Mount Terminus

Los Angeles has culturally taken the pressure off anywhere else in the world. The world is looking to California's mega worship as a source of credibility, creativity, spirituality and even partiality. And even David Grand, who once said he has phobia of the city, has spent the last decade writing "Mount Terminus," an L.A. fantasy within a fantasy within a lens.

Set in the 20th century version of the city (which now seems a very distant past), Mount Terminus dominates in a place where things are not built up, films can in no way capture this all chaos and darkness is equal to the light. The L.A. we usually see -- the one filled with sunshine and white teeth -- is just one fraction of a more complex whole in this novel. The other fractions are deeper, darker, and not associated with the place immediately; but the dream is clouding slowly, and the wrath of reality thunders. The past, the way we were before, will inevitably affect the way we will be; the thrill of times colliding keeps the pages turning faster and faster. A whirlwind of finding ourselves in moments of perfect prose allows us to swim majestically in Grand's words.

Grand gives us characters that we cannot love or hate. We can only observe them as they move through time and space, with absolutely no regard for reality. But perhaps what is real is just another dream within the dream, within the film version of our lives? Bloom, the son of a wealthy inventor, is our hero, and we find him living up on the mountain reading, walking, and thinking in oblivious splendor. We need a catalyst for what's to come; young Bloom therefore gets obsessed with the previous owners of the estate. Their world shows Bloom exactly what he's missed in this life -- love, hate, revenge, drama -- and so informs him to create his own world behind the lens.

Grand manages to remind us of our greed, of our decay, and just how technology (which came as such a good thing) can strip us of our morality and lead us up a dead end towards happiness -- never mind enlightenment. Of course, Grand cannot stop bringing us to the obvious: When we're in front of a screen, or on screen, or with a screen, are we real? Or is what's happening somewhere else what is actually real? Who is escaping who?

"Mount Terminus"
David Grand
Picador
$17