The Men of the Mountain by Drew Harrison

The Men of the Mountain is a genuinely ingenious genre-bender. What begins with many of the familiar tropes of traditional fantasy: wizards, orc-like monsters, feudal settlements, superstition and apparent magic, eventually spins completely on its axis. In the vein of Planet of the Apes, the past becomes the future and the future becomes the past.

The story follows Cade the Clanless, a hunter and rabbit trapper whose sister left with the mysterious Men of the Mountain five years earlier and has not been seen or heard from since. Cade is betrothed to Helga, a strong, independent woman, and despite having no clan of his own, he is being trained to become a Civic, an upholder of the Dicta and its Covenants.

Everything changes when what appears to be a falling star crashes nearby. Cade discovers that the "star" is carrying a wounded woman named Robin, who does not speak Renn. Anyone arriving from the stars is supposed to be handed over to the Men of the Mountain, but Cade hides her and tends to her injuries instead. From there, everything he believes about his society, its history and the world beyond the Renn begins to unravel.

Being an Ancient Aliens fan, I rather liked the central idea behind this world. How would people from a non-technological society perceive those from an advanced one? Robes might become wizard's robes, technological staves become wands, and lights that burn without flame become magic. Science, when its origins and explanations have been lost, can very easily become mythology.

The use of language is clever too. Different languages appear throughout the novel and are not always translated, leaving us, like Cade, to work out meaning through context. Latin is woven into the language of the Men of the Mountain, while other surviving languages have taken on different identities over time. Even the name Tabula Rasa is significant. The Latin phrase means "blank slate", something that becomes increasingly meaningful as that part of the story unfolds. It is one of several clues placed in plain sight long before the reader has enough information to understand its importance.

What I enjoyed even more was the way the author continually plays with familiar tropes. A woman falls from the stars, and you automatically expect her to become the young hero's love interest. The rigid friend obsessed with following the Dicta seems like the annoying rule-follower you expect to be killed off fairly quickly. The hero is betrothed to a woman larger and physically stronger than him, the sort of relationship fantasy often seems determined to undo. The grotesque Krieger initially appear to occupy the traditional role of ignorant and violent monsters. Even the title Men of the Mountain evokes old folklore about mountain men and trappers, people removed from civilisation and made rougher by isolation.

Yet almost everything you expect from those ingredients is turned around. Even the romance refuses to follow the familiar route toward the beautiful stranger, discarded betrothed and inevitable climactic sex scene. At times, it feels as though the author is not simply bending the genre, but dismantling its tropes one by one.

Underneath all of this is a much more interesting story about civilisation, power and choice. There is a strong colonial element running through the novel. Those with the more sophisticated technology naturally see themselves as the advanced civilisation and everyone else as primitive. Once people are placed within that hierarchy, it becomes increasingly easy for the dominant group to stop seeing the individuals beneath them at all. The bitter irony is that every faction here is human, all living on the same world and all ultimately descended from humanity on Earth, yet each group is still ranked above or below another.

It reminded me in some ways of slavery in the United States and other systems of colonial domination, where restricting education, language and access to knowledge helped maintain power. If people can be kept ignorant of their own history, discouraged from questioning authority and taught that the existing hierarchy is simply the natural order of things, they become much easier to dominate, use and ultimately discard.

That also brought to mind the short story Examination Day, in which a government is threatened not by violence but by curiosity. A society built upon unquestioned authority cannot afford too many people asking why the rules exist in the first place.

The Dicta, the Covenants and the superstitions surrounding the Men of the Mountain therefore become more than fantasy world-building. They show how a dominant society can control another not only through superior weapons, but by controlling what people are permitted to know and even what they believe is possible. The novel never really asks which society is the civilised one. It asks who gets to define civilisation in the first place, and shows how quickly those with the greatest knowledge and weapons can begin to believe that power is proof of wisdom.

There is an interesting question here too about survival of the fittest. When those who already hold the power are also deciding who is fit to survive, natural selection becomes something else entirely. It becomes oppression dressed up as necessity.

No society in Men of the Mountain is simple, and there is rarely an obvious right decision. A choice may save you and the people you love while having catastrophic consequences for somebody else. Sacrifice may be heroic when someone freely chooses it, but does it remain heroic when a leader decides that somebody else must make that sacrifice? When every possible decision causes harm, does choosing the so-called greater good make someone a good leader, or simply provide a justification for becoming a monster?

At the same time, the novel does not take the easy route of deciding that leadership itself is the problem. Cade repeatedly discovers that somebody still has to make decisions, and those decisions will inevitably affect people who had no part in making them.

The science-fiction elements, when they begin to emerge, are also surprisingly well thought out. The technology is not simply there to provide a late twist or explain away the apparent magic. There is genuine thought behind how humanity might establish itself on another world, what problems might arise over enormous periods of time, and what people might be willing to justify when the continued survival of humanity itself is at stake.

At times, this gave me shades of the television adaptation of Foundation. The stories are very different, but there is a similar sense of considering humanity across worlds and generations, and of people making morally questionable decisions because they believe they are preserving civilisation. I cannot say much more without giving away some of the novel's best revelations, but the eventual explanation of this world is far more considered than the opening initially suggests.

The novel is something of a slow burn at first. It takes time for the larger story to reveal itself, and readers looking for immediate action may need a little patience with the opening section. In some ways, though, it reminded me structurally of The Lord of the Rings, where we spend considerable time in the Shire before the world truly opens up. Here, that slower beginning establishes the Dicta, the Covenants, the social structure and the superstitions governing Renn life. Because we spend so long seeing the world through Cade's limited understanding, the later revelations have considerably more impact.

Once the story moves beyond that opening section, the pacing becomes much more intense. There is plenty of momentum, escalating danger and rising action, but what kept me most engaged were the questions.

Running alongside Cade's story is the secondary perspective of Tabula Rasa, a mysterious character being subjected to a series of increasingly disturbing tests. For much of the novel, we do not know who he is, why this is being done to him, what those conducting the tests hope to achieve, or how his story connects to Cade's. His chapters add another layer to the mystery and give the reader a second piece of the puzzle without showing where it belongs.

That gradual uncovering of the truth was probably what kept me turning the pages. Each time I thought I finally understood what was happening, an answer opened the door to another question. I wanted to know who the Men of the Mountain really were, what had happened to this world, why its different peoples lived as they did, who Tabula Rasa was, and ultimately what all of it meant. The answers were worth waiting for.

Ultimately, this is a story about choice: who gets to make it, who pays for it, and what happens when people become so convinced of their own righteousness that they stop asking whether the choice was ever theirs to make.