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Climbers
Retreating from his failed marriage to Pauline, Mike leaves London for the Yorkshire moors, where he meets Normal and his entourage, busy pursuing their own dreams of escape. Travelling from crag to crag throughout the country, they are searching for the the perfect climb. Through rock-climbing, Mike discovers an intensity of experience - a wash of pain, fear and excitement - that obliterates the rest of his world. Increasingly addicted to the adrenalin, folklore and camaraderie of the sport, he finds, for a time, a genuine escape. But it is gained at a price...This dark, witty and poetic novel is full of the rugged beauty of nature, of the human drive to test oneself against extremes, and of the elation such escape can bring.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
35 people are currently reading
1039 people want to read
About the author
M. John Harrison
109 books832 followersaka Gabriel King (with Jane Johnson)
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 60 reviews
August 4, 2013
If I were going to make a list of the ten best British novels I've read this would be in there. It's hard to say what it is that I liked so much about this novel. Maybe it's because I recognise a lot of the landscapes, climbs and characters but I think it's more than that. Harrison does urban decay and urban encroachment into the rural environment brilliantly. He has this knack of mixing the banal with the wondrous so that the beauty of both is revealed through their contrast. It is these moments, set against the general mood of incomprehension and confusion - some might say bleakness - of the narrative that really make this book what it is and the sections that deal with actual climbing are some of the best I've read, but you don't have to be a climber to enjoy - although I'm not sure enjoy really hits it - this book. This is one I will read again and again. Brilliant!
January 5, 2021
I was told I should read this about 20 years ago. Despite talking to the author about it and his experience climbing, and liking his other books, I only just got round to it last year after buying a copy on a whim in Hebden Bridge during lockdown.
Climbers follows MJ Harrison's other work in slowly, poetically unpicking reality. I can never decide whether he's a nihilist or in tune with some higher spiritual realm, for his books often leave me with a sense of denied revelation, as if I've nearly been shown something very important, but that by its nature can only remain elusive, leaving you with the impossible choice between life either being a meaningless trudge toward inevitable extinction, or a shroud over higher states of being that will one day be drawn back, and no way to decide between the two.
Melancholy and life affirming at the same time, Climbers is more accessible than some of the author's stories by dint of being firmly rooted in real life, giving him less room for philosophical obtuseness SF and Fantasy can sometimes afford. I'd say he likes deliberately taunting the reader, if you didn't leave this story, like all the rest, with a sense of his own frustrations at the unknowability of existence. Great stuff, if you're in the right kind of mood.
Climbers follows MJ Harrison's other work in slowly, poetically unpicking reality. I can never decide whether he's a nihilist or in tune with some higher spiritual realm, for his books often leave me with a sense of denied revelation, as if I've nearly been shown something very important, but that by its nature can only remain elusive, leaving you with the impossible choice between life either being a meaningless trudge toward inevitable extinction, or a shroud over higher states of being that will one day be drawn back, and no way to decide between the two.
Melancholy and life affirming at the same time, Climbers is more accessible than some of the author's stories by dint of being firmly rooted in real life, giving him less room for philosophical obtuseness SF and Fantasy can sometimes afford. I'd say he likes deliberately taunting the reader, if you didn't leave this story, like all the rest, with a sense of his own frustrations at the unknowability of existence. Great stuff, if you're in the right kind of mood.
July 14, 2022
Our introduction to the world of Climbers is the Standedge moorland, the A62 murmuring behind the Roman roads and haunted quarries, narrator Mike and mentor Normal sitting out in the drizzling open air, on armchairs that have been left along with the rest of the loungeset across the ridge. This weird domestic setting has the "rakish, cosy, fake-surrealist air of a cigarette advert," while the lights visible from thousands of feet above sea level look like a UFO, the land "rolling in from an infinitely polluted sea." Rather than recoiling from the ruined country, Mike notices these apparent opposites harmonise, the carpark "bobb(ing) gently on the psychic swell." The landscape is often given this emergent psychology, and it's never reducible to any one component: "Motorway bridges, smoke, spires, glow in the sun: it is a kind of psychic illumination." Nature is the sum of human waste in Climbers. It's impossible to extract the human from nature, waste from the landscape, and Harrison wouldn't want it any other way.
It's under thick corroded skies, twisted and exposed in tar, that Mike is absorbed into the landscape's psychic swell, feeling at once elated and, in his expression, finite: "It is to do with being alive, but I am never sure how." Climbers is not about looking for the perfect climb so much as the perfect language through which to relay experience. And then it's not the experience *of* the climb per se, but everything that goes with and exceeds it. The climber, the rock, the litter and blood, all form the substrate through which psychic illumination emerges, which, for Mike, is the experience yet to be domesticated in words. He surrounds himself with more committed climbers just to listen to them communicate. (Technique betrays experience, and both are formatted for transmission in language). It's their language he desires when he writes "One day all this would arrange itself inside me. I would possess it the way they possessed it, easily. I would deploy it without effort." Mike gets close to them but he is always still their observer, watching their movements, documenting their stories, building his glossaries so as to hone his experience—to arrange his insides—through their use.
