘At that point they had not yet been authorized to visit the so-called new mountain. They had been instructed to refer to it as “so-called” until the facts were established.’

Other characters are also affected by Ghost Mountain. It appears on the land owned by a man who has unexpectedly inherited his dead father’s estate. The legality of possessing a mountain that was not there before entwines with his attempt to be a socially just landlord. The Clerk of Maps, who is proved right about putting contours on ordnance surveys, becomes enamoured with the ‘pecking bird’ of his own importance. Carthage and Clare take to picnicking on the mountain but quickly lose interest. Ocho convinces himself Ruth is having an affair with Carthage, but this proves a fantasy born of self-obsession. The mountain becomes a totem for each character’s circumstances or outlook:

Clare simply referred to it as New Mountain.
Carthage, who, according to Ocho, was trying to be poetic to impress Ruth, called it Suddenly Mountain.
In response, Ocho referred to it, in his own head at least, as Stupid Dick Mountain.
Ruth, who spoke of little else around the house, referred to it as Spirit Mountain.

Ghost Mountain returns again and again to the relationship between love and loss. Later in the novel, Elaine reflects on the different loves she finds inside herself, which include both the family she acquires and the pet she mourns. ‘It was impossible for her to separate these loves. It was like trying to divide a balloon.’ Such images blend seriousness and childlike wonder, capturing the ineffability of our inner worlds. A sequence of unexpected deaths punctuates the novel, each one brought about by and nothing to do with Ghost Mountain. Characters grieve in different ways, some turning inwards, others finding comfort in company, others in art.

Several characters in the book are artists. Elaine, a former teacher, tries repeatedly to find the courage to sell her paintings, which always depict her new family walking or standing on Ghost Mountain. She fails because she cannot bear the loss of the paintings. They are a part of her, no different to her love and her grief. For Ursula, who we first meet as a child and then again as an adult, thinking and talking about Ghost Mountain ‘gave her peace’, but she struggles to paint the mountain because ‘she disliked the mental projection that landscapes involved. The fly tipping of the mind on the landscape. The turning of the landscape into things. Into metaphors.’ Hession writes perceptively about creativity. Ursula, for example, works best in the morning before language has intruded her mind. When her housemate’s boyfriend tries to talk to her about her art, she feels her ‘sketching energy’ is ‘already spoiled’. ‘Now her head was full of words. Her personality had woken up and chased away her picture.’ This accounts for Ursula’s need to be nearer and nearer Ghost Mountain, a place for her that, again conjuring Beckett, defies expression but must be expressed.

In Chinese painting, shān shuǐ refers to paintings of mountains and natural water features such as rivers and waterfalls. It is a conceptual style, revealing how the landscape has affected the painter as they have sat and observed it. As Hession’s characters come and go, Ghost Mountain remains the constant, an empty canvas on to which they project their desires and their fears. Rónán Hession has written an enchanting meditation on love, grief, perception and creativity. Ghost Mountain is a profound novel by a writer of immense talent.

WJ Davies is a writer and library manager from southeast England. He has also written as William Davies. He is an editor of LONGITŪDINĒS magazine and has written for Literary Review and The Radio Times, as well as various academic journals. His latest book is Samuel Beckett’s Poetry, a collection of essays edited with James Brophy.

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