a new edition of climbers
by uzwi
If I’m delighted to have Climbers–certainly my best novel–back in print, I’m even more delighted to have an introduction to it by Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places and The Old Ways, and chair of this year’s Man Booker Prize judges. Here’s a glimpse–
So let me try to express a little of the amazement I feel when standing in front of the work of Harrison … To read Light, Nova Swing, Empty Space or Climbers is to encounter fiction doing what fiction must: carrying out the kinds of thinking and expression that would be possible in no other form. I pass through his novels feeling a mixture of wonder, calmness and disturbance; I end them brain-jarred and unsettled. It takes time to recover. Metaphysical tremors and echoes persist for days afterwards…
It takes time, also, to realise that what feels at first like bleakness in Harrison’s novels is in fact something more like parity of gaze. He offers lucidity without pity, but without rancour either. Although the fierce ease with which capitalism husks humanity is one of his main anxieties, and although debris–emotional and material–is one of his chief preoccupations, and although rupture and damage are the textures that most attract his eye, his vision is devoid neither of tenderness nor of hope. His compassion will be unmistakable to anyone who reads him…
Robert Macfarlane’s engagement with landscape and the philosophy of landscape is acute, searching and in the best sense poetic. His work places him firmly in a tradition which stretches back to the Romantics, while his understanding of the anti-sublime makes him fiercely contemporary. To have this introduction isn’t just a thrill: it gives me hope that Climbers might in some way fit into and extend that tradition too. That will have made it worth being a writer.
Climbers is published in May, and available for pre-order, on Kindle or paper, at Amazon now.
the m john harrison blog 
Not being an enthusiast to the degree that the dials swing into the negative numbers, this was the one that I was going to pass by. Increasingly arthritic, climbing up from the floor to a standing posture and then ratcheting about with whatever dignity is allowed by the circumstances of mass, motion, and gravity is my sport. Is Harrison’s enthusiasm for the subject the cause for his estimation of this as his best novel? Hm. Still, that is his estimation and deeply felt. Well, fuck it. I’m in. (Too bad it’s not hard-cover.)
Great news! I’ve just read Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places and it blew me away.
And there’s my answer! Hurrah! Three cheers for Climbers and thee!
New edition is not yet listed on amazon or amazon.ca. Not at chapters/indigo or kobo. As yet.
I’m almost more happy about this is as an actual human being as I am as a publisher.
I’ll buy the new edition but it will never replace the hardback copy, remaindered from the Borders Library (whichever borders those may be), found and bought in Hay all those years (three, to be boringly precise) ago.
Yeah, anzanhoshin, I’m to the left of the pond, too.
Will this new edition be available in North America sometime, Mike?
If not, I’ll just (pre-)order from amazon.co.uk and call it good.
Hi James, hi anzanhoshin: I don’t think it’s likely to be available in the States in the forseeable future, no. So your best bet for now will be Amazon UK.
Mat J: astonishing book, as is The Old Ways.
Matt: which borders indeed. That copy has evidently slipped in from Autotelia. I would have warned you not to read it, but too late now.
Congratulations on the endorsement Mike. Well deserved. Going off at a tangent re Romantics, old ways, landscape and rock faces – I’m told JMW Turner’s small colour oil sketch Saltram Quarry (1813) will be on view week after next at Tate Britain. It was made on the spot on a hot day, and you can feel the midday sun and the dust amidst the Devonshire bocage..
For several years I’ve been under the misconception that Climbers was a “non-fiction” work, which apparently isn’t (entirely) the case. I’d swear I’ve seen it described explicitly as such somewhere, which seemed authoritative at the time.
Which just goes to show that you can’t trust anything on the internet. Especially not this.
Planned to have effect, even in those pre internet times. I wanted to have blurry climbing snaps bound in as well, but Gollancz were too scared. In its first year you could find it shelved under fiction, autobiography, sport or even–if the shop was big enough–mountaineering; sometimes all four. Nowadays you could make a marketing thing out of that–although no one would unless you were already Will Self or Julian Barnes–but then it was considered a bit experimental & risky.
Non-UK readers who would like to stay away from Amazon, I have sometimes ordered books shipped to the US from Foyle’s with excellent results. http://www.foyles.co.uk/