In reply to Andy Clarke and thread:
> I think Harrison is far more interested in climbing's intensity rather than its joy
Quite. I doubt any reader could get anything much out of the novel without grasping this.
Many of these criticisms - that it's grim, or depressing, or devoid of joy - aren't criticisms at all in the proper sense, i.e. they don't tell us anything about the novel, but only about the particular reader, insofar as they give us a clue as to what kind of personal difficulty that reader has that inhibits their ability to comprehend what they're reading properly.
For those who've found Climbers depressing, I'd say that's actually quite a promising initial response. It's not indifference, or boredom; it's an emotional reaction that indicates some depth felt but not understood. One of the clever things about the novel is that it's constantly prodding you to question the emotional reaction it's trying to generate in you by, for example, gliding past the death of a central character. What happened? Why did they suddenly vanish from the world of this novel? Why aren't they mentioned ever again?
Such reactions do give an idea of what personal presuppositions are getting in the way of appreciation: in this case it's probably what Richards called mnemonic irrelevances, as so many readers may have specific personal experiences of climbing, are not really interested in what Harrison has written, and are only looking for some sort of reflection or validation of their own memories. In other words, they judge the novel against another entirely imaginary novel that the author didn't write, and fail to see what's right in front of them. The best novels do tend to shake the reader's comfortable assumptions a bit. Anything else is just tummy-tickling in prose.
> anyone looking for upbeat happy endings would do best to avoid.
Somewhere on the internet used to be the unfortunately-named Happy Endings Foundation, which was not a knocking shop in SE Asia, but an American religious foundation dedicated to campaigning for classic novels to be republished with newly-written upbeat endings.
E.g. Sydney Carton, at the end of A Tale of Two Cities, is not executed but escapes the guillotine; his speech "It is a far, far better thing that I do" is never made; and they all live happily ever after.
I always hoped the Happy Endings Foundation was a clever parody of readers who don't really like reading books and would prefer all art eviscerated and turned into a sort of comfortable Disney taxidermy. But I have the nagging fear that they were and are real.