BOOK REPORT: THE HIGH MOUNTAINS OF PORTUGAL BY JANN MARTEL

[Spoiler Alert!—Plot details are discussed. Ed.]

I almost didn’t read Yan Martel’s new novel, The High Mountains of Portugal. I’d borrowed it from the library just before they closed due to the pandemic and it sat on my bedside To Read pile for a while—I had a bunch of apocalyptic fiction to get to first; during pandemics there are priorities, after all. But I picked it up the other day and I’m glad I did. It was an engaging read and well worth the time.

The book is divided into three chapters: “Homeless”, “Homeward” and “Home”, each set in a different time period with the action occurring, for the most part, in the sparsely-settled, rural, north-west of Portugal. As Martel describes, the area is hardly ‘mountainous’, as the name might suggest, being little more than a rocky, scrubland plateau of heath and thickets, though it is dotted with huge, meters-high boulders left by ancient glaciers, which may suggest “mountains” to the passerby. The people there live on small farms with herds of goats and sheep and vegetable allotments. In the villages, their houses and fences are all made of stone, but the people themselves, as Martel shows us, are anything but stone-like, with hidden strengths and subtleties and deeply felt emotions and beliefs.

The book jacket describes the novel, in part, as a “…Tale of Loss and Love”, and the deaths of several characters, young and old,* as well as their loves, are central to the novel’s story, linking four generations across decades and oceans.

The book opens with Tomás walking through the streets of Lisbon on a bright summer’s morning in the year 1904 to visit his uncle. He has an important favour to ask him, and while he’s always a bit anxious meeting with his wealthy Uncle Martim, the day’s weather is congenial and it lightens his mood as he strolls across the city. Martel captures the pace and setting of Lisbon at the turn of the Twentieth Century with quiet, subtle descriptions. For several pages we follow Tomás though a city drawn as if in pastels from another, less garish time, with only the occasional odd description of his stride or an obstacle he trips over, or a comment a passerby makes to him to disturb our morning’s walk. It’s only after several pages we are told that Tomás is walking to his uncle’s house backwards.

As a reader you’re immediately hooked of course, and needing to find out at once about this strange procession Tomás and the author are taking you. It’s a bit like stepping onto a train platform only to discover you’re actually on a merry-go-round! What is going on?

We learn by the end of “Homeless” the reason for Tomás’s odd form of locomotion: It involves the trauma he experienced following the death of his lover and their child, and his beloved father, all within days of each other. Much to the consternation and embarrassment of his uncle, Tomás began walking backwards shortly after the funerals. We learn he does so in a protest against God, who he feels has taken all the joy from life and the possibility for future happiness. Hence, he will walk backwards looking at the past as it still exists, and deny what the future and God’s destiny, looking forward, hold for him. Tomás, in his despair following the loss of his family, comes to believe that God really does not have a place on earth, as revealed through his son, Jesus Christ. Instead, God is an indifferent and implacable entity, alien and remote from humanity and its suffering. He does not deny God’s existence; rather, he wishes to punish him by revealing to the world proof of the false divinity of his son.

Yann Martel

He decides on this course of action during his work as a curator at the city museum when he discovers the diary of a Seventeenth Century priest, Father Ulisses, who missioned on São Tomè, a small Portuguese island-colony off the coast of Equatorial Guinea, which functioned as a transit port in the African slave trade. Tomás reads that Father Ulisses, who like his namesake from Greek mythology, journeys far from home, wished to become a “slave priest” ministering to slaves working the cocoa plantations on the small island and to those in transit to other colonies. But over time his efforts to convert the somber, sullen Africans to Christianity go unrewarded. Increasingly, he is wracked with a sense of helplessness and despair, and comes to feel that his life’s work has been in vain. Eventually, Father Ulisses is alienated from both his church and the slave population who ignores him. Like Tomás, he loses his faith in a loving god and a resurrected Christ, and in his diary indicates—and this is what interests Tomás, reading the priest’s account some two and a half centuries later—that he has carved a crucifix depicting this heretical, deist vision. Through considerable research, the now-obsessed Tomás discovers the relic is located in one of several possible churches in rural north-western Portugal. This object, his fevered reasoning deduces, will be a revelation to the world and his revenge on a god that took away his lover and son. Thus, he borrows his uncle’s luxurious and well-provisioned Renault and proceeds to drive into the High Mountains of Portugal to find it.

