Book Review | Thin Air by Michelle Paver

The Himalayas, 1935.

Kangchenjunga. Third-highest peak on earth. Greatest killer of them all.

Five Englishmen set off from Darjeeling, determined to conquer the sacred summit. But courage can only take them so far—and the mountain is not their only foe.

As the wind dies, the dread grows. Mountain sickness. The horrors of extreme altitude. A past that will not stay buried.

And sometimes, the truth does not set you free.

***

It was on the back of the award-winning, six-part Chronicles of Ancient Darkness that Michelle Paver put out Dark Matter. A ghost story inspired by her lifelong love of the Arctic, it attracted flattering comparisons to the work of such giants of the genre as M. R. James and Susan Hill, and became, before long, a bona fide bestseller.

That the author has now turned her hand to another tale in the same vise-like vein can hardly be seen as surprising; what can is the fact that it's taken her six years and another complete children's series, namely the Gods and Warriors novels. But given the strength of Thin Air, a short, stirring and altogether masterful narrative set on the sheer slopes of the world's third-highest hill, if it takes another decade for Paver to perfect its successor, that's a decade I'll be willing to wait.

It's 1935, and mountaineering has the nation by the nape. Our protagonist Stephen Pearce has always been a keen climber, but he certainly wasn't supposed to be conquering Kangchenjunga this spring. He was meant to be getting married and starting a family, but something about the life he could see stretched out ahead of him—and the death, yes—didn't feel quite right, so when his big brother Kits basically begged him to follow in the footsteps of Edmund Lyell on an expedition up one of the Himalaya's highest peaks, Stephen said yes.

Yet Kits' request wasn't exactly selfless. He needed a medic for the expedition to go ahead, and if securing one meant upending his younger sibling's entire existence, then that was a price Kits was only too happy to pay to win the day. As Stephen reasons:

I know my brother. A couple of years ago, someone came upon Irvine's ice axe on Everest's north-west ridge, and Kits sulked for weeks. Why wasn't he the one to find it and get all the glory? That's what he's after now: relics of the Lyell Expedition; and a chance to complete what the great man began, by being the first in the world to conquer an eight thousand-metre peak—with the added lustre of planting the Union Jack on the summit, and beating the bloody Germans. (p.19)

Brothers they may be, but Stephen and Kits haven't always—or even often—gotten on, and for all that they're on their best behaviour at the outset of the trek, as the weather closes in and things threaten to get grim, the tension between them fairly flares.

Book Review | Climbers by M. John Harrison

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

One of M. John Harrison's most acclaimed novels in a career of near universal acclaim, Climbers is, perhaps, the least fantastical of his novels. Yet it carries life-changing moments, descriptions of landscape bordering on the hallucinogenic and flights of pure fictive power that leave any notion of the divide between realistic and unrealistic fiction far behind. First published in 1989, Climbers has remained a strong favourite with fans and reviewers alike.

A young man seeks to get a grip on his life by taking up rock-climbing. He hopes that by engaging with the hard realities of the rock and the fall he can grasp what is important about life. But as he is drawn into the obsessive world of climbing he learns that taking things to the edge comes with its own price.

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 unattainable: 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 adrenaline, 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

***

I've often heard Climbers described as the least fantastical of M. John Harrison's novels, and so it is, looked at in a particularly literal light — I espied no spaceships, I'm afraid, and there isn't a single sentient bomb in sight — yet this reading is as wrong as it is right.

Climbers is certainly less overtly otherworldly than the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, and it has none of The Centauri Device's spare spacefaring. Indeed, it takes place almost entirely in the north of England in the eighties, but do not be so easily deceived: Climbers is far from absent alien environs.

"The Andean landscapes [...] had a curious central equivocality: black ignimbrite plains above Ollague like spill from some vast recently abandoned mine: the refurbished pre-Inca irrigation canals near Machu Picchu, indistinguishable from mountain streams. Half-seen outlines, half-glimpsed possibilities; and to set against them, a desperate clarity of the air." (p.34)

This is the work of a bona fide stylist, reminiscent of recent Christopher Priest, or China Mieville at his most memorable, and even here in his most mainstream text to date Harrison imbues his landscapes — though they are real rather than imagined — with such bizarre and startling qualities that you'd be forgiven for thinking Climbers is science fiction.

