Climbers
On sale
26th May 2022
Price: £9.99
‘No one alive can write sentences like he can. He’s the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf’ Olivia Laing
‘Among the most brilliant novelists writing today’ Robert Macfarlane
‘Truly gets to the heart of that strange, indefinable otherness of the wild northern landscape’ Benjamin Myers
Retreating from the ruins of his marriage, Mike leaves London for the wildness of the Yorkshire moors, where he falls in with a group of climbers – a band of misfits and mavericks bound by the pursuit of the unattainable: the perfect climb.
Travelling from abandoned urban quarries to misty, lichened crags, Mike discovers an intensity of experience – a wash of pain, fear and excitement – that causes the rest of his world to recede. Increasingly addicted to the adrenaline, folklore and camaraderie of the sport, he begins to lose his grip on the line between passion and obsession – at a cost.
With an introduction by Robert Macfarlane
‘Among the most brilliant novelists writing today’ Robert Macfarlane
‘Truly gets to the heart of that strange, indefinable otherness of the wild northern landscape’ Benjamin Myers
Retreating from the ruins of his marriage, Mike leaves London for the wildness of the Yorkshire moors, where he falls in with a group of climbers – a band of misfits and mavericks bound by the pursuit of the unattainable: the perfect climb.
Travelling from abandoned urban quarries to misty, lichened crags, Mike discovers an intensity of experience – a wash of pain, fear and excitement – that causes the rest of his world to recede. Increasingly addicted to the adrenaline, folklore and camaraderie of the sport, he begins to lose his grip on the line between passion and obsession – at a cost.
With an introduction by Robert Macfarlane
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Reviews
Harrison is a linguistic artist, constructing sentences that wrap and weave like a stream of consciousness without ever breaking focus
Like prose poetry, it's beautiful
Stunning . . . Harrison makes an intensely poetic and evocative brew of the interstices between sport, passion and obsession. Moments of exquisite surreality rub against others in which you can smell the soil and stone
Over the past 50 years, M. John Harrison has produced a remarkably varied body of work . . . He is not easily pigeon-holed - an intentional state of affairs, but one that has denied him a large readership . . . When he moves into less exotic terrain, he's able to make everyday experiences feel alien - the best example being his 1989 novel Climbers, set in the Pennines among misfits who claw their way up crags, escaping one kind of precariousness by chasing another . . . The prose ripples with mystery and lustrous turns of phrase, and there are flashes of humour, too . . . The landscapes are part J.G. Ballard, part Iain Sinclair . . . Equally at ease depicting suburban midlife crisis and parallel universes, Harrison writes memorably about people who are bewildered, sidetracked, trapped or on the lookout for opportunities to change
M. John Harrison has abjured the high-pitched melodramatics of TOUCHING THE VOID for a microscopically observed novel about a group of climbers . . . Descriptions of the various climbs are painstaking and suspenseful, and Harrison has a sharp ear for dialogue. But most impressive is his acute sense of place . . . the raw beauty of the Pennines
Harrison is without peer as a chronicler of the fraught, unsteady state we're in
Magnificently unsettling . . . Harrison described this real, gritty world with the same precise and estranging fluency with which he has more often mapped galactic space, using the dense idiolect of climbing to make atmosphere and geology resonate on an emotional, interior level. Some kind of breach or fault line was being cautiously staked out, a post-industrial, late-capitalist collapse in credit and confidence so amorphous and inarticulable that it would vanish altogether if apprehended too directly. . . . No one alive can write sentences as he can. He's the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf, bringing together new blooms of language, gathering up advertising copy and internet lingo and arranging them in startling hybrid forms.
Harrison draws the reader on by the clarity of his vision and writing . . . The way he handles the sport and the social background bears comparison with that of David Storey in THIS SPORTING LIFE. I know no higher praise
Future critics will find in his writing a distinct, clear-eyed vision of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century life
A vivid, restless, deeply cunning novel
A poetic portrait of the strange and fascinating, very niche world of rock climbing
More than anything I've ever read, Climbers truly gets to the heart of that strange, indefinable otherness of the wild northern landscape, and the odd people compelled to conquer it in their own odd ways. It feels more than book - it's an adrenalized dream, a series of moods as changeable as the sky above. Unique is the only word for it
[A] masterpiece . . . celebrated for its fine-grained depictions of the landscapes of Northern England through the seasons . . . Harrison is a psychological novelist whose fascination with trauma, repression and memory remains constant throughout his work. Climbers - the great hinge in Harrison's career - is a novel-length attempt to view the past so clearly you can see the beard-frost
If fiction's greatest achievement is in affecting the way the reader sees the world, then Harrison's spare and beautiful prose has conjured up here a feeling of almost permanent dislocation from the routines of everyday life. Even when the book has been closed, it's a feeling that is incredibly hard to shake off
Reading Climbers today it's not just the incredible sense of a place and part and time of England that is so vividly done, but also the warm, complicated drawing of its people. As soon as I finished the book I missed, deeply, all that odd little gang with their obsession and their jargon and their pastime. Harrison's book is fossil and debris, with the qualities of both stone - pure, clean, hard, and the strange uncanniness that comes with finding a bottle top, say, that takes you back to a past decade
Sheer brilliance
A lot of literary fiction has become its own cliché and it's become very mannered. Of course there's a lot of appallingly bad pulp fiction but when this stuff finds something new and locates itself as part of the tradition it's as good as anything. There are some writers in that tradition in terms of their use of language who as prose stylists are the equal of anyone alive. I'm thinking of people like John Crowley, M John Harrison, Gene Wolfe.