Most of “Homeless” is concerned with the journey Tomás makes and in which Martel details the often comic trials and tribulations that the young man, who is an inexperienced driver, endures as he threads his way across Portugal, with the car—for all intents and purposes—itself becoming a character in the story. Tomás’s obsession leads him ever onward, despite all that the landscape, its people and his mechanical bête noir can do to prevent him from reaching his goal.

A major theme throughout High Mountains is engagement with others, especially the idea of seeing and being seen, with a recurring motif of “eyes”. For example, in a tragic event that has Tomás accidentally running over and killing a young boy, he notes the startling blue of the dead boy’s open eyes.  In the final chapter, “Home”, set some eighty years following the events of “Homeless”, the retired Canadian senator Peter Tovy’s life-changing journey begins when he first encounters the gaze of a chimpanzee in an Oklahoma zoo.

 “It continues to stare into his eyes. Peter doesn’t know why, but his throat tightens and he feels close to tears. Is it that no one since Clara has looked at him like that, fully and frankly, the eyes like open doors?” (235)

It is interesting that both Tomás in “Homeless” and Doctor Lozora in “Homeward” are recent widowers (as, too, is Peter in “Home”), who suffer deeply the loss of their beloved wives, and in the case of Tomás, his son as well. They no longer have intimates in their lives; there is no one to engage with, no ‘other’ who looks at them “fully and frankly”, anymore. Both Tomás and Lozora do not wish to have anyone else in their lives; they are bereft, refusing to seek solace or support with others. Tomás descends into irrationality, walking backwards, barely keeping up appearances. He becomes obsessed with recovering Father Ulisses’s crucifix, making his long journey in a machine few had seen at that time in the country, suffering mishap after mishap, and rarely asking for help. He avoids villages and roadways where he might encounter people, his strange vehicle attracting crowds (who are not always friendly) wherever he went. And he has trouble with the clutch. And changing gears! And is “moto-naphtha” fuel flammable? (Yes!) He arrives in Tuizelo disordered and disheveled, his car a wreck, and by chance stumbles across what he’s been searching for in the tiny village church. At the end of “Homeless”, Tomás’s last words are a cry for help to the local priest, as he collapses outside the church. (We later learn that he spoke only briefly with the priest before leaving the village and the novel, as always walking backwards.)

In the middle chapter, “Homeward”, we learn from his receptionist that poor Doctor Lozora has been working long hours, often in a state of exhaustion, refusing help or time off following the death of his wife, Maria. His withdrawal from others is such that he even refuses the offer from his colleague to perform the autopsy on her; instead he performs the task himself. Maria has died falling from a bridge under unclear circumstances. Does he hope to recover her in some fashion by examining her constituent parts? In a way, yes. Perhaps, he wishes to discover ‘how she lived,’ as the elderly Marie Castros will later ask him to do by performing an autopsy on her husband. “Open him up, tell me how he lived?” (184) It may be possible that he performs the operation to discover something in Maria that will help him live without her in his life. He is in despair, and remains so at the end of the chapter, but there is a hopeful moment when his receptionist decides to go into his office to console him.

Both he and Tomás have lost their sense of home they had shared with their wives—with Tomás far from Lisbon in the High Mountains of Portugal and Doctor Lozora unable to return to the apartment he shared with his recently-deceased wife, sleeping instead in his office at the hospital. 

However, in the “Home” chapter Peter, in a strange twist of fate following the death of his wife some months earlier, discovers such a bond of intimacy with Odo the chimpanzee, and the final third of the book is a depiction of their relationship and growing mutual acceptance.

Together, this strange couple makes a home in Tuizelo, and we watch as Peter strives to understand the ape and to accept him on his level, wholly and completely and without reservation. Odo does this with Peter quite naturally, whereas it is something Peter must carefully and respectfully learn. On the phone to his sister Theresa, living in Toronto, he says:

 “Sometimes I think Odo breathes time, in and out in and out. I sit next to him and I watch him weave a blanket made of minutes and hours. And while we’re on top of a boulder watching a sunset, he’ll make a gesture with his hand, just something in the air, and I swear he’s working an angle or smoothing a surface of a sculpture whose shape I can’t see. but that doesn’t bother me. I’m in the presence of a weaver of time and a maker of space.” (301)

Peter, returning decades later to Tuizelo, the village of his birth and the place where Tomás found his cross, is more alive to his world than he has ever been before. He has come to a place he can truly call “home”.