At bottom, it's about a man — readers, meet Mike — who leaves his life in London behind after the failure of his first marriage. Disillusioned and disconnected, he moves to the Yorkshire moors, falls in with a clique of climbers, and slowly but surely insinuates himself in their increasingly extreme endeavours.

"To climbers, climbing was less a sport than an obsession. It was a metaphor by which they hoped to demonstrate something to themselves. And if this something was only the scale of their emotional or social isolation, they needed — I believed then — nothing else. A growing familiarity with their language, which I had picked up by listening to them as they practised on the indoor wall in Holloway, and their litter, spread out on a Saturday afternoon like a glittering picnic in the deep soft sand at the foot of Harrison's Rocks, had already made me seem quite different to myself." (pp.77-78)

In climbing, Mike finds a way... not to escape, exactly, but to be a part of something greater. Something purer, or at least less muddy than the life he's lost. His pursuit of the present, of mastery over the moment — by way of puzzles and problems solved on chalky rock walls — is, I think, a fundamentally powerful thing, and in time it takes precedence over every other aspect of his existence.

He does, however, have cause to recall what brought him to this point: namely the end of something hardly begun — a death, yes — which we only ever glimpse in shattered fragments, reflected in shards of mirrored glass. It falls to us to put the pieces of Mike's memories together, and I dare say your willingness do this — to work towards a passing grasp of character and narrative that the author obfuscates at every stage — will determine what you ultimately take from this tale.


The story, such as it is, does not unfold chronologically. Though Climbers' structure implies a year in the life, from Winter through Spring to Summer followed by Fall, and there is a linear element — a single thread that wends its bewildering way through the text in toto — in truth Harrison's 1989 novel is more memoirish, replete with recollections and ramblings such that we only learn about Mike's separation from his wife and the circumstances of said perhaps halfway through the whole.


To be sure, Climbers can seem inscrutable, but to a greater or lesser extent this is true of Harrison's entire oeuvre. As the similarly inclined nature writer Robert Macfarlane asserts in his insightful introduction to the new British edition:

"Harrison's [books] 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." (p.xvii)

And so to the characters Mike meets: to Normal and Bob Almanac, Mick and Gaz and Sankey; isolated individuals who become comrades in climbing whilst flitting in and out of the fiction whenever real life intervenes. They come and go, and they're hard folks to know... but people aren't easy. We are complicated, contradictory creatures, and Mike's new mates struck me as more human than most. As right and as wrong as us all.

Its parts are undeniably abstracted, and there will be those who take issue with this, understandably perhaps, but cumulatively, Climbers is as complete and pristine as any of the SF classics Harrison has composed. Nor is it any less revelatory. Indeed, some say it is his piece de resistance. I don't know that I'd agree with that assessment — however mesmeric the landscapes, however impeccably crafted the narrative and characters are, I don't know that Climbers has the scope or the manifest imagination of Light and the like — nevertheless, Harrison imbues the ordinary of this novel with such extraordinary qualities that it is not, after all, so dissimilar in effect to the best of the speculative fiction this remarkable author has written.

***

Climbers
by M. John Harrison

UK Publication: May 2013, Gollancz

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review | No Way Down by Graham Bowley

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /

IndieBound / The Book Depository

The summit of K2, 1 August 2008. An exhausted band of climbers pump their fists into the clear blue sky – joining the elite who have conquered the world’s most lethal mountain. But as they celebrate, far below them an ice shelf collapses and sweeps away their ropes. They don’t know it yet, but they will be forced to descend into the blackness with no lines. Of the thirty who set out, eleven will never make it back.


No Way Down weaves a tale of human courage, folly, survival and devastating loss. The stories are heart-wrenching: the young married couple whose rope was torn apart by an avalanche, sending the husband to his death; the 61-year-old Frenchman who called his family from near the summit to say he wouldn’t make it home. So what drove them to try to conquer this elusive peak? And what went wrong that fateful day?

