Climbers: A Novel (2 page)

That search for that fearful high is one of the reasons that Harrison’s climbers climb. Another – though they would never put it like this – is their desire to impose order upon chaos.
Climbers
, like all of Harrison’s novels, is obsessed with mess, foulness and excess. Almost every page features something that leaks or discharges. Mould furs wallpaper. Dirty crockery piles up in sinks. A stray cat coughs ‘grey puddles’ of vomit daily on the floor of a flat. Animals are ‘runny-eyed’. Pornographic magazines sprawl in slippery piles. Factory chimneys spew toxins. When Mike pokes an old man in the stomach during an argument, the man threatens to shit himself in response. Confronted daily by such evidence of abjection, struggling with the disarray of low-income lives, the climbers seek control and neatness in their sport. As Mike remarks of Sankey, ‘the climb, the moves necessary to complete it or survive it, existed for him solely as an excuse, as a phantom of his own sense of absolute personal orientation.’ It takes Mike to see this: the other climbers are not interested in examining their actions, despite the risks involved. Their causes for climbing are at once too obvious and too fugitive for expression, and so motive remains mysterious to them. As, eventually, it does to Mike, who attempts to analyse the subculture he has joined but who, like all Harrison’s analysts, fails in his task. At the book’s close, he examines a set of Polaroids taken during the preceding months: the only information the photographs yield to him is that ‘events’ do not ‘understand themselves more accurately towards the end than the beginning’.

Speaking to
Rolling Stone
about his novel
Libra
in 1988 – the year Harrison completed
Climbers
– Don DeLillo described fiction as an art-form capable of ‘rescuing history from its confusions . . . providing balance and rhythm . . . correcting, clearing up and, perhaps most important of all, finding rhythms and symmetries’. DeLillo’s mandate for fiction could hardly be further from Harrison’s, whose novels explore confusion without dispelling it, have no ambitions to clarification, and are characterised in their telling by arrhythmia and imbalance. Nothing in
Climbers
seems quite to signify in the way it ought to; events that should be crucial flit past in a few sentences, barely registered. The many deaths and injuries that occur are particularly shocking for the distracted scarcity of their narration: the killing of Mike’s adopted stray cat, Nina’s fatal accident, or the boy from Lancaster who ‘panicked above the crux of quite an easy route called Touch of Class and fell with a groan of fear backwards onto zinc grey boulders the size of commercial refrigerators.’ What a sentence that is – and how hard I will find it to forget it. Even as Mike recalls someone’s appalling injury, his climber’s mind is still grading the climb (‘quite . . . easy’), and implicitly disdaining the boy for failing on it. The ‘groan of fear’ is chilling, but more terrible still is the comparison of the boulders with ‘commercial refrigerators’, an image that brings a white-goods mundanity to the event, and also suggests the unyielding edges and corners onto which the boy plummets. Shades here of The Smiths, a band not mentioned in the novel but whose music – at least to my ear – haunts it: ‘
Young bones groan
/
And the rocks below say
/ “
Throw your skinny body down, son
” ’. . .

So unfamiliar is the landscape of Climbers, and so powerful the dissonances it incites in the reader, that at times the book feels sprung from another world or era entirely. Hints of apocalypse play about its edges: near the M6 motorway Gaz and Mike ‘squat at the base of a wall in our patched baggy tracksuit trousers and headbands, like the remains of a punitive expedition gone native among the tribes in the killing humidity’. Normal shows Mike a photograph taken by his wife of a rusting car on a Welsh beach, in which ‘everything – the shingle belt, the frieze of corroded side panels and deformed chrome window frames, the sky itself – had a brownish tinge, as if she had exposed the film in an atmosphere of tars’. The novel generates an atmosphere of catastrophe, in which the whole world seems to exist as quaked ruins – though as ever in Harrison, the causes of this destruction are left unspecified.

Although
Climbers
is seen as an outlier in Harrison’s oeuvre, a rare real-world expedition, its kinships with other work – especially his dystopian
The Committed Men
(1971), or the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy of
Light
,
Nova Swing
and
Empty Space
, are unmistakable. To Harrison, all life is alien: the inhabitants of a motorway service station near Penrith or an inner-city Sheffield café are as compellingly bizarre as anywhere in The Halo or Radio Bay. The climbers have their SF counterparts in the ‘shadow operators’ of the Kefahuchi novels, the snickering figures who haunt the periphery, ‘algorithms with a life of their own . . . full of crime and beauty and inexplicable motives’. The hailstones that fall like ‘bone dice’ upon the Yorkshire crags will later return as The Shrander’s stolen goods. The terminal beach on which Kearney waits towards the end of
Light
, ‘a metaphor for some other transitional site or boundary, a beach at the edge of which lapped the whole universe’, is a later version of the moor over whose ‘psychic swell’ Normal and Mike gaze from their dumped armchairs. Even the free indirect style in which
Climbers
is told, slipping restlessly from consciousness to consciousness, anticipates the technology that permits Seria Mau to inhabit her K-ship as a dispersed extension of her own mind.