Tomás, on the other hand at the end of “Homeless”, is in despair and guilt-ridden over the death of the young boy he has killed, and at a loss to understand his feelings of emptiness and futility, even though he has discovered Father Ulisses’s crucifix. With his discovery of the wooden cross portraying Jesus with seemingly more ape-like features than human (and thus not an appropriate image for a resurrected god) he feels this will prove to the world the non-divinity of Jesus, that he was ‘just an ape’ and not the son of God. Jesus was not a fallen god; he was a risen ape. Tomás would finally achieve his ‘revenge’ on God for taking his son by taking God’s son, in turn. Thus, to the woman who’d let him into the village church, he shouts:  

“’Do you understand? You’ve been praying to a crucified chimpanzee all these years. Your son of Man is not a god—he’s just an ape on a cross!’” (129)

  

Ape imagery is an important element linking the three settings and time periods of the novel. As mentioned in the first chapter, we have Tomás’s wood carving of a ‘crucified ape’; in the final chapter we have Peter renting a house in Tuizelo (which turns out to be his childhood home) and sharing it with Odo, the chimpanzee he purchased from an American zoo. 

In between, we have Doctor Lozora and the strange case of Rafael Castros’s autopsy on New Year’s Eve, 1939.

Doctor Lozora was happy that evening. His lovely wife of thirty years had just visited him as he worked late at the hospital. She spoke at length as they shared a bottle of wine before the New Year arrived. She often spoke at length on many topics, many of which were religious in nature. Maria, a fervent Catholic, was forever tolerant and accepting of her agnostic, science-orientated husband. As a present to him for the New Year, Maria set out, in a sense, to “Justify the ways of God to men,” in a long speech where she argues that the gospels concerning Jesus’ life are really meant to be seen as stories, as allegories that, at their core, are ‘murder mysteries’! That is, they ask the question: “Who killed Jesus?” Was it Judas? Pontius Pilate? The Jews? The Romans? Anonymous? The answer, really, is all of us. We’re all guilty. The gospels are murder mysteries that we must read and ‘follow the clues’ to reach this conclusion. And she presents her husband with the latest Agatha Christie mystery novel as a final offering. The English novelist is his favorite writer, and Marie, in equating the gospels with murder mysteries (the name “Christie” is so close to “Christ” after all), she gives him permission to enjoy his light reading by imbuing the stories with deeper, more timeless themes. She leaves him to finish his work, and he is left with a feeling of abiding love and gratitude to her for her marvelous gift.

Almost immediately there is a knock on his office door. Doctor Lozora rushes to open it expecting to see his Maria; instead he is confronted with the elderly Marie Castros who has come to the town of Bragança from Tuizelo in the High Mountains of Portugal with a strange request.

She wishes to be present as Doctor Lozora performs an autopsy on her husband. When he objects, she reminds him that she has been his wife for over sixty years and “I will be there with him.” (186) She is adamant and he reluctantly agrees. Here Martel uses “magical realism”. As Doctor Loraza dissects Rafael’s body, objects are uncovered: a red cloth, a flute, tools, mud, and several other items including, most strange, the body of a chimpanzee curled around a teddy bear!

One thing about the literary technique of magical realism is that it reminds you that you are reading a story and like the gospel stories, for example, stories are lies that tell the truth (or a truth). What are we to make of this scene? We learn from Marie that when her son was mysteriously killed, decades earlier some miles from Tuizelo (well, not so mysteriously, for the reader knows it was Tomás) that she, like Lozora and Tomás died inside, becoming bereft and living lives of despair. Apparently, this is how she has existed all these years. Yet her husband, Rafael, somehow found the will, not just to exist, but to find joy in life after their son’s death. The items recovered from his body represent various aspects of his life that made him feel alive: his work, his garden, other activities and actions, memories of his little boy, games played, walks taken, and so on. These, to answer her question, are how he lived. She makes a final request to the pathologist: to sew her into her husband’s body. She removes her clothes and steps into the body cavity beside the chimpanzee, curling herself around it and the teddy bear—the heart of his life (he called his son “my little bear.”) The ape within Rafael may represent the essential life force we all share, the unconscious or perhaps undirected will to live.)

Albrecht Dürer's Rhinoceros 1515

When Doctor Lozora’s receptionist comes in the next morning, she discovers the doctor asleep with an empty wine bottle on his desk, and there in the operating room lay a body already autopsied that is unaccounted for. Magic.

