Climbers: A Novel Read Free

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:
    All the way down to London, immense columns of smoke rose from the burning stubble in the fields. Near at hand they were a thick greyish white; on the horizon, faint, brown, dissipated smears through which the late sun burned like a blood orange. Misty lenses and feathers drifted over the dark stripe of woodland, the flint churches and comfortable houses between Newark and Peterborough. A little further south Pauline counted twelve plumes of smoke. ‘You can see the flames now!’ But the other passengers seemed not to care . . . Near Peterborough in the twilight, everything became fluid, deceptive: a charred field with small white puffs of smoke hanging just above the ground revealed itself as a long field of fresh water, fringed with reeds and dotted with swans; even the stubble, burning in the middle distance like a line of liquid fire, sometimes resolved into the neon signs of factories and cinemas. It was soon dark. I went to the buffet, and when I came back Pauline asked me,
    ‘Doesn’t it break your heart to see anything so beautiful?’
    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

     
WINTER

 
     
     
     
    ONE

     
Mirrors
     
     
     
     
    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