What is at play then is the veneration of those he perceives to live authentic lives, and the valorisation of authentic language through its repeated failure to appear on the page. Mike writes diary entries, but "experience is not quantifiable in these terms: that much is evident." He nicks from his peers any word or phrase that might hone that experience: 'arseholing', 'cobbing it off', 'boning off', 'poiky', leaving a 'bazzer' so the bazzer stays 'bazzing' all the way home, and so on. "I liked her," he writes of his mother in law, only adding by way of explanation "She spoke of a 'sea fret', meaning a cold mist." These flashes of phenomenal clarity charge Climbers' narrative voice, bringing the strangeness of the landscape closer, and making Mike's circle of weirdos appear vividly, chaotically present; "Moments like this spoke to me in a special language, an invitation to decode a whole way of life." What becomes clear is that Mike is still stuck *decoding* authentic life, through writing portraits that both articulate it, and ensure that he, and the reader, are all forever outside of it. Furthermore as the group's annalist, the burden of documenting these lives and landscapes becomes more and more heavy as these figures slip away, their technical and colourful language with it.
Harrison does not make a big deal of the fact that Mike is a writer, and it is only significant insofar as he is cursed by the written word. In trying to give form to the psychic swell of a climb so fluid and natural that he hardly noticed it, the very act of writing about it turns him outside of the event: "It was some time before I related this sensation to the idea of swimming; after that I never felt it with quite the same purity and sharpness." Mike occasionally betrays a romance for prelingual existence and undivided time *la durée*, speculating that happiness, the psychic swell, is by nature ineffable; the activation of the phantom memory of some primordial organ that was lost with the advent of language. The difference between Mike the author and Mike the character is their approach to this phantom pain. Harrison embraces this melancholy of lost paradise, making Climbers contract and expand with the distorted time that Mike so wishes he could avoid.
There is nothing new about climbing — as Mike and his friends reach cliff tops that have not seen a person in years, or perhaps ever, they are met with rocks and lichens who are unfazed, or perhaps operating on such a different timescale that they cannot register these visitors. This meeting, or dissonance, of human and nonhuman timescales makes climbing itself a form of time travel, says Mike. Gaz's memories are likened to layers of sediment, compounding and eroding, and always present in the overall structure but in always different states. The act of climbing, as is obvious, likewise transforms the cliffs into the dense, churning layers of Mike's own mnemonic faculties. We don't know when he's stopped a climb and gone somewhere else, or when he's remembering something else at the same time that he's performing the climb. In one such instance he's both climbing and remembering a post-climb drive, and he draws on this image once again, "When you hear an old song again like that, one you have not thought about for years, there is a brief slippage of time, a shiver, as if something had cut down obliquely through your life and displaced each layer by its own depth along the fault line."
Pauline says something as innocuous as "So much depends on perspective, doesn't it?", meaning, of course, that everything there is is coloured with everything you, and everybody else, brings to it, on any given day or in any given moment. Mike however is still hung up on the notion that, rather than a multiplicity of experiences taking place, there is an elusive, originary one, that is always withdrawing from him the moment he puts it into words or even thinks about it: "She meant, perhaps, that the moment you step into a landscape it becomes another one." The moment Mike experiences it, he thinks it, and the moment he thinks it, it recoils. He goes on to repeat his interpretation of her words throughout the book like a mantra. Bob tries to tell Mike as much when he observes that, while the outside of climbing knots discolour, the insides retain their vibrancy: "'You release the light that was caught up in the knot,' he said. 'I think of it as releasing the light. I thought you'd like that.'" It's always the same knot, and writing it gradually releases everything it is.
Where Mike feels that he has betrayed the climb by allowing time to fold into itself, memory to distort the raw presence of the event, Harrison encourages him to fail. Mike can't tell when he's making connections between episodes or drawing on other people's words and stories, and so the reader has to do it themselves. Harrison lets this happen, because what he knows and Mike doesn't is that the bruised time of the written word deforms the event the same as lived experience does the landscape. It's the agony of the psychic swell.
It's under thick corroded skies, twisted and exposed in tar, that Mike is absorbed into the landscape's psychic swell, feeling at once elated and, in his expression, finite: "It is to do with being alive, but I am never sure how." Climbers is not about looking for the perfect climb so much as the perfect language through which to relay experience. And then it's not the experience *of* the climb per se, but everything that goes with and exceeds it. The climber, the rock, the litter and blood, all form the substrate through which psychic illumination emerges, which, for Mike, is the experience yet to be domesticated in words. He surrounds himself with more committed climbers just to listen to them communicate. (Technique betrays experience, and both are formatted for transmission in language). It's their language he desires when he writes "One day all this would arrange itself inside me. I would possess it the way they possessed it, easily. I would deploy it without effort." Mike gets close to them but he is always still their observer, watching their movements, documenting their stories, building his glossaries so as to hone his experience—to arrange his insides—through their use.
