"Climbers" by M John Harrison

 Mike the narrator is a young man bitten by the climbing bug who travels north to join a loose community of climbers: Normal and Sankey, Mick and Stox and Andy Earnshaw and Bob Almanac. They are unemployed or in mostly dead end jobs; these form the background as do their wives and girlfriends and sisters and friends. These things aren't important. These lads live for climbing. What really matters is the 'problem': how to get to the top of a challenging climb. 

There's a lot of technical information about climbing, most of it, like the climbers, over my head. It seemed to me that the biggest difficulty, and this could be a metaphor, is that rock surfaces are eroded by the weather so that, far from the solidity that the concept of stone embodies, a rockface is covered with potentially treacherous handholds that flake away when you place your trust in them. This is a paradox.

But an even bigger paradox is that these people can only enjoy and find meaning in their lives when they are risking it. They aspire to climb but they are haunted by the fall. The 'fall' was everywhere; even Pauline's daughter falls from a table and ends up in hospital. Even the sections, labelled Winter, Spring, Summer after the seasons, end with Fall. And one by one the climbers fall, some fatally. Death, or injury, weeds them out. 

It is a complex narrative, jumping forwards and backwards in time and from character to character. It seems to be deliberately fractured. There is a suggestion very near the start that one of the major characters has died; there is a moment of fantasy about children who have been lost from day trips to the moors growing up feral. It starts and ends with reminiscences. 

I'm not sure, after a single reading, I have fully appreciated the narrative. But the quality of the writing was unmistakable. 

There are some remarkable descriptions. They combine forensic exactness and technical terms with some remarkable images.

• "Light poured in over the blackened threshold of the old smokehouse, falling among the eroded beams onto a clutter of broken ladders. A few dry beech leaves blew about in the heap of coal. As he stood there looking in, thunder banged tinnily again over towards Huddersfield." (Winter; 2)
• "As you face the sea the cliff goes up on your left, whitish, dusted with the same lichen you can see on any other limestone crag ... custard yellow, dry and crusty. You get to the top among the yew trees bent and shaved by the wind." (Spring; 7) 
• "The right bank of the cove is a clinted slab overgrown with whin, short turf and hawthorn bushes. From there the tourists can gaze out to sea or at the weed-covered rocks at the base of the cliff like green chenille cushions in the front room of a fussy old woman." (Spring; 7) What a simile, to compare rocks with interior decorating.
• "The sun came down and scraped into the irregular corners." (Spring; 7) Scraped ! 
• "Masses of hawthorn blossom were piled up like exotic buttercream, from which streamed downwind vanilla and corruption intertwined. ... In the evenings the rock seemed to sweat inside. As it grew dark the lupins in front of Sankey's house gave off like tall translucent candles a perfume so delicate it might have been mistaken for a faint white light." (Spring; 9)

Some of the characters, such as Normal and Sankey, have their stories told in shards which the reader must assemble. It's all show don't tell. Other, more marginal characters, are presented with little vignettes or snippets of back story. 

There isn't a conventional plot. It is more of a Bildungsroman, a coming of age novel chronicling the narrator's apprenticeship as a climber, and his becoming an acknowledged member of this self-selecting group (though the suggestions from both the beginning and the ending is that, though still a climber, he now no longer one of them but an outsider looking in). But this book is not about plot; it is about the characters. In this way it reminded me of The Rock Pool by Cyril Connolly. 

One of the delights, as with this author's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, is his ability to disrupt a scene and set the reader's teeth a little bit on edge with an overheard remark, utterly irrelevant in the context of the narrative but somehow adding verisimilitude and colour while giving a slight sense of weirdness:

• "I throw a lot of frombies. ... At least that's what my husband calls them. Frombies." (Summer; 12)
• "Behind him one woman was telling another, 'I get quite passionate about being wrong - I mean really passionate: I hate it!', firmly italicising 'passionate', 'really', 'hate'." (Fall; 17)

Selected quotes: 

• "In weather like that you never quite sleep. Long dreams merge seamlessly with the long days, leaving you entranced and stuporous but somehow restless; hypnotised yet full of ambitions you cannot dissipate." (Summer; 12)
• "The youngest had sponged themselves as clean of life as the sides of a brand-new plastic bath." (Summer; 12)
• "He arranged much of what he said around the hinge of that 'but'." (Summer; 12)
• "You spend Christmas ... surrounded by other people's assessment of you." (Fall; 13)
• "Fossils emerged from the landlady's cheap slaty coal as it split into thin leaves in the smoke." (Fall; 13)
• "Stalybridge itself is compromised, neither town nor country but a grim muddle of both." (Fall; 15)

A complex novel with sufficient challenge for the reader to feel pleased and proud when it is mastered, like a climber reaching the summit of a new 'problem'. Great characters and wonderful descriptions. June 2024; 234 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God