Booknotes: Climbers by M. John Harrison

Climbers by M. John Harrison Finished 07-18-2024

Notes:

The world receives you and recedes from you in the same moment. ‘So much depends on perspective, doesn’t it?’ Pauline used to say. That was some time before I started climbing. She meant, perhaps, that the moment you step into a landscape it becomes another one.

This is considered Harrison’s “literary” novel, and on the surface there’s nothing fantastical about it; unlike say, Light with its post-humanism and quantum-fractured narrative or The Course of the Heart with its offstage gnostic rituals. But anyone who reads Harrison knows that his real content isn’t in the fantastic, but in the complicated and messy experiences of the world and our failure to comprehend it. I want to suggest that Climbers manages to do is to treat 80s rural Britain as a kind of fantastical landscape, strewn with waste and detritus, roved by sick and mad and lost people trying to make sense of a senseless world. Thus, despite the lack of space or magic, the book feels fantastical, if only in the sense that there is no firmament on which to rest; the ground will always open up under you.

Robert McFarlane, in his glowing review (which is expanded into the introduction to the Orion Edition of this book), says that Climbers “does not really deal in plot” and it’s true that much of the novel is impressionistic and discursive. But there are some through lines. First, the whole novel takes place over a year of the life of the narrator, Mike (who both is and isn’t Harrison himself), though it certainly draws on memories distant and recent. It unfolds that he’s run from a marriage that ended in tragedy, and it’s clear that he’s unable to cope with what’s happened. What he runs to is the world of British rock climbers, mostly working-class or lower-middle class men who rove the northern countryside, always seeking “crags you have never seen before, made of some wonderful new kind of rock.” They have their own language: cliffs are “problems”, reliable paths through them “numbers”. They give the rocks they climb surreal or joking names like “Artless” or “Anglezarke” or “The Sniveling”. These climbs are dangerous, even with the obscure and specific equipment they use. Climbers fall, get up, fall again. Sometimes they die in the attempt, or violently injure themselves. Their lives are bent around climbing, and anything else is chaotic, uneven, or precarious. The forms of solidarity and friendship that might have once bound together such men have been shattered by capitalism and modern alienation. And they have it better than many other characters who populate the book. For example, Mike’s downstairs neighbor is desperate for companionship, but also steals Mike’s milk, terrorizes his cat and plays the TV at ear-splitting volume in his squalorous flat. Seen from that angle, the climbers are holding themselves together in a world they can’t contain or comprehend. The numbers are their lifeline, climbing “a metaphor by which they hoped to demonstrate something to themselves.”. Mike joins them, climbs with them, drinks with them, fights with them. For a variety of reasons, he himself is equally shattered, but also scared and selfish.

The characters in the book are always trying to get higher, to get somewhere else, but burdened by the choices they’ve made in the past, or were made for them. They are stuck, hanging from a rock, in danger of falling, perhaps only dimly aware of how they got there, and cursing themselves if they do know.

This is a function of time as well as space, and the wreckage of the past is manifest in Harrison' astonishing and vibrant descriptions of landscapes. The British landscape is a character in its own right, given ridiculous names, and rendered with shocking emotional complexity. To take one example (and the book is littered with hundreds of them), here’s Harrison’s description of Stanage:

Rags of mist came up through the plantation, where a kind of humid softness or dstinctness of the air made the trees seem as if they were hiding something, and the rock never really dried out; but though it threatened to rain it never did. All day long the cement factory above Hope pumped heavy moist smoke straight up into the cloudbase, then at nightfall it vanished without warning, to be replaced on the obscure hillside by a constellation of orange lamps which suggested the shape of an ocean liner…Though it looks remote, and in some lights romantic, Stanage is only two miles from the suburbs of Sheffield. When the wind is right you can smell dinners cooking in the Kelvin Flats.

This is a landscape that is both isolated and connected, ancient and modern, lost and found.

As MacFarlane notes in his introduction, “the whole world seems to exist as quaked ruins”, and Harrison constantly references everyday refuse, as an index of unknowable activity, as a signifier of rot and unstated decay, and as an imposition on the characters. Trash remains uncollected, but documented and witnessed like the photos Mike’s friend Normal takes of household objects buried in sand or at the top of cliffs for climbing magazines. There’s an element to this that feels very archaeological, of things being lost and then uncovered, their meaning obscured and made opaque by the passage of time.

This ambiguity, between movement and stasis, time and space, is what shines so brilliantly across all of Harrison’s fiction, and what makes Climbers a fantastical (and fantastic) work. He resists plot in favor of the honesty of meandering experience, but makes clear that such meandering is a function of our own alienation. The only clarity that can come in the world we live in is what we impose on it–the numbers imposed on the problem. Or, as Pauline, Mike’s tragedy-stricken ex-wife says “So much depends on perspective, doesn’t it?”