What is at play then is the veneration of those he perceives to live authentic lives, and the valorisation of authentic language through its repeated failure to appear on the page. Mike writes diary entries, but "experience is not quantifiable in these terms: that much is evident." He nicks from his peers any word or phrase that might hone that experience: 'arseholing', 'cobbing it off', 'boning off', 'poiky', leaving a 'bazzer' so the bazzer stays 'bazzing' all the way home, and so on. "I liked her," he writes of his mother in law, only adding by way of explanation "She spoke of a 'sea fret', meaning a cold mist." These flashes of phenomenal clarity charge Climbers' narrative voice, bringing the strangeness of the landscape closer, and making Mike's circle of weirdos appear vividly, chaotically present; "Moments like this spoke to me in a special language, an invitation to decode a whole way of life." What becomes clear is that Mike is still stuck *decoding* authentic life, through writing portraits that both articulate it, and ensure that he, and the reader, are all forever outside of it. Furthermore as the group's annalist, the burden of documenting these lives and landscapes becomes more and more heavy as these figures slip away, their technical and colourful language with it.
Harrison does not make a big deal of the fact that Mike is a writer, and it is only significant insofar as he is cursed by the written word. In trying to give form to the psychic swell of a climb so fluid and natural that he hardly noticed it, the very act of writing about it turns him outside of the event: "It was some time before I related this sensation to the idea of swimming; after that I never felt it with quite the same purity and sharpness." Mike occasionally betrays a romance for prelingual existence and undivided time *la durée*, speculating that happiness, the psychic swell, is by nature ineffable; the activation of the phantom memory of some primordial organ that was lost with the advent of language. The difference between Mike the author and Mike the character is their approach to this phantom pain. Harrison embraces this melancholy of lost paradise, making Climbers contract and expand with the distorted time that Mike so wishes he could avoid.
There is nothing new about climbing — as Mike and his friends reach cliff tops that have not seen a person in years, or perhaps ever, they are met with rocks and lichens who are unfazed, or perhaps operating on such a different timescale that they cannot register these visitors. This meeting, or dissonance, of human and nonhuman timescales makes climbing itself a form of time travel, says Mike. Gaz's memories are likened to layers of sediment, compounding and eroding, and always present in the overall structure but in always different states. The act of climbing, as is obvious, likewise transforms the cliffs into the dense, churning layers of Mike's own mnemonic faculties. We don't know when he's stopped a climb and gone somewhere else, or when he's remembering something else at the same time that he's performing the climb. In one such instance he's both climbing and remembering a post-climb drive, and he draws on this image once again, "When you hear an old song again like that, one you have not thought about for years, there is a brief slippage of time, a shiver, as if something had cut down obliquely through your life and displaced each layer by its own depth along the fault line."
Pauline says something as innocuous as "So much depends on perspective, doesn't it?", meaning, of course, that everything there is is coloured with everything you, and everybody else, brings to it, on any given day or in any given moment. Mike however is still hung up on the notion that, rather than a multiplicity of experiences taking place, there is an elusive, originary one, that is always withdrawing from him the moment he puts it into words or even thinks about it: "She meant, perhaps, that the moment you step into a landscape it becomes another one." The moment Mike experiences it, he thinks it, and the moment he thinks it, it recoils. He goes on to repeat his interpretation of her words throughout the book like a mantra. Bob tries to tell Mike as much when he observes that, while the outside of climbing knots discolour, the insides retain their vibrancy: "'You release the light that was caught up in the knot,' he said. 'I think of it as releasing the light. I thought you'd like that.'" It's always the same knot, and writing it gradually releases everything it is.
Where Mike feels that he has betrayed the climb by allowing time to fold into itself, memory to distort the raw presence of the event, Harrison encourages him to fail. Mike can't tell when he's making connections between episodes or drawing on other people's words and stories, and so the reader has to do it themselves. Harrison lets this happen, because what he knows and Mike doesn't is that the bruised time of the written word deforms the event the same as lived experience does the landscape. It's the agony of the psychic swell.
November 1, 2009
This fractured contemporary novel follows a rock-climber in the north of England and the fellow climbers he meets. The characters and the landscapes are vividly depicted in precise prose that glitters like ice-crystals. People are acutely observed, but from the outside, leaving the uneasy reader to infer their motives and concerns - rather as in reality.
Not much happens in the way of conventional plot, but that is not the book's thrust: it's more like an extended poem, capturing the truth of a time and the people in it. Harrison is better known for his edgy science fiction: this one is edgy real life.
Not much happens in the way of conventional plot, but that is not the book's thrust: it's more like an extended poem, capturing the truth of a time and the people in it. Harrison is better known for his edgy science fiction: this one is edgy real life.
January 7, 2023
I'm not one for giving too many 5* reviews , I reserve them for books that I look forward to coming back to, would read repeated times and that offer up a unique perspective of some sort
Although already a fan of Harrison's SF work I'd always shied aware from this non-SF work about climbers as I thought it might not offer the same feeling of displacement and just general oddness I expected from him.
