If I were going to make a list of the ten best British novels I've read this would be in there. It's hard to say what it is that I liked so much about this novel. Maybe it's because I recognise a lot of the landscapes, climbs and characters but I think it's more than that. Harrison does urban decay and urban encroachment into the rural environment brilliantly. He has this knack of mixing the banal with the wondrous so that the beauty of both is revealed through their contrast. It is these moment...

Wanted to enjoy this book more than I did. A wonderful foray into blokeishness, but by that very fact I was put off by it - by the blokery. Women appear, but like distant figures in a landscape. A high point (ahem) for me was the discovery that quite a few climbs in Northern England are known by the names of David Bowie tracks. Cracked Actor, indeed.

This book is about a group of British rock climbers. It is a patchy read that starts slowly but improves after about the halfway point. The strengths of the book lie in the descriptions of climbing and the emotional highs and lows delivered by a successful or failed climb. The weaknesses, or perhaps the less gripping aspects, revolve around the climbers' personal lives and the effects that climbing has on them. Climbing, along with all extreme activities, is more of an obsession than a sport and...

Much more than I expected. Hard intricate shards of description saturated with beauty and a traumatized quietness.

The rocks, quarries and mountains form a background which is also a sensory experience for this group of friends/companions. Glass like surfaces, rocks covered in lichen, missed holds and falls, discarded burned out cars in unexpected places. The scenery is by turns, grim, exciting, polluted and sometimes unexpectedly beautiful. Writing about a group of obsessives and making this seductive to those who know nothing of rock climbing is quite a feat. The novel is clearly placed in the north of Eng...

A quirky book, but in a good way. There is not much of a plot. What Harrison is very good at is description. He describes the English countryside in such detail that I could smell the flowers and feel the wind in the air. He does, however, have a dim view of the English countryside: it is most often raining and filled with industrial refuse - a lot of the climbing takes place in abandoned quarries. The characters are quirky. The protagonist is a keen observer, but detached, there appears to be s...

What an astonishing book this is: less a novel, and more a mosaic of fragmented vignettes that slowly and assuredly pull out to be a novel haunted by loss, sadness and disappointment. It’s a book happy to focus on the minutiae of climbing without ever feeling alienating to a non climber, partly because it’s obvious that such minutiae is deliberately there to give the novel a distancing effect, so that elements such as Nina’s fate sort of glide by quietly and sadly in the way in which our narrato...

This was in the sci-fi/fantasy section of my local bookshop and I used to climb so I gave it a punt.It is about climbers and it was contemporary fiction nearly 30 years ago. This is basically "last of the summer wine" but with youngish climbers not doing much rather than 3 old blokes falling in rivers and sliding down hills in baths. Its not as funny or as interesting. You don't get any insight into why they climb, there is no overall plot or character arc.If you want insight into climbing read

An enjoyable book in spite of there being little or no plot and, at a level, barely anything happens. I really liked his writing style especially his descriptions of the rocks climbed and the landscape of the climbs: the way he describes things brings out a strangeness to the everyday whilst at the same being vivid and visual. He doesn't often delve into what the characters think yet manages to convey much of the impact of the big events that occur in their lives through references things that t...

This is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. A beautifully written novel with a strangely eerie feel to it. Brilliant.

M. John Harrison is one of those “writers’ writers”—most people have never heard of him or can’t find anything in his fiction worth the effort, but then the few who have tend to be in awe without exception. I counted myself among the former for a long time. Even when I started his “Viriconium” series, it took me several attempts over more than two years to actually get through it, and even though part of me knew I would never stop reading him again, the other part has never quite stopped wishing...

These are the five stars of awe and admiration, more than naive enjoyment. Having had it talked up to me for many years, Climbers did not disappoint. It feels like the purest distillation of Harrison's goals that I've read: often described as being partly autobiographical, I experienced it more as a kind of merciless auto-anthropology, describing the ways and experiences of a group in a time and in a place with an unsparing, pristine clarity. It refuses nostalgia, refuses aphoristic romanticism,...

Can't be pinned down.More than in most of his books, in Climbers M.John Harrison gave us a glance into his own mirror. It might be him reflected back, it might be his shadow, it might be that stranger behind you. Who knows? Anyway, this book feels personal while cutting an oblique section across an mundane world.Viewpoints and obscurities bounce off one another.And there's lots of climbing, mentioned just enough to stimulate a desire to learn more.I hope his knee recovered.

Do men come up with ingenious ways to endanger themselves out of an inability to express their feelings, or is it more that their deepest feeling is in fact a need to endanger themself?...My favorite subgenre of sci-fi novel turns out to be the non-sci-fi novel written by an author best known for writing science fiction: the Mad Man, Searoad, Peace, and now this. Very curious to see if China Mieville, in his determination to write a novel in every genre, has a go at it well.

Having read Climbers back in the late 80's, I was intrigued to see it listed recently as one of the all time outdoor/climbing novels. It is. Although not really about climbing, or climbers, and as MacFarlane says in the introduction to the copy I read, the plot is undefinable or irrelevant. I thoroughly enjoyed the re-read, the brilliant use of often bitter sweet language. And, perhaps as I am now living in northern England, and more familiar with the crags, cliffs and landscapes mentioned, I wa...

I was initially dubious about this book. I don't tend to like fiction that deals with some concrete activity, preferring works that revolve around a period, place or lives. I'm not so interested in the jargon, in-jokes, rites and obsessions shared by a few. I'm more interested in how different people come together. My initial misgivings were mostly born out. The book does have memorable moments – a book dealing with mountain climbers is hardly wanting in this regard – and some of the characters

I was told I should read this about 20 years ago. Despite talking to the author about it and his experience climbing, and liking his other books, I only just got round to it last year after buying a copy on a whim in Hebden Bridge during lockdown.Climbers follows MJ Harrison's other work in slowly, poetically unpicking reality. I can never decide whether he's a nihilist or in tune with some higher spiritual realm, for his books often leave me with a sense of denied revelation, as if I've nearly

Original and innovative, yet quiet and reflective. Never read anything quite like this. Truly unique novel, with almost no story line that nevertheless grips you. Definitely give it a try if you want to read a fresh take on what a novel can be and do. All the smarts!!

This fractured contemporary novel follows a rock-climber in the north of England and the fellow climbers he meets. The characters and the landscapes are vividly depicted in precise prose that glitters like ice-crystals. People are acutely observed, but from the outside, leaving the uneasy reader to infer their motives and concerns - rather as in reality.Not much happens in the way of conventional plot, but that is not the book's thrust: it's more like an extended poem, capturing the truth of a t...