Rock-climbing is, at its exhilarating best, a free indirect form of motion, in which the climber becomes – as Mike puts it – ‘the idea or intuition that sat cleverly at the centre of [the climb], directing it’. I have never been nearly a good enough climber to enter this state myself, though I have watched it happen to others. The climber achieves a faultless fluency in which instinct absorbs the role of conscious choice, holds leap to hand, and static rock and shifting body appear to morph together. Harrison seems to write his novels in some chronic version of this state. I have read nearly two thousand pages of his work, and cannot recall a single mis-step or over-reach – only a sustained and mobile grace. Here he is, describing the train journey that Mike and his ex-wife Pauline take south, shortly after Nina’s death in a northern hospital:

It is extraordinary prose: using a precision of utterance to evoke desperate bewilderment. What appears at first to be sheer description is in fact reactive in its every phrase and detail to the terrible loss that the pair have sustained. The ‘blood orange’ of the sun hangs as a sanguine reminder of the scene they have just left behind; the ‘comfortable houses’ are in view but out of reach. Pauline distracts herself tragically with counting games. Even as Mike’s perception closes in on specificities – the ‘misty lenses’ of smoke, the ‘charred field’ – they slip away, shape-shift, deceive. There is no resting point for the eye or the unquiet mind; nothing for it but to go to the buffet. In this way – in this style – the everyday shades into the lyric, which tends to the allegorical, which becomes the surreal, which at last curves round to reveal itself again as an aspect of the heart-breakingly actual.

– Robert Macfarlane, November 2012

PART ONE

ONE

I went by bus on a wet day in January to the indoor practice wall of a private sports centre near Leeds. It wasn’t very successful. Some of the problems there are quite intimidating, with crux moves well up on them, in damaging situations if you inadvertently let go. The return of my sense of balance had given me secret dreams. I would work the winter out of my muscles. I would dance. But hanging high above the badminton players in that huge cold echoing hall with its stink of sweat and rubber soles, I could only pant and groan and slither back down to the floor.

I sat in the changing rooms afterwards tired out, listening to a repetitive noise which I thought at first must be the sound of children shouting or singing in the swimming pool. Then I realised it was the wind I could hear, rising and falling about the bizarre cantilevered roof of the place.

Two fat boys were washing their hair in the shower. The soap and water made them shine. They stood close together and watched me guardedly as I swilled the gymnast’s chalk off my hands so I could look at the cuts underneath, and only began to talk again, about different kinds of lager, when I went to get my clothes. They were just like fat pink seals, backing away from the hand outstretched on the ice. Was I a tourist or a sealer? Either way, shreds of skin hung off three fingers of my left hand where I had jammed and twisted the knuckles into a crack in the concrete wall. I am never quite clear what makes you hang on so hard, even when there is such a short way to fall.

‘Prawn cocktail crisps here, nice—’ said an oldish woman to her friend, walking up and down in front of the Vendepac machine on the floor above.

‘– yes, I’ve seen them dear, very nice.’

They put some coins in, nothing happened, someone showed them what to do. When they had sat down again one of them said, raising her hands to the side of her head, palms inward, and moving them rapidly backwards and forwards as if demonstrating some kind of blinker, ‘I’m just not straightforward with a mechanical thing. You know.’

(As I looked down at the badminton players their white faces had for a moment seemed to be swinging slightly to and fro
above
me.)

The first time I went to that wall was for its official opening. Schofield, who had financed it, looked away when he spoke to you; his venality was deeply impressive. ‘Enjoy yourselves, lads!’ he called. It was free for today, or at least for an hour, so that the climbing press would write him up. ‘Remember we close at two.’ Sunday lunch time: thirty or forty of us stood in the hangar-like space, watched disapprovingly by some people who were trying to have a game of tennis, waiting for one of the great working-class climbers of the previous generation to christen it, then bless us as the inheritors of his tradition. Bemused-looking and pissed he made one or two jerky moves on the easiest of the problems and went back to the bar. In a low voice Schofield assured him he would never have to pay for his drinks here again. Any time he wanted to come he would be welcome here. They had wheeled out this exhausted man, with his Durham accent and his memories of death by stonefall on the Freney Pillar under the relentless telescopes of European journalists, so that the adventure sports trade could have its last good squeeze of him before he was forgotten; and as we left the hall the tennis players were already lined up to complain.

‘Tennis, badminton, squash, a sauna: you can have them all for twelve pounds more on your sub. Don’t forget, lads,’ said Schofield. ‘Don’t forget.’