I was wrong, this is every bit as good as any of his genre work and you most definitely don't have to be a fan of rock-climbing to enjoy it. Recommended
Although already a fan of Harrison's SF work I'd always shied aware from this non-SF work about climbers as I thought it might not offer the same feeling of displacement and just general oddness I expected from him.
I was wrong, this is every bit as good as any of his genre work and you most definitely don't have to be a fan of rock-climbing to enjoy it. Recommended
August 29, 2024
I deliberated whether to give this 4 or 5 stars. In many ways, there's little more here than anecdotal material of climbers whose lives are no more nor less than the sum total of the summit, yet the writing is so glittery perfect that it seems churlish to drop a star due to the absence of plot. I found myself re-reading sections to enjoy the prose which is absolutely spot on. Neither a page turner nor something I was reluctant to pick up each evening, "Climbers" embedded itself in my psyche and I realised whilst I was reading that it would all be about the end as to how much I could look back on and enjoy what came before it. Sort of looking back at where you've come from after a climb (not that I climb, but I do ramble, as you can tell from this review). Anyhow, the ending is perfect. Therefore, five stars.
March 29, 2019
Original and innovative, yet quiet and reflective. Never read anything quite like this. Truly unique novel, with almost no story line that nevertheless grips you. Definitely give it a try if you want to read a fresh take on what a novel can be and do. All the smarts!!
November 5, 2021
Ik keek er erg naar uit om dit boek te lezen, ik had er over gehoord op BBC, het krijgt hier veel sterren, een lofwoord vooraf door Robert MacFarlane, dat boek moest wel een topper zijn.
Ik heb er me door gesleept.
We volgen gedurende 1 jaar Mike die de hobby van het klimmen opneemt, en uitstappen maakt met zijn vreemde klimmaatjes. Vergeet het idyllisch Verenigd Koninkrijk, dit boek speelt zich af tussen het zwerfvuil.
Er gebeurt ook erg weinig.
Tijd voor iets boeiender nu.
Ik heb er me door gesleept.
We volgen gedurende 1 jaar Mike die de hobby van het klimmen opneemt, en uitstappen maakt met zijn vreemde klimmaatjes. Vergeet het idyllisch Verenigd Koninkrijk, dit boek speelt zich af tussen het zwerfvuil.
Er gebeurt ook erg weinig.
Tijd voor iets boeiender nu.
August 26, 2023
Wonderful book,written with perfect style: you don't have to be a climber to appreciate this affectionate realisation of the climbers world,the unforgettable characters and their wry dialogue are caught perfectly :
"One day I saw a warm tobacco- brown haze on the moors to the south of Buxton. ‘It looks nice.’ ‘Wait till you get out of the car. It’ll freeze your bollocks off. What’s the capital of Louisiana?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘I thought you were educated.’ "
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
"One day I saw a warm tobacco- brown haze on the moors to the south of Buxton. ‘It looks nice.’ ‘Wait till you get out of the car. It’ll freeze your bollocks off. What’s the capital of Louisiana?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘I thought you were educated.’ "
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
October 21, 2021
What an astonishing book this is: less a novel, and more a mosaic of fragmented vignettes that slowly and assuredly pull out to be a novel haunted by loss, sadness and disappointment. It’s a book happy to focus on the minutiae of climbing without ever feeling alienating to a non climber, partly because it’s obvious that such minutiae is deliberately there to give the novel a distancing effect, so that elements such as Nina’s fate sort of glide by quietly and sadly in the way in which our narrator can’t really begin to face the actual events as they happened
It’s a book of tangles, of strained relationships and interior worlds of unhappiness and regret, of liminal spaces and unspoken things. Harrison has this devastating ability to keep one foot firmly in the real world - the fragments of strange conversations that always feel incredibly real; the geographic locations (mostly around this part of the world, rather than the Yorkshire moors the back cover alludes to); the drudgery of late eighties British life - so that the darker, more nebulous moments feel literally anchored to something. It’s an intoxicating effect, all the more so as you try and thwack away at the narrator’s relationship to the author himself
I heartily recommend finding the edition with the Robert MacFarlane introduction, a piece that is not only beautifully written but is also incredibly astute and thought provoking. Read it after the book though as it feels like a final grace note to savour after the novel is complete
It’s a book of tangles, of strained relationships and interior worlds of unhappiness and regret, of liminal spaces and unspoken things. Harrison has this devastating ability to keep one foot firmly in the real world - the fragments of strange conversations that always feel incredibly real; the geographic locations (mostly around this part of the world, rather than the Yorkshire moors the back cover alludes to); the drudgery of late eighties British life - so that the darker, more nebulous moments feel literally anchored to something. It’s an intoxicating effect, all the more so as you try and thwack away at the narrator’s relationship to the author himself
I heartily recommend finding the edition with the Robert MacFarlane introduction, a piece that is not only beautifully written but is also incredibly astute and thought provoking. Read it after the book though as it feels like a final grace note to savour after the novel is complete
March 6, 2021
The rocks, quarries and mountains form a background which is also a sensory experience for this group of friends/companions. Glass like surfaces, rocks covered in lichen, missed holds and falls, discarded burned out cars in unexpected places. The scenery is by turns, grim, exciting, polluted and sometimes unexpectedly beautiful. Writing about a group of obsessives and making this seductive to those who know nothing of rock climbing is quite a feat. The novel is clearly placed in the north of England and glimpses of the poverty of the so-called "left behind" shines through. I thought this book was clever, unexpected and quite exciting.
