I strongly recommended Hazards Way by Roger Hubank, a fine novel about the early days of English rock climbing. Really not to be missed.
Surprised not to see Climbers by M. John Harrison in this list. A powerful and moving novel that is about climbing and, er, life, in equal measure. Semi-autobiographical, I believe, and still one of the most thoroughly authentic depictions of British (trad) climbing culture put to paper.
Also from Travanian: Shibumi. Partially about caving.
Does seven years in Tibet count?
Love that book 😎
Although Andrew Greig's "Electric Brae" contains few descriptions of actual climbing, the two main characters are both climbers and the depiction of them, their relationship and the other climbers around them rings truer than in most climbing fiction. Greig went on a couple of Himalayan expeditions with Mal Duff, Jon Tinker and co and obviously decided he liked climbers. He has us nailed, in an affectionate way. A superb book.
Wasn't there a novel about the Welsh/Peak climbing scene written by a female author in the 80's?
Never read it so can't say if it was worth "classic" status or not.
Probably not classics, but Showell Styles' series of books featuring Sir Abercrombie (Filthy) Lewker certainly helped get me into climbing when I was a kid! Last read nearly sixty years ago, but they still bring back happy memories of when times were a bit different.
Possibly should mention "Take It To The Limit" by Lucy Rees and Alan Harris. A 60s precursor to "Electric Brae" in terms of relationships, but easier to read, of its time, and without having to reach for the Gaellic dictionary quite so often. But "Electric Brae" is a fantastic read, with so many twists at the end.
That's the book I was thinking about. I thought it was about the 80's but apparently it was set over a decade earlier, published in '81.
Again, not epic literature but well-written, interesting crime novels with a central character whose identity as a climber is an intrinsic part of the character and the story lines: Gwen Moffat's Miss Pink series.
I'm enjoying them, anyway...
The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti is a genuinely brilliant piece of literature.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/18/eight-mountains-paolo-cognett...
John Buchan uses climbing in a lot of his novels, and in some it’s a key element - some of the Hannay stories are obvious contenders - probably ‘the three hostages’ the best, but for some Buchan obscura try ‘A prince of the captivity’ in which mountaineering is a key component.
I've just finished the excellent "Black Car Burning", a very recently published novel by Helen Mort, starring the eponymous Stanage E7. It's set in contemporary Sheffield, as much about relationships and (especially) trust as about climbing, and is as beautifully written as one would expect from such a fine poet. It has an obvious (and acknowledged) debt to M. John Harrison's "Climbers".
No climbing in it, but I found "The Shepherd's Life: A Tale of the Lake District" by James Rebanks a fascinating book, mixing a pretty amazing autobiography (bad boy from a Lakes sheep farm leaves school with no GCSEs, gets into Oxford and is now (his other job) an advisor for the Unesco on tourism) with captivatingly written accounts of a year's day-to-day work on the hills. I've only ever been to the Lakes as a tourist to climb and walk, and this book put a whole new perspective on that beautiful landscape.
I'll always have a soft spot for Take It to the Limit. When it came out, I was in a similar form of relationship to the participants. As with them, we let the climbing do the talking. As with them, it ended badly - although mercifully not as badly.
But Electric Brae inhabits another realm entirely. Even given his impressive talent, Greig created something quite remarkable. It aches to be filmed. Just when you think you can't take any more, he twists the knife - again... and again... and again.
The '60s and '70s - wild times in the climbing community. Like moths to the flame, we were drawn to routes that were too scary and relationships which were both compelling and destructive.
Mick
anyone read / rate The Fall by Simon Mawer ?
I've just got 'Black Car Burning' - looks excellent, saving it for my holiday reading. Really like her poetry too.
Climbing and climbing locations or characters feature in some of M. John Harrison's other novels. The scene at Attermire near the end of 'Course of the Heart' still sticks in my mind, twenty years or more since I read it.
Stronger than Death by Manda Scott, a Scottish vet who, I think climbs.
Good if you like crime novels.
Book starts on a seacliff and they have a bouldering wall at home.
> anyone read / rate The Fall by Simon Mawer ?
