If any landing you walk away from is a good one, then Henry's landing is a good one. But as the plane's wheels come off and it tumbles on the ice, cartwheeling on its wings, Miss Jane hurries to his aid.
As it happens, Henry had been on his way to Kingdom Mountain because of a riddle given to him by his grandfather about a hidden treasure in stolen gold. Civil War Rebels originally stole the gold in a raid on the village's bank. But they, and the gold, vanished without a trace. Unfortunately, the crash landing has also made all but the very beginning of his grand-dad's riddle vanish from Henry's recall.
Miss Jane offers Henry the hospitality of her home on Kingdom Mountain and he gratefully accepts. And what a unique home Miss Jane runs. A bookwoman she runs in the village of Kingdom Mountain an Athenaeum, a combination library and bookstore. There she, in book club meetings, rails against William Shakespeare who she calls The Great Pretender and tries to identify who really wrote what he took credit for. An accomplished woodcarver she has fashioned a large, wooden statue of the so-called Bard as one of many s
uch authors and book people whose carved figures grace the Athenaeum.
uch authors and book people whose carved figures grace the Athenaeum. Although she has been trying for some years to win the North American bird carving contest, she has always placed second or third due mostly to her imaginative interpretation of the subject matters. She delights though in carving displays of strife in Nature, of birds preying on each other, dioramas of real life in the real woods. In her house there on Kingdom Mountain, she has turned her parlor into a huge diorama which she has titled in her mind "On Kingdom Mountain."
In the On Kingdom Mountain area are many life-sized statues of her family for a few generations before the Civil War. All have oblong heads, with painted features, all have the same clear, gray eyes as Miss Jane. With names like Quaker Meeting and Pilgrim it is clear that her family memories evoke much of the early North East. As the novel progresses it becomes more and more apparent that Miss Jane has been manipulated by her family's past into being a lifelong caretaker for her family's land -- Kingdom Mountain.
When her cousin Eben Kinneson, a lawyer and town selectman, approaches her for permission to extend a highway to Canada across the boundaries of her domain it becomes very clear that this will be a fight. The nature scenes in this book are amongst the most beautiful in contemporary literature and author Howard Frank Mosher, a Vermont native himself clearly is in love with that land. As I read many of the passages in the book I found myself reminded of "A River Runs Through It" but in "On Kingdom Mountain" the characters do not simply interact with Nature. In many ways Kingdom Mountain is itself a main protagonist in this book and all of its Nature a character onto itself.
Well, as Henry and Miss Jane proceed on a two-pronged mission to remember the riddle and discover the gold, and to stop the highway from coming through, they begin to find in each other what neither has known before. Miss Jane is known to edit books, making changes in classics and literature to make such books more what she thinks they should have been.
Even more than William Shakespeare, King James I comes in for a huge dose of her ire because of what (in Miss Jane's estimation) he did to the Bible. In editing the King James Bible, Miss Jane has made many changes, deletions and additions.
Even more than William Shakespeare, King James I comes in for a huge dose of her ire because of what (in Miss Jane's estimation) he did to the Bible. In editing the King James Bible, Miss Jane has made many changes, deletions and additions. But the most telling change she has made to the Bible is in Proverbs. In that area she has added that "All the best stories are about Love."
I believe that you will find the love affair between Henry and Miss Jane to be among the most believable and memorable you have read. Both Miss Jane who does everything from editing the Bible to carving prehistoric birds and Henry Satterfield who may well have been an airplane-equipped bank robber in an earlier time, become the sort of characters who will live on in your mind long after you have closed the pages of their book.
"On Kingdom Mountain" is the sort of book that you will return to time and again, perhaps not to read it cover to cover but to return to favorite passages, to reacquaint yourself with the details, to once again enjoy the whole through its parts. But now you have a rare opportunity, to meet Miss Jane and Henry for the first of many times. Enjoy that meeting as you travel to Kingdom Mountain.
ON KINGDOM MOUNTAIN by Howard Frank Mosher is published by Houghton Mifflin Company, $24.00 hardcover.