July 17, 2024
Can confidently say this is the best thing I've read so far this year. A book so good I finished it in the morning and immediately started reading it again that same evening. I'm going to recommend this and buy copies for friends forever. Possibly the most approachable thing I've read by him so far, although the way the narrative twists around itself probably isn't for everyone. If the Kefahuchi Tract or the Sunken Land are this good I'll have to erect a monument to M. John Harrison in my garden or something.
March 12, 2022
M. John Harrison is one of those “writers’ writers”—most people have never heard of him or can’t find anything in his fiction worth the effort, but then the few who have tend to be in awe without exception. I counted myself among the former for a long time. Even when I started his “Viriconium” series, it took me several attempts over more than two years to actually get through it, and even though part of me knew I would never stop reading him again, the other part has never quite stopped wishing that I would. Harrison is called a master stylist for good reason—his sentences are up there with the most poetic, viciously intelligent, original and profoundly resonant in all of contemporary literature—but you often get the sense that he writes first and foremost for himself, as a challenge in how to refine his prose and abstract his philosophical ideas even further. Some of his books are merely challenging while other are positively impenetrable—I still couldn’t tell you what “Luck in the Head” was even about, except for a horse-skull with pomegranate eyes …
“Climbers”, it might come as a very welcome surprise, is not only Harrison’s only fully realistic novel, but also his most accessible by far. Instead of simultaneously re- and reconstructing the very concept of imaginary worlds in Beckett-esque language, this time around, Harrison presents a sleek, relatively straightforward, almost memoir-like portrait of rock-climbing in northern England of the 1980s. A protagonist named Mike moves north after a failed marriage in London, gets acquainted with the local climbing scenes, and spends a year braving routs on wind-grazed sea cliffs and rocky hillside’s above moors. There isn’t much of a plot to speak of—people talk, people struggle, briefly triumph or briefly fall; some get hurt, some get drunk, some die, not much changes for anyone involved. Instead, the whole novel is comprised of a series of relatively disjointed vignettes that convey both the mundanity and the obsessive risk of this sport, the peculiar characters involved in it, the challenges posed by English weather, tourist groups or puzzled relatives, and the horrid late Thatcherite landscape in which rivers are awash with industrial waste, steel mills slowly turn into graveyards, moss spreads in the cracking walls of council estates, everyone carries their personal package of disillusionment, and life simply doesn’t hold any bigger thrills or revelations than hanging in a crack fifty feet above ground and finally arriving on top without major scratches or broken bones. It’s frequently bleak, occasionally beautiful, even inspiring, and it is refreshingly restrained in comparison to Harrison’s general writing: In keeping with Mike’s voice, there are no poetic fireworks, no transcendent thematic resonances or contemplations on the human condition. There’s subtext, sure—certain symbols will re-occur in “Light” and “Nova Swing” at the other end of the galaxy, and this particular type of climbing functions as a better allegory for writing than most I’ve ever read. Overall, however, “Climber” doesn’t dazzle, doesn’t confuse, doesn’t make any bigger statements, and doesn’t want any of that: It’s a powerfully written milieu novel about inconsequential humans in inconsequential circumstances, looking for any sort of hold or distraction life can plausibly offer. After the awe-inspiring cosmogeny of “Light” or “Viriconium”, it seems relatively unremarkable, but I have a suspicion that, had I started my foray into Harrison’s work with this novel, I might have found a much easier access point and seen his themes budding, unfolding, and finally achieving perfection from book to book like flowers in the brief English spring.
Just as a last caveat: For all its considerable merits, its ease, observancy, and mesmerizing depths, this is a very male novel from its subject matter (wilderness climbing in the English 80s) to its focalization, so there might be some justified questions about whether we really needed another prose studies of white guys being white guys, drinking beer, talking about white guy stuff, and grappling with how hard they have it in today’s world.
