Mountain Devil

Recommend: No

Kay Dick’s tiny little novella presents each chapter as a fragment from the narrator’s struggle with an omnipresent social change. Dick’s story is centred in an unnamed country that is navigating an insidious shift in power away from individual thought to dull conformity.

There’s a cruel movement of people, the eponymous they, that are threatened by artistic expression. It’s insinuated that through artistic creations, humans can single handedly wreak havoc on society with the communication of their raw emotions. Grief, joy, love – the view of the prevailing powers is that nothing good comes of these experiences. Better for society, they claim, is placidity. To feel nothing is better than to feel anything. Art, therefore, is pitched as a contagious danger – to think about art is suspicious, to create it is foolish and to defend it is punishable. Chapters in this book find characters doing all three.

I have expectations when going into these types of dystopian future books. I expect the surreal force (the they) to be sufficiently realised so as to be complicated. I want to find out that a subtle skew to a different set of base motivations would have me be a ‘they’ rather than a protagonist. I expect an interrogation of what went differently in this alternative universe versus our own. That is to say, I expect the unreal to be uncannily recognisable as real.  

Kay Dick’s style is too sparse to allow for these expectations to be met. Dick presents a world that is creepy and interesting, yet it is hard to form a connection with any of the characters and the world building is too disjointed to feel engaging. There is little analysis into the motivations of villains, who are not characterised much further than the infuriatingly vague grouping of ‘they’. The same criticism applies to the narrator, who is never warm and is rarely reflective, making it feel like the reader has no ‘in’ to the world. The narrator, I think, is the constant throughout each of the chapters, although I was very unclear of the narrator’s gender, which made them a slippery character to grasp. The other people that we meet (always artists, or the family or artists) change every chapter. It’s probably understandable that it is difficult to invest in any of them.

So if you can’t connect with the characters, if the villains are too superficial to be spooky, then you are left with only two other elements to care about: the ‘ideas’ of the novel, and the ‘writing style’ of the author.

The most fleshed out idea presented in They is the purpose of art when no one is meant to consume it. What merit is there writing a book when they will invade your home while you are out and rip all the pages to shreds? What is the point of spending hours on a painting when eventually all paintings will be systematically burnt? What compels us to protect our artistic creations even when to do so warrants us to sacrifice our physical wellbeing? These are fascinating questions. I find these questions resonate because they are a more nuanced variant on the clichéd ‘what is the purpose of art in society?’. In They art emphatically does not belong in society – and stripped out of its social context, what is its purpose? I think that this is a critical interpretation of artistic ambition. My reading of They carries the implication that expression is a human need as much as shelter and food, and therefore it is laughable to subject it to accolades and praise.

Dick’s writing style is fine. There are evocative images of nature, particularly gardens and the beach. The issue is that these paragraphs feel very separate to the underlying story of the they. It is a little too jarring to read about lush hills and misty beaches and then segue into a painter having her arm burnt over a fire because she tried to save her work from being incinerated. The juxtaposition between the serenity of the natural world and the anxiety instilled by this new invasive social structure is surely a deliberate choice by Dick. But neither atmosphere was shown clearly enough to be able to enhance the opposing forces in the other. The end result is a bit janky.  

They is a disjointed exploration into a compelling conceit. The book effectively shows the stress placed on individuals when the ruling authorities actively try to stamp out that which is fundamental to existence. There are easy readthroughs to real life – the removal of immigrants in the US; the persecution of gays in Egypt; the limitations of life for women in Jordan. They is marketed as a hidden gem by Faber Editions. It isn’t. But Dick would argue that’s not the point. Most of the time, we just eat what we find, we simply live where we can, and we write what comes. Some books we read are masterpieces, some fade. I had a nice enough time.