I have, and would recommend it highly. I believe it won the Boardman Tasker Prize some years back. I had already read his superb The Glass Room (not about climbing), but in the first few pages of The Fall, when the eponymous fall takes place, I was convinced it was written by a climber, so on the nail was all the climbing detail. Mawer has written a good number of excellent novels - I'm in the middle of Prague Spring at the moment - many of them based around recent historical events like the Cyprus civil war (Swimming to Ithaca), and SOE ops in WW2.
Another book written around climbing which I enjoyed is As the Crow Flies by Damien Boyd.
'The Three Hostages' (1924) by John Buchan is an obvious choice. Any Buchan novel has his main character romping about on hills and mountains in some part of Scotland or Europe, but the last chapter of The Three Hostages is a superb example of hero chasing villain on a steep and wild Scottish mountain, with rock and gully climbing invovled amidst deer stalking etc, and a dramatic ending. Classic spy-novel suspense set in a mountain environment. Another example of Buchan's knowledge and experience of mountains is in Mr Standfast where the hero Richard Hannay visits the Cuillin of Skye. And another earlier example of Buchan's love of Scotttish hills is in John Burnet of Barns (1898) where the lead character of the title delves deep into the Southern Uplands of the Scottish Borders (Buchan's home territory) and Galloway on a trek across South Scotland to Glasgow.
Although I have mixed emotions about John Buchan, I cannot go onto moorland without thinking of him. Clearly he loved the hills. The part in Mr Standfast where Hannay travels along the north-west coast of Scotland, passing so many depopulated places, is reminiscent of Brendan Behan's, 'A Jackeen's Lament to the Blaskets'. The terrible emptiness...
After Sick Heart River, Mr Standfast is probably my favourite. There's an almost mystical quality to the chapter 'The Col of the Swallows' where Hannay, sick at heart, certain he cannot win, has a resurgence of hope. There's a sense that mountains, dangerous though they may be, are places of spiritual renewal.
I love the end, where Mr Standfast choses his fate. He does indeed stand fast, when most needed. And makes the supreme sacrifice.
Mick
Maybe stretching the thread's theme a little, but what about Arthur Ransome's Swallows & Amazons series ? Many are set in the Lake District and in Pigeon Post they climb Kangenjunga (or maybe the Old Man of Coniston).
I read 'The Fall' and remember thinking highly of it. Not sure if my copy is still on the shelves somewhere, or if it failed the test of keep/Oxfam - possibly a mistake. I would agree 'The Glass Room' is superb and I don't know why it's not better known (a bit too cerebral, perhaps) - my copy has been lent to a friend (the sort who does return books). I think I saw a reference somewhere to 'The Glass Room' being in production for film, and that could be interesting. (Obvious thread of books improved or ruined by film/TV versions here ...)
Now I'm going to have to read 'Mr Standfast' again. After umpteen years since last reading. Thanks for the prompt.
Last year, I re-read all of the Hannay books (don't bother with The Island of Sheep - it's dreadful) and the Leithen ones, until I got stuck on one which was going round and round in circles.
But Mr Standfast doesn't disappoint. When Hannay orders the destruction of the five German spotter/fighter planes, it's the cold command which is sometimes unfortunately necessary. The sub-text is that they must be shot down - no matter what the cost. If even one returns, then all is lost.
Yet, when all five planes have been shot down, a sixth emerges. And the pilot is Lensch, ace of aces, Mr Standfast's enemy/comrade.
Heartbreaking...
Mick
Pidgeon Post was the first book to interest me in climbing. The second, which clinched it, was James Ramsey Ullman's 'Banner in the Sky'. (Somewhere, on Portland, there's a boulder problem thus named.) As an impressionable youth, I also loved Ullman's 'The White Tower'. Perhaps the quintessential mid-20th century climbing novel, with echoes of European existentialism, 'It existed. It was there...' Back in the '70s, the golden age of the splenetic review, it was excoriated - unfairly, in my view.
But back to 'Pigeon Post'. Kanchenjunga probably was the Old Man of Coniston. I loved it when they put their names in a (sardine?) can, went to bury it in the summit cairn and found another rusty can with their parents and uncle's names in it, commemorating their ascent of the Matterhorn, decades previously.
So often, there have been those who went before us...
Mick
Linking Buchan and Greig, I really enjoyed Greig's "The Return of John MacNabb" which involved lots of chasing round the Scottish hills and a bit of climbing I think.
If graphic novels are allowed, I nominate Asterix in Corsica, Tintin in Tibet and Prisoners of the Sun.