“Climbers”, it might come as a very welcome surprise, is not only Harrison’s only fully realistic novel, but also his most accessible by far. Instead of simultaneously re- and reconstructing the very concept of imaginary worlds in Beckett-esque language, this time around, Harrison presents a sleek, relatively straightforward, almost memoir-like portrait of rock-climbing in northern England of the 1980s. A protagonist named Mike moves north after a failed marriage in London, gets acquainted with the local climbing scenes, and spends a year braving routs on wind-grazed sea cliffs and rocky hillside’s above moors. There isn’t much of a plot to speak of—people talk, people struggle, briefly triumph or briefly fall; some get hurt, some get drunk, some die, not much changes for anyone involved. Instead, the whole novel is comprised of a series of relatively disjointed vignettes that convey both the mundanity and the obsessive risk of this sport, the peculiar characters involved in it, the challenges posed by English weather, tourist groups or puzzled relatives, and the horrid late Thatcherite landscape in which rivers are awash with industrial waste, steel mills slowly turn into graveyards, moss spreads in the cracking walls of council estates, everyone carries their personal package of disillusionment, and life simply doesn’t hold any bigger thrills or revelations than hanging in a crack fifty feet above ground and finally arriving on top without major scratches or broken bones. It’s frequently bleak, occasionally beautiful, even inspiring, and it is refreshingly restrained in comparison to Harrison’s general writing: In keeping with Mike’s voice, there are no poetic fireworks, no transcendent thematic resonances or contemplations on the human condition. There’s subtext, sure—certain symbols will re-occur in “Light” and “Nova Swing” at the other end of the galaxy, and this particular type of climbing functions as a better allegory for writing than most I’ve ever read. Overall, however, “Climber” doesn’t dazzle, doesn’t confuse, doesn’t make any bigger statements, and doesn’t want any of that: It’s a powerfully written milieu novel about inconsequential humans in inconsequential circumstances, looking for any sort of hold or distraction life can plausibly offer. After the awe-inspiring cosmogeny of “Light” or “Viriconium”, it seems relatively unremarkable, but I have a suspicion that, had I started my foray into Harrison’s work with this novel, I might have found a much easier access point and seen his themes budding, unfolding, and finally achieving perfection from book to book like flowers in the brief English spring.
Just as a last caveat: For all its considerable merits, its ease, observancy, and mesmerizing depths, this is a very male novel from its subject matter (wilderness climbing in the English 80s) to its focalization, so there might be some justified questions about whether we really needed another prose studies of white guys being white guys, drinking beer, talking about white guy stuff, and grappling with how hard they have it in today’s world.
June 16, 2025
In the digital age, long lost is the reader’s presumption that - as in a piece of legislation - each word has ‘work’ to do. However, the great writers remind readers of that lost presumption. Like Delillo, M. John Harrison treats his sentence as if a labourer with work to do. There are no filler-sentences; no padding. One could afflict Climbers with the cut-up technique, popularised by Burroughs, and each sentence would capably stand on its own and say, “Hey, where’s my pay?”.
Climbers was my first foray into the world of M. John Harrison. Considered to be his ‘realist’ novel, it does nevertheless seem to dance on the edge of the crag of science-fiction. That atmosphere alone made the novel highly engaging, though to me, the quality of prose was as pitch-perfect as they come.
Mercifully for my reading life but mercilessly for my wallet, I have discovered an author that necessitates my foraging into much of the back catalogue. I shall see you there.
Climbers was my first foray into the world of M. John Harrison. Considered to be his ‘realist’ novel, it does nevertheless seem to dance on the edge of the crag of science-fiction. That atmosphere alone made the novel highly engaging, though to me, the quality of prose was as pitch-perfect as they come.
Mercifully for my reading life but mercilessly for my wallet, I have discovered an author that necessitates my foraging into much of the back catalogue. I shall see you there.
September 19, 2025
3.5. really incredible writing on a sentence level, sharply observant and evocative, rich in sensory texture. skewers the insanity of climbers and their world and nails the atmosphere of the north of england. however i did find the constant fatphobia, ableism & misogyny extremely tiresome and depressing. wish i could rate it higher but it was just too egregious
April 4, 2024
read quite differently to other books i’ve read, overly descriptive but in a good way and very fast but loosely paced
November 11, 2022
this's a weird one. i decided to pick this up because I love rock climbing and have heared good things about harrison. it reads like a collection of short stories, it doesn't have a plot instead we follow Mike as he hops from one climb to another meeting all kinds of local climbers.
after reading it i'm a bit torn. some passages were so brilliant I couldn't stop rereading and others were so boring I could barely get through. i'm not a very visual reader so when i get to long descriptions of nature it dose nothing to me but make me bored and there was a lot of that here. also his relationship with his wife I thought wasn't that interesting and i skimmed most of it.
the charachters were eccentric and vivid and the dialogue between them always fun and funny. the way harrison writes gives the book an eerie atmosphere, even though you know nothing weird is going to happen, that adds to the overall enjoyment of the book. i'd say there is a lot here that I liked but i'd only recommend it if you're into rock climbing or beautiful descriptions of nature.
after reading it i'm a bit torn. some passages were so brilliant I couldn't stop rereading and others were so boring I could barely get through. i'm not a very visual reader so when i get to long descriptions of nature it dose nothing to me but make me bored and there was a lot of that here. also his relationship with his wife I thought wasn't that interesting and i skimmed most of it.
the charachters were eccentric and vivid and the dialogue between them always fun and funny. the way harrison writes gives the book an eerie atmosphere, even though you know nothing weird is going to happen, that adds to the overall enjoyment of the book. i'd say there is a lot here that I liked but i'd only recommend it if you're into rock climbing or beautiful descriptions of nature.