***

Mountaineering and me: we have a bit of a thing.


We have a bit of a thing because my Dad has a bit of a thing, and I was a Daddy's boy all the way. Before I could even walk he was carting me up munroes like a front rucksack, and when I got a little older - when I came to find my legs were my own - the closest I ever felt to him was when we went climbing together. We'd clamber up gulleys while I poured my heart about about problems at school; between breaths as we ran headlong up scree slopes I'd moan about my exams or dream aloud how this girl or that girl would be my girl if I had my way.


My Dad and I, we bonded up Ben Nevis. And we still do - though on littler hills, admittedly, a little less often. So I've a whole lifetime of hill-climbing behind me, and a special place set aside for the pursuit in my heart.


But climbing Everest, or K2, or the North face of the Eiger... that all's a way beyond me. That kind of extreme sports mountaineering is a whole other ball game from the one I recall so fondly. It's about summitting the unsummittable; it's about testing the limits of human endurance, and going places we as a species have precious little business with, as evidenced by the utter dearth of oxygen in the atmosphere when you're above 26,000 ft.


One fateful day, thirty climbers set out to do just that. An international coalition of mountaineers joined forces, against the better judgement of some among them, to stand shoulder to shoulder with giants on the second-highest point on the planet. It's August 1st, 2008, and on the Traverse beneath the Balcony Serac - a colossal abutment of glacial ice overhanging the primary route to K2's summit - nature waits with baited breath. Of the thirty climbers, only nineteen return.


No Way Down is their story, albeit second-hand. It's an exhilarating, atmospheric, and emotional tale of real human tragedy and incredible endurance. And in the hands of Graham Bowley, it's a tale well told. From interviews with all but a few of the survivors and their families, as well as with the loved ones of those lost that day, the reporter who broke the story for the New York Times has put together as coherent and respectful a picture of the events which led to these eleven deaths as we're likely to see short a first-hand account; and even then, there's enough disagreement about that fateful day on K2 that such a thing would surely be refuted.


Now Bowley, unlike Joe Simpson and Jon Krakauer, who brought to Touching the Void and Into Thin Air such intimacy and experience as to render them amongst the finest real-life survival stories in any literature, is no mountaineer. He's just a journalist. And that's a double-edged sword. On the plus side, Bowley's credentials mean he has an eye accustomed to picking out the essential story: there is a clarity and a balance to the narrative of No Way Down as he presents it, a coherence - if you'll indulge me a moment - in terms of plot and character that is as gold dust in non-fiction from the pen of its own participants.


However Bowley admits to a certain disinterest in the pursuit of the thirty men and women whose stories he aims to tell, as best he can. In the Author's Note he recalls:


"When my editor suggested I write about their ordeal for the newspaper, I balked at the idea - mountaineering had never interested me - although the next morning my story appeared on page one of the paper." (p.xi)


And the line between disinterest and plain Jane disdain is a precious fine one; even with my limited experience of mountaineering, No Way Down left this reader feeling a mite slighted on occasion. Take, for instance, the fact that the author's only actual experience of K2 was a trip to Base Camp - so to the foot of the mountain - during which time his photographer fainted from exhaustion and the pair were forced to turn back. This he wears like a badge of honour in his mini-bio, as if it were a qualification.


In short, Bowley seems rather more invested in the potential audience an account of these climbers' many trials might reap than in presenting a tale particularly empathetic with their determined pursuit of the summit. But at least he's professional about it. Though coldly, he accounts for their respective rationales, and there are moments when the mist lifts and the clouds part and we see an ocean of mountains before us, staggering natural beauty captured just so: the very vistas one imagines the mountaineers in part strive so earnestly to see for themselves. No Way Down is at its finest at such times, and irrespective of its author's feelings for the subject, the devastating tale of ill-fated dreamers chronicled herein is one well worth the telling.

***

No Way Down

by Graham Bowley

UK Publication: July 2010, Penguin
US Publication: August 2010, Harper


Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading