One of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, Toby Litt, author of Corpsing, deadkidsongs, Exhibitionism, Finding Myself and Ghost Story brings us a monthly selection on cult literature.

This month features: Mount Analogue by Rene Daumal (translated by Carol Cosman)
Published by: The Overlook Press
ISBN: 1585673420
Price:$14.95

I found this wonderful curiosity in one of my favourite browsing-places, The Calder Bookshop on The Cut, near Waterloo Station. (Go there, if you can; it shows all independents can do that chains can't.) (And isn't The Cut the most fantastic name for a street?) Mount Analogue was out on the display table – and I took this as an implicit recommendation. But, upon inquiry, I discovered that it was a customer order that someone hadn't bothered to collect. So, thank you, Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms, Dr, Prof or Lord Unknown Person. And, whoever you are, you missed out on something very special.

As the series went on, year after year, Herge's Tintin books became less about adventure and more about a semi-mystical quest for truth – or perhaps just a quest for a quest. Tintin in Tibet is the famous example of this. Rene Daumal's Mount Analogue has something in common with this; it almost resembles a Tintin story without Tintin (and Lucky).

At the start of each chapter, there is a summary. In most books, I find this a little annoying and affected, but here it works:

'Something new in the author's life – Symbolic mountains – A serious reader – Mountaineering in the Passage des Patriarches – Father Sogol – An internal park and an external brain – The art of getting acquainted – The man who turns ideas inside out – Confidences – A satanic monastery – How the devil for the day led an ingenious monk into temptation – The industrious Physics – Father Sogol's malady – A story about flies – The fear of death – With a raging heart, a mind of steel – A mad project reduced to a simple problem of triangulation – A psychological law'

It was this passage which persuaded me, the uncommitted browser, to invest in Mount Analogue – although the title alone was enough to seriously intrigue me.

The opening paragraph only served to hook me further:

'Everything I am about to tell began with a scrap of unfamiliar handwriting on an envelope. On it was written my name and the address of the Revue des Fossiles, to which I contributed and through which the letter had tracked me down, yet those penned lines conveyed a shifting mix of violence and sweetness.'

The letter is from Father Sogol, which is 'Logos' backwards.

My Concise Oxford Dictionary defines 'Logos' as 'the Word of God, or the Second Person of the Trinity.'

(My Concise Oxford Dictionary defines 'analogue' as 'analogous or parallel word or thing (e.g. narrative)' and defines 'analogous' as 'similar, parallel, (to)'.)

Father Sogol is thrilled to read the narrator's article:

'"For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue," I concluded, "its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings as nature has made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The gateway to the invisible must be visible."

'This is what I wrote. Taken literally, my article did, indeed, suggest that I believed in the existence, somewhere on the surface of the globe, of a mountain much higher than Mount Everest, which was, to any so-called sensible person, an absurdity.'

The rest of the novel is an exploration of what it takes to journey, in company with Father Logos and sundry others, to such an absurd but essential place.

An expedition is mounted, an eccentric crew gathered, meticulous supplies laid in – all as in any good Boys' Own Adventure. And Mount Analogue does sometimes read like a children's book for adults. But equally as an adult book for children. (Along with Tintin, it could also be compared to Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Night Flight.)

Being the kind of critic who hates giving away middles, let alone endings, I'm reluctant to say much more; either you're already intrigued or you think it sounds like guff.

However, the novel's end is, like a mountain-top, hidden in clouds. I couldn't give it away even if I wanted to, as I've never been there: Rene Daumal died in 1944, leaving the manuscript unfinished. He did leave notes for Chapters Five and Six. And he dictated his intentions for Seven, the final chapter. He was planning to call it, 'And you, what are you looking for?'

Now I want to re-read Mount Analogue, definitely more than once, once a year maybe, and to investigate some of Daumal's other works, which have great titles such as A Night of Serious Drinking and You've Always Been Wrong.