August 5, 2024
Reread this because a podcast I like is doing the Harrison deep dive. The way certain parts of the run of events are kept from the reader by the narrator until later on seemed incredibly deft, this time round. That trick can be pulled because we don't actually get a lot of the narrator other than as an abnegated presence giving us these unfolding portraits of a series of eccentric, limited, aimless-on-Christmas Day men who have dedicated their lives and bodies to rockface practices that don't come naturally to the human body.
Compassion for the intensity and grotesquerie of the hobbyist is what this is about. The relationships between people - friendships that come to an end, marriages that start in ambivalence and fizzle out - are not stylised, convenient or morally impressive, and there's a realism to that. It also captures a certain UK gloom and then the warmth, whimsy and interest in the world that arises from that gloom in order to cope with it; does this rather than just stopping at the gloom.
Similarly non-idealised is the scenery, with Mike's eye always on the fly-tipped furniture, discarded page of Men Only, or factory in the distance, as well as the beautiful stuff. This same eye is levelled at the lives and achievements of the climbers, in all of their little victories and the boring winters either side of them.
Compassion for the intensity and grotesquerie of the hobbyist is what this is about. The relationships between people - friendships that come to an end, marriages that start in ambivalence and fizzle out - are not stylised, convenient or morally impressive, and there's a realism to that. It also captures a certain UK gloom and then the warmth, whimsy and interest in the world that arises from that gloom in order to cope with it; does this rather than just stopping at the gloom.
Similarly non-idealised is the scenery, with Mike's eye always on the fly-tipped furniture, discarded page of Men Only, or factory in the distance, as well as the beautiful stuff. This same eye is levelled at the lives and achievements of the climbers, in all of their little victories and the boring winters either side of them.
November 27, 2008
I was initially dubious about this book. I don't tend to like fiction that deals with some concrete activity, preferring works that revolve around a period, place or lives. I'm not so interested in the jargon, in-jokes, rites and obsessions shared by a few. I'm more interested in how different people come together. My initial misgivings were mostly born out. The book does have memorable moments – a book dealing with mountain climbers is hardly wanting in this regard – and some of the characters are genuinely likable and rendered with economy, though some easily sank into the background. The style is also unadorned and at times strives for that a McEwanesque foreboding, but other times it seems simply drab. I wonder if this wouldn't have been better as non-fiction in which the emotions and experience would have superseded the novelist's concerns with what mountain climbing 'means'.
August 6, 2023
Unusual, but marvellous. Possibly unforgettable.
It's set in exactly those parts of the North where I live, so the landscapes are familiar - but the precision and poetic accuracy of Harrison's descriptions bring them sharper to the mind's eye than even when standing in front of them, seeing for myself.
There's little in the way of conventional story but, as with Knaussgard, it's always interesting and compelling. Much is left unsaid and needs to be inferred by the reader; it's as though the first person narrator is deliberately not thinking about painful experiences, distracting himself by immersion in the obsessive world of rock climbers and climbing. I don't climb but have known a handful of climbers, and their world is evoked masterfully and vividly.
A writer whose other work I'll hurry to find.
It's set in exactly those parts of the North where I live, so the landscapes are familiar - but the precision and poetic accuracy of Harrison's descriptions bring them sharper to the mind's eye than even when standing in front of them, seeing for myself.
There's little in the way of conventional story but, as with Knaussgard, it's always interesting and compelling. Much is left unsaid and needs to be inferred by the reader; it's as though the first person narrator is deliberately not thinking about painful experiences, distracting himself by immersion in the obsessive world of rock climbers and climbing. I don't climb but have known a handful of climbers, and their world is evoked masterfully and vividly.
A writer whose other work I'll hurry to find.
December 17, 2013
This was in the sci-fi/fantasy section of my local bookshop and I used to climb so I gave it a punt.
It is about climbers and it was contemporary fiction nearly 30 years ago. This is basically "last of the summer wine" but with youngish climbers not doing much rather than 3 old blokes falling in rivers and sliding down hills in baths. Its not as funny or as interesting. You don't get any insight into why they climb, there is no overall plot or character arc.
If you want insight into climbing read Joe Simpson, if you want to waste your time read this. It's only saving grace is its very short and easy to read
It is about climbers and it was contemporary fiction nearly 30 years ago. This is basically "last of the summer wine" but with youngish climbers not doing much rather than 3 old blokes falling in rivers and sliding down hills in baths. Its not as funny or as interesting. You don't get any insight into why they climb, there is no overall plot or character arc.
If you want insight into climbing read Joe Simpson, if you want to waste your time read this. It's only saving grace is its very short and easy to read
June 21, 2024
This is 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'. It has great characters and wonderful descriptions.
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 which combine forensic exactness and technical terms with some evocative images.
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.
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 which combine forensic exactness and technical terms with some evocative images.
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.
May 12, 2017
An enjoyable book in spite of there being little or no plot and, at a level, barely anything happens.
I really liked his writing style especially his descriptions of the rocks climbed and the landscape of the climbs: the way he describes things brings out a strangeness to the everyday whilst at the same being vivid and visual. He doesn't often delve into what the characters think yet manages to convey much of the impact of the big events that occur in their lives through references things that trigger memories.
