Local Writer Wins Authors’ Club Best First Novel, 2013
Although Mountains of the Moon by I.J. Kay (published by Jonathan Cape in 2012 and, in part, a product of the MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University) grows out of one woman – Lulu’s – earthly trials, her journey is an upwards and uplifting one. Her ascendings, whether as a girl climbing trees or making Pan-like excursions up to an African plateau of the mind, are experienced with a kind of rebellious joy, in which all the little flaws in a child’s language seem to turn into poetry:
The Masai Mara grass is rolling, golden, golden over golden; running way from the wind, don’t know how big it is. Pip said one time he found a manhole cover with a big empty sewerage underneath. Magine, a manhole cover in the Masai Mara grass…. Sometimes the sun makes me blind. Africa goes on forever.
In more literal terms, the ground of Lulu’s invented world is actually part of the earthworks from which the M25 London Orbital is being constructed in the 1980s, but the urgency with which the little girl claims the territory as hers, makes this world into a magical and transformative one: the desire to make the mountains of her “Africa” become real is part of a wish-fulfilment the reader enters into. We find ourselves climbing the Ruwenzori mountains with her, and the writing becomes part of a jagged and dramatic terrain, sometimes just leaving the reader suspended in air – as when Lulu’s friend, the redoubtable Robertson, falls asleep mid- phrase: “You’ll see [the mountains] just for a few seconds. Beaut…” She fell clean off the top of the word.
This is a novel with some shock and well-merited dread in it – but they are fears usually experienced in a surprising combination with the poetic and the beautiful.
Colin Edwards
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