A lost American classic to rival anything by Faulkner

It’s rare that granitic and iron-jawed prose is also enveloping and warm, but that’s just one of the many enticing literary paradoxes in the American writer John Ehle’s 1964 novel The Land Breakers. The work was the first of seven volumes that Ehle dubbed his ‘mountain novels’, books which today tend to get tagged as historical, a disservice that has kept Ehle a peg below some of the southern heavies (including even Faulkner) whom he sometimes manages to eclipse.

There’s a twinge of something less artful when one tosses in the word ‘historical’, as though the resulting novel relies on borrowings from an earlier era rather than the author’s imagination. But after about three paragraphs of The Land Breakers one realises that this resists any easy codification. We enter a whole new world, like literary Magellan ether.

The ostensible tale of Mooney Wright in a teeming, seething post-Edenic mountainous wilderness in late 18th-century North Carolina, this rangy novel extends its narrative to the assorted settlers who make their way into a kind of elevated valley of death, pumping in humour when need be, and, when humour fails, masses of snakes. One such scene, with vipers awakened from their winter slumber and emerging from beneath a neighbour’s floorboards, is among the most terrifying in American letters. Like the beasts themselves, it comes with no great fanfare, no preparation, certainly; and yet there it is, natural to the point of being unquestionable, and simply how life can go.

Mooney loses his wife in short order after some D.H. Lawrence-like sexual romping upon first arrival. He seeks another, and having been rejected by a naive yet strikingly wise teenager called Pearlamina — the book’s wandering conscience, in some ways — he ‘house tends’ with the 30-year-old daughter of the aged Tinkler Harrison, a would-be land baron in search of his proper kingdom.