Climbers [9798905610035]

Overview

“Sheer brilliance.” —Iain M. Banks

A darkly poetic novel full of the rugged beauty of a vanishing nature and of the human drive to test oneself against extremes, by the beloved, Booker shortlisted British fantasist.  

A young man named Mike has lost his grip. Reeling from a failed marriage, feeling himself unmoored in a world of lonely maturity and dreary responsibility, he takes up rock-climbing. Rock is hard and real; a fall cannot be misinterpreted or argued away. Hanging off the side of a cliff, he thinks, he may yet be able to find purchase in a life that only makes less sense as he gets older. Joining the entourage of an inveterate climber called Normal, Mike travels from crag to crag, searching for transcendence and discovering an intensity of experience that obliterates the rest of his world. Increasingly addicted to the adrenaline, folklore, and camaraderie of his chosen sport, Mike succeeds, for a time, in escaping from himself—but gravity never sleeps, and the ground is always waiting below. 

First published in 1989, Climbers is perhaps M. John Harrison’s most beloved, and most grounded, novels. (No pun intended.) One of the most celebrated living authors of fiction bordering and often crossing the line separating the fantastical and the mundane, Harrison plays merry hell with such classifications in Climbers, presenting a vision of landscape and nature as hallucinogenic and seductive as any fairyland, yet deadly as a warzone for anyone likely to lose their way, or their selves, amid the rocks.