In retrospect, I think it was reading the Swallows & Amazons books that was responsible for me hassling my parents to go to the Lakes for a family holiday rather the usual Wales (Dad was Welsh so holidays were often visits to relatives). Helped by one of his workmates being a keen fellwalker who never missed a chance to wax lyrical about the Lakes. Once there I was invited to join a family in the same B&B for a days walking which turned out to be the classic Striding Edge/Swirral edge circuit & I was hooked on mountains.
> Maybe stretching the thread's theme a little, but what about Arthur Ransome's Swallows & Amazons series ? Many are set in the Lake District and in Pigeon Post they climb Kangenjunga (or maybe the Old Man of Coniston).
My 10yr old granddaughter has recently read Pigeon Post. Due the map reading and hill skills taught to her by my son, she views the Kanchenjunga story as a classic 'what not to do':
No-one informed of route or plans
No maps
Compass but no idea how to use it.
Splitting a party leaving weakest members to take the toughest route.
Dangerous use of rope and dangerous rock-climbing.
I could go on but...
Still it's a great story and reflects attitudes of earlier times. Also, judging by the mountain rescue stories on Grough, it appears to be still being used as a 'Hill Skills Manual' by a minority of walkers.😜
I read the Swallows and Amazons stories too, most of them when I was 14 or 15. Doug's post resonates with me because I too found them hugely inspiring. With a passion, coming from a family with no outdoors experience in which from the age of 12 I made my own holidays, I wanted to be a Swallow or an Amazon. I didn't read the books as a how-to manual to go on the hills or sail a boat to Holland. It was the idea that you could imagine such things that gripped me.
A soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin is absolutely superb. The main action occurs in the Austrian/Italian front line in the dolomites and contains lots of climbing action by the alpine soldiers
Thanks Mick. Bumper collection of 39 Steps, Greenmantle, and Mr Standfast on my Kindle now, for the bargain price of £0.00! I do have a slight unease about some of Buchan (stereotypes etc), but then he was a man of his times writing in his own context.
Is one allowed to plug one's own book on UKC?
1980s- set mountain adventure story.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Above-Horizon-Rosemary-Cohen/dp/0749003766?Subscri...
> Is one allowed to plug one's own book on UKC?
I really don't see why not!
Have just bought a copy and am looking forward to reading it.
Many thanks indeed.
Mick
> Although Andrew Greig's "Electric Brae" contains few descriptions of actual climbing, the two main characters are both climbers and the depiction of them, their relationship and the other climbers around them rings truer than in most climbing fiction.
I'm a big fan of Greig, I've read most if not all of his work. But I didn't really like Electric Brae. Reading it after his other books it's obvious that it's his first, it seems clunky and rough round the edges compared to his later works.
Also, the descriptions of climbing and the climbing world just didn't ring true for me. Perhaps because it's a world I knew very well myself albeit a few years later than what Greig describes. There are nuggets of good stuff in it but it doesn't work as a whole for me.
I think his best piece of fiction is Fair Helen. Despite or perhaps because I'm not a golfer or angler I also loved his non-fiction based on those activities.
No mention of -https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/features/the_only_genuine_jones-5331
Electric Brae was his first fiction but he'd already published at least two mountaineering books plus quite a lot of poetry
> Electric Brae was his first fiction but he'd already published at least two mountaineering books plus quite a lot of poetry
Yes, first novel was what I meant.
Have just been reminded of "Thin Air" by Michelle Paver a horror story set on Kanchenjunga
I wouldn't exactly class it as a "classic" but it's a good enough read.
+1 for the Cognetti book!
I would also recommend The Flying Mountain by Christoph Ransmayr, even if it is a bit weird (written almost like a verse epos, something he already did for his first novel).
Ransmayr's second novel, The Terrors of Ice and Darkness is a bit more conventional and one of my favourite novels. It is not about mountains, but about the Arctic, so should at least get an honourable mention...
CB
Any one else read Ice fields by Thomas Wharton ? I bought in while in Canada (author is Canadian) many years ago & can't remember the story very well and although glaciers feature I'm not sure about climbing as such
The second BMC Members Open Forum webinar took place on 20 March. Recently-appointed BMC CEO Paul Ratcliffe, President Andy Syme and Chair Roger Murray shared updates on staff changes, new and ongoing initiatives, insurance policy changes and the current...