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CRUX by Gabriel Tallent

Commodification values compete with the raw beauty of the show and, for the participant, the kinaesthetic rewards of the activity, the sense of it as a self-expression and an art. However good you are you can’t do the moves unless you have the right shoes, the coaching, the hours in the gym. So in some aspects everything is very classed and costed now, and also a bit like amateur golf.

But Gabriel Tallent’s second novel opens with two adolescents night-climbing without mats at Joshua Tree, one of the legendary bouldering venues of the world. They’re still young enough to be rehearsing their wry dirtbag dialogue, which is delivered subtly and fills the reader with an inexplicable sense of heartbreak. They aren’t safe. Their relationship is quite complex. They are using it to navigate two or three potential disasters. The threat of having to follow the same life as their parents. The economic precarity of their own future, metaphorised by the chains of tiny, fractious holds that cross the highball slab they’re working on. You can so easily fall off.

Tallent tells the truth about how it looks, how it sounds and smells. There’s a real sense of being there. He’s good at the lyrical too; although sometimes prone to banality, as in “the clouds were tangles of cotton-candy pink”. Accurate descriptions not only of the rock, its demands and the accompanying sensations, but of the kind of people who do the activity. The character of the rock and the character of the people who engage with it. So what are you climbing for? Have you forgotten? Or are you only just this minute realising? While they are not entirely rhetorical, there is no real answer to these questions, as Dan and Tamma discover, “except in the terrifying, day-in, day-out work of the attempt.”

Read my review of CRUX in the TLS, here

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Of course I’m a fan of Brad Barr, even before he discovered string. & I love Maddie Ashman not just because of her surname.