Over the Mountain

Over the Mountain (1939) by Scottish poet and Blake scholar Ruthven Todd is a surrealist political allegory in which a young man named Michael crosses the forbidding Pale Peak that borders his country, loses his memory and his name in the crossing, and finds himself exploring a totalitarian state on the other side. The novel's central irony, withheld until the end, is that the country he is exploring is the same one he came from. The signs of authoritarianism, Todd suggests, are plain enough; the difficulty is that citizens of such states are conditioned not to recognize them in their own society.

Published on the eve of the Second World War, the novel draws on Todd's close association with the British Surrealist movement and his political sympathies with the Republican cause in Spain. Its nearest literary relatives are Rex Warner's allegorical novels and, as Todd himself acknowledged, Kafka, though the book's thriller mechanics and working-class solidarity owe as much to the adventure fiction of the period it is quietly subverting. Todd's later surrealist novel, The Lost Traveller (1943), is also held in this collection.

Hardcover. First Edition. Octavo, red cloth stamped in gilt on spine. London: George G. Harrap, 1939. #11391.
Discreet owner signature on front endpaper, slight spine lean; otherwise a very good copy in a very good dust jacket with a few closed tears and mild darkening to the spine.