There's a few sentences in the final chapter that pretty much sum the book up: "I sat in the niche for a long time. I realised I didn't know any more than I had the last time I sat there. I didn't know anything about anything." I think the final sentence pretty much sums up the book and maybe life as well.
Don't be put off by the subject, there is a lot of climbing terms and chatter but it no point did it spoil the book and I know nothing about climbing.
I really liked his writing style especially his descriptions of the rocks climbed and the landscape of the climbs: the way he describes things brings out a strangeness to the everyday whilst at the same being vivid and visual. He doesn't often delve into what the characters think yet manages to convey much of the impact of the big events that occur in their lives through references things that trigger memories.
There's a few sentences in the final chapter that pretty much sum the book up: "I sat in the niche for a long time. I realised I didn't know any more than I had the last time I sat there. I didn't know anything about anything." I think the final sentence pretty much sums up the book and maybe life as well.
Don't be put off by the subject, there is a lot of climbing terms and chatter but it no point did it spoil the book and I know nothing about climbing.
January 18, 2018
These are the five stars of awe and admiration, more than naive enjoyment. Having had it talked up to me for many years, Climbers did not disappoint. It feels like the purest distillation of Harrison's goals that I've read: often described as being partly autobiographical, I experienced it more as a kind of merciless auto-anthropology, describing the ways and experiences of a group in a time and in a place with an unsparing, pristine clarity. It refuses nostalgia, refuses aphoristic romanticism, refuses any kind of consolation. Perhaps the last ten pages or so feel just a little forced, an out-of-place and too-familiar neatness in a novel of loose ends; but other than that, it is stubbornly and only itself.
November 29, 2024
At first I was put off by how deliberately vague and hard to follow Climbers was. But it keeps circling back to the same or at least similar scenes that both my understanding and appreciation had grown considerably by the end. It is beautifully written, and the weird style does fit the subject matter - a lot goes unsaid in climbing.
The details of the individual climbs and crags are specific enough that you have to think much of the novel is autobiographical (a point also mentioned in the introduction). Also, the types of characters the narrator falls in with seem all to true-to-life: as a beginner you often can't choose your partners and are happy to join whoever will mentor your, no matter how sketchy. And of course the runouts and highballs are not without consequences...
The details of the individual climbs and crags are specific enough that you have to think much of the novel is autobiographical (a point also mentioned in the introduction). Also, the types of characters the narrator falls in with seem all to true-to-life: as a beginner you often can't choose your partners and are happy to join whoever will mentor your, no matter how sketchy. And of course the runouts and highballs are not without consequences...
August 4, 2019
A quirky book, but in a good way. There is not much of a plot. What Harrison is very good at is description. He describes the English countryside in such detail that I could smell the flowers and feel the wind in the air. He does, however, have a dim view of the English countryside: it is most often raining and filled with industrial refuse - a lot of the climbing takes place in abandoned quarries. The characters are quirky. The protagonist is a keen observer, but detached, there appears to be something missing in his emotional reactions. An appreciation of climbing does increase the enjoyment of this novel. I really like it, but seem unable to explain why!
September 17, 2019
Having read Climbers back in the late 80's, I was intrigued to see it listed recently as one of the all time outdoor/climbing novels. It is. Although not really about climbing, or climbers, and as MacFarlane says in the introduction to the copy I read, the plot is undefinable or irrelevant.
I thoroughly enjoyed the re-read, the brilliant use of often bitter sweet language. And, perhaps as I am now living in northern England, and more familiar with the crags, cliffs and landscapes mentioned, I was fascinated with the way in which Harrison moves features around, as though they had no fixed location, as characters in the plot.
I thoroughly enjoyed the re-read, the brilliant use of often bitter sweet language. And, perhaps as I am now living in northern England, and more familiar with the crags, cliffs and landscapes mentioned, I was fascinated with the way in which Harrison moves features around, as though they had no fixed location, as characters in the plot.
December 14, 2025
Overall what I love here is the language of landscape. There's a constant back and forth between the natural and industrial world. It acts to reinforce some main themes of escapism, but truly is standout on its own. Employing prose in a way that juxtaposes selection and context of language used in a poetic and masterful way not seen elsewhere. It threads a fine line between misappropriately surreal but absolutely sticks the landing.
Narratively it may not be a feast, but I found the way it grinds away any prestige of climbing activities and nudges at the unreliable narrator to provide an entertaining read.
Narratively it may not be a feast, but I found the way it grinds away any prestige of climbing activities and nudges at the unreliable narrator to provide an entertaining read.
January 6, 2018
This book is about a group of British rock climbers. It is a patchy read that starts slowly but improves after about the halfway point. The strengths of the book lie in the descriptions of climbing and the emotional highs and lows delivered by a successful or failed climb. The weaknesses, or perhaps the less gripping aspects, revolve around the climbers' personal lives and the effects that climbing has on them. Climbing, along with all extreme activities, is more of an obsession than a sport and the book is at its best when this is the focus.
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