“Home”, the final chapter, I have discussed earlier and the gist of the novel is clear. From the past to the present, from despair to hope, from a deadness of the soul to a living life, the generations-long stories woven through the lives of Tomás and Doctor Lozora and Peter, and the novel's other characters are displayed as along a path that moves from darkness to light, from loneliness to love. Martel links each time period through family ties, traditions and legends, oral history, a journal, records, and I have only the mild criticism that the storyline is a bit too neatly tied up. Otherwise, it is a satisfying read.
But the “Home” chapter brings to fruition the struggles of all three main characters as they try to understand how to live their lives. What Peter, in the end, realizes is that when you truly come to accept the “other”—in this case the other in Peter’s life is Odo the chimpanzee—even where there is an element of danger (Odo is a wild animal after all, with considerable strength), and further, where there is always at the heart of the other a mystery we can never fully understand, that by allowing the other to be wholly and completely themselves, we can be wholly and completely ourselves.

I won’t detail how the various story lines intersect, or go into the religious themes that run throughout, other than to mention it is an interesting synthesis of two 'opposites' as it were: In the village church there is the cross with the ape-like Christ above the altar and at the back of the church there is a shrine to the “Golden Boy” (Marie and Rafael’s much beloved and remembered son who, over the years, has become a religious icon for the villagers, and who they also refer to as "a fallen angel".) What is the relevance of both having a place within the same church?

A final note: Peter, having lived nearly three years in Tuizelo with Odo, who has become accepted and even loved by many in the village, one day goes for a walk with his chimpanzee companion. I should note that Martel portrays Odo as Odo—he isn’t a cute talking, magical chimp; he isn’t telepathic; he is simply who he is, and it’s up to Peter to understand him, not the other way around. He will never, truly understand Odo. He remains mysterious and alluring, and if I may say, he remains a divine question. 
The two go upland and encounter one of the many large boulders in the area. Odo encourages Peter to climb on top of the rock. (And Martel, here, may be suggesting a variation on the story of Saint Peter. This Peter, however, is on top of the rock; he is not the rock as in Jesus's speech: "And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church." Is the role of our Peter to 'found' some sort of new religion or new sensibility? Or is his role more to bear witness to it's birth?)

Here in this scene,  Martel again uses magical realism: The first two chapters make references to the extinct “Portuguese rhinoceros” that may have survived as remnants in Portugal up to the Middle Ages. (26, 185) Peter and Odo peer down from their perch on the boulder and watch as one of the supposedly ‘extinct’ creatures walks by! It’s a magical scene, evoking awe and reverence for life in general. The novel ends with Peter suffering a heart attack and dying on the boulder, while Odo moves on into the landscape.

Interesting read.

Cheers, Jake 
    

*As an aside, I’d finished the “Homeward” chapter of the novel the previous night, and was out for a short walk the next afternoon while I waited for my car to be serviced. On the sidewalk, I approached a woman from behind carrying a shopping bag in each hand who appeared to be struggling or having some difficulty walking. As I reached her, I saw she was elderly and, to my eye, seemed frail, though her eyes were clear and dark over top of her facemask, the now ubiquitous fashion statement in these days of coronavirus. She was a bit breathless and had difficulty keeping her balance, so I offered to carry her shopping for her (which I found to be quite light). She was hesitant for a moment then handed me the bags, thanking me. We walked up the street and talked for a block or two. We reached a bus stop where there was a bench. She said she was tired and wanted to rest.

Since my car was at the nearby shop and would soon be ready, I offered to drive her home, and she accepted my offer. I returned to the mechanic’s, and then drove my car back, but she had gone. I drove up the street to see if she had continued her walk, but I couldn’t find her; I assumed she boarded a bus.

Long story short and the reason why I’m mentioning this is because of the bit of synchronicity that happened as we walked. In Martel’s story, in the “Homeward” chapter, the main character is a middle-aged pathologist who receives a late-night visit from an elderly woman whose husband has died. Marie Dores Passos Castros had been married “some sixty years” to her recently-deceased husband. (She’d brought his body along in a suitcase for Doctor Lozora, the pathologist, to examine—an element of “magical realism” Martel incorporates into his writing.) The woman I walked [oddly here, I misspelled the word as “waked”. Ed.] with the next day—Darlene was her name—told me that her husband of sixty-four years had died recently (last year).

I thought it was a bit of a coinkydink that the fictional character, Marie, I’d read about the previous evening and Darlene who I met the following afternoon, both spoke of deceased husbands and marriages lasting six decades. I didn’t get shivers from anyone walking over my grave, but I think maybe it’s one of those “wake-up calls” we get from time to time. If only I could remember whether or not I’m still dreaming! Did my alarm go off? And who is calling me, anyways?!