The Mountain and the Valley

The novel opens with an elderly Ellen Canaan working on a hooked rug in her kitchen in Entremont, a village nestled between the North and South Mountains. The rug is composed of scraps from the family's old clothing, serving as a material representation of memory. David Canaan, now thirty years old, suffers from a profound sense of physical and spiritual malaise. He resolves to climb the South Mountain, a feat that has loomed over his life as a symbol of both unity and escape.

The narrative shifts back to David's childhood in the 1920s. David is a brilliant child with a "word-shaped" consciousness, distinguishing him from his father, Joseph, and his brother, Chris, who possess a more direct, wordless connection to the physical world.^[3] His twin sister, Anna, acts as his spiritual double. An early attempt to climb the mountain with his father is cut short by news of a local tragedy. During a school play, David experiences a moment of profound emotional vulnerability when he kisses his classmate, Effie, on stage; the audience's heckling reinforces his growing sense of alienation.

As an adolescent, David corresponds with Toby, a pen pal from Halifax who represents the restless urban spirit. When Toby visits the farm, his presence catalyzes David's internal conflict between his duty to the land and his desire for an artistic life elsewhere.^[2]

The middle sections chart the progressive breakdown of David's closest relationships. His bond with Joseph fractures during a dispute over farm labor, where David's intellectual approach to moving a heavy rock clashes with his father's physical instinct. David's romantic development is marked by guilt following the early death of Effie.

The onset of World War II further isolates David. While his peers enlist, David is left behind on the farm due to a medical condition. The deaths of Joseph and Martha, followed by the departure of Chris and the marriage of Anna to Toby, leave David alone with his grandmother, Ellen, trapped in a solipsistic existence.

Returning to the present day, David begins his final ascent of the South Mountain. As he climbs, he undergoes a series of sensory epiphanies, feeling a totalizing unity with the landscape. He believes he has finally discovered the "word" that will allow him to synthesize his experience into art. However, upon reaching the summit, David suffers a fatal heart attack. His death is portrayed as an ironic fulfillment: he achieves the absolute vision of the artist only at the moment his physical life ceases.^[3]

The creation of The Mountain and the Valley spanned more than a decade, reflecting Buckler's own transition from the urban professional world to a life of rural seclusion. Born in 1908 in Dalhousie West, Nova Scotia, Buckler attended Dalhousie University and the University of Toronto before working as an actuarial mathematician in Toronto.^[4] Recurring ill health necessitated a return to his family's farm in the Annapolis Valley, which provided the primary raw material for his literary career.^[1]

Buckler described his writing process as a "tunneling process," a method of retrieving past experiences in installments to build a narrative of high emotional and sensory density.^[4] Between 1940 and 1952, Buckler published sixteen short stories, many of which served as a "testing ground" for the themes and character archetypes that appeared in the novel.^[3] He stated that the account of David's death on the mountain—the "crowning point of the whole dramatic irony"—was the first segment he composed.^[3]

As a Künstlerroman, the novel explores the development of a creative mind, but scholars frequently categorize David as a "failed artist."^[2] This failure is attributed to his narcissism and a solipsism that distances him from the reality he seeks to describe. The novel explores the modernist dilemma of choosing between the "perfection of the life" or the "perfection of the work."^[3]

A central theme is the inadequacy of language. Buckler distinguishes between characters who are "articulate" (David) and those who are "inarticulate" (Joseph). While David's ability to label experience gives him power, it also creates an "exquisite guilt," as words can never truly encompass the "swarming multitude" of voices in the valley.^[4]

A later strand of scholarship, advanced by Wayne Hankey and Robert Crouse, interprets the novel through the lens of Neoplatonic ascent.^[5] In this reading, the geography of the Annapolis Valley serves as a metaphysical map: the valley represents the multitude of a fragmented, sensory existence, while the mountain represents the "One"—a state of absolute, undifferentiated unity. David's intellectual development is seen as an '‘anodos’’ (ascent), where he attempts to transcend the "broken" nature of time and relational identity to find a singular, synthesizing "word."^[5] David's final ascent is a movement from the "many" to the "One," a process of purification that is inherently incompatible with physical life. In this context, David's death at the summit is necessary; having achieved a totalizing vision that collapses the distinction between self and world, the soul finds rest only through the dissolution of individual identity.^[5] This interpretation elevates David from a local "failed writer" to a figure representing the universal human struggle for spiritual integration.^[4]