On Not Climbing Mountains

From the internationally acclaimed, prize-winning author of The Performance and Fugitive Blue comes a remarkable work of literary fiction.

SUSAN'S REVIEW

This is one of the most intriguing, skilfully crafted and beautifully written novels I’ve read in some time. Like her two previous and award-winning novels, Fugitive Blue (2008) and The Performance (2022), Claire Thomas’s On Not Climbing Mountains explores the value of art, but it’s also a moving meditation on the legacies of loss, as well as more experimental in mode.

While the novel begins with a sumptuous and meticulously detailed description of a 1981 guide book, Baedeker’s Switzerland, it immediately unsettles our expectations of a traditional travel narrative. Instead of creating a linear, cause-and-effect plot, On Not Climbing Mountains is narrated by a young woman named Beatrice as a series of vignettes about the various museums, galleries and rural areas she visits in the country of her father’s birth. Instead of focusing on the joys and challenges of new experiences, her excursions consist mainly of stories about the lives of historical figures, including writers, actors, musicians, historians and mountaineers, who’ve had a connection to Switzerland. The narrator reflects on the fascinating lives of people such as Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Hillary, Mary Shelley, James Baldwin and Francois Huber, a French scientist who discovered the reproductive habits of the honey bee. We encounter the extremes of human experience: creativity and decline, joy and disappointment, kindness and cruelty, birth and death.

We also gradually learn that these stories are fundamentally a distraction for the narrator, a means of avoiding confronting her grief after the recent death of her father (he was killed when his car was hit by a kangaroo; what his daughter calls “an absurdly Australian way for [her] Swiss father to die”). In charting her psychological development, the novel does adhere to the traditional assumption that travel can create change in the traveller. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator’s self-description represents her as akin to a Romantic poet for whom “lofty” mountains were a source of transcendence: “I have a lofty yearning to be beside the point, outside time, somehow untethered to the measurable”.

But what might be read as a desire for spiritual fulfilment begins to seem suspiciously like escapism. Here, for example, is her first tourist experience, at the History of Science Museum in Geneva. Thanks to the invention of the microscope, she is “stunned by the ferocious drawings of small animals with paired-sword pincers and panoptic, disco-ball eyes. Their proximity is unsettling, too intimate, like looking into the facial pores of a lover.” Here, as elsewhere in a novel about perception and scale, proximity suggests a fear of intimacy, even a revulsion. The catalyst for change is meeting her father’s brother Carl, after which she begins to feel regret for being emotionally distant from her father; for failing to ask him more questions about his life; for not having a photo from his childhood which she had been hoping Carl would give her. Regret for being unable to “see” her father, an emotionally inexpressive but decent man, a widow, an exile from his homeland, trying his best to raise a daughter on his own.

Beatrice’s personal development is also shown through the novel’s recurring references to the Swiss painter Jean-Frederic Schnyder’s series ‘Wartsaal’ (‘Waiting’). Consisting of 92 paintings of the waiting rooms of Swiss train stations, the images initially represent Beatrice in in a state of suspension, waiting for an unknown future. But later, when viewing a painting before heading back to Australia, she feels “a sense of possibility and anticipation buzzing inside [her]”. That this new feeling might involve having a child is suggested by the metaphor of buzzing, echoing Huber’s work on the reproductive habits of honey bees; and it’s surely no accident that Beatrice is always known to family and friends as “Bee”; that her former boyfriend, seeking to console, calls her “honey”. The photos also represents Bee’s ultimate validation of the everyday; the “ordinary” moments she recalls about family, reading, teaching, the stamps which her father acquires for her and which she treasures for their fragile beauty.

And what of the mountains of the book’s title? They are represented as a source of inspiration for writers and painters, their massive scale and sublimity contrasted with the preciousness of the miniature and the revelations of the close-up. But Bee also sees the mountains as a symbol for the masculine desire for adventure and conquest. Not climbing them, then, can be read as a feminist refusal of that masculine genre, privileging instead the arduous journey inward, of introspection and self-reflection. The mountains also represent the beauty and integrity of the natural world, disrespected by climbing tourists who leave tonnes of litter in their mindless wake. And in a novel which wears its politics lightly but incisively, the mountains are sites of mourning in the context of climate change. Bee recalls how in recent years, ecological activists have organised funerals for disappearing glaciers; how “[c]rowds dressed in mourning black climb up a mountain to honour the death with readings and song …” Here as elsewhere in the novel, Bee’s personal story is embedded in a wider social context which asks us not to look away from the destruction of the natural world.

Claire Thomas’s new book, now available at the Lane Bookshop, will appeal to lovers of literary fiction and nuanced language; to readers who enjoy an artful blend of fiction, historical research and literary criticism; who admire a novel whose narration is slanted/to the side rather than plot-driven; and who are willing to be moved in subtly unexpected ways. On Not Climbing Mountains is a remarkable novel; it’s only the beginning of March, but it’s already one of my picks for the year.

Susan

PUBLISHER REVIEW

A woman arrives in Geneva, the first stop in a train journey through the country of her father's birth. She yearns to be outside time - untethered and alone - but she soon becomes immersed in the stories resonating all around her.

She visits a museum and stares into the oversized, disco-ball eyes of an insect, unsettled by the intimacy, 'like looking into the facial pores of a lover'. Later, she will tiptoe through the snow to find a portrait of James Baldwin on the window shutter of a chalet, his features rendered in rows of silver staples shot into timber.

She will find traces of Mary Shelley and Fleur Jaeggy; android pioneers in eighteenth-century Neuchatel; Charlie Chaplin, Patricia Highsmith, and striking workers drilling through the earth to create the vast Gotthard Tunnel; Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary as they summit Everest; Lenin and the Dada artists in early twentieth-century Zurich.
On Not Climbing Mountains is a tender and compelling novel from the internationally acclaimed author of The Performance. Beautifully conceived and deftly crafted, it is an exhilarating feat of storytelling, concerned with the fragilities of the natural world, the pains of grief and memory, and the endless reverberations of art.

'Not climbing, waiting, connecting. Thomas has written a novel that is truly novel - she plays with form and artfully constructs a journey through the mountains of Switzerland, braiding stories of artists, writers, and thinkers into a literary rope, a pulley system for the mind. Vivian Gornick meets Ali Smith, but unmistakably Claire Thomas' MADELEINE GRAY, AUTHOR OF GREEN DOT

'Absorbing . . . Thomas has an archivist's curiosity and a novelist's ear, and the result is a work that feels both precise and associative. She invites the reader to look harder, and then again and again. It's not quite memoir, not quite history, not quite criticism, not quite fiction, but something tautly stitched between all three' BOOKS+PUBLISHING