Conspicuous Consumption

  M. John Harrison has just won the Booker Prize for his most recent novel, The End of Everything . Thus I'm several years late and a dollar short in publishing this review of his 1989 novel Climbers . Harrison is best known for his science fiction, so the first thing to note about Climbers  is that it is not science fiction. (It seems pretty clear, from the reviews I've read, that The End of Everything isn't either.)   It is a climbing novel, and won the Boardman-Tasker prize for mountain literature, but for many reasons it would be a mistake to slot it into any of the categories that might suggest. In place of pristine landscapes, or outdoorsy nature writing we get disused quarries and the industrial detritus of Northern England; in place of wholesome young mountain athletes we get working class and sub-working class climbers surviving in England during the dark days of late Thatcherism, and in place of the sort of upward and onward success for which ascending a r...

  As unlikely it sounds, even as anti-clerical and irreligious as I am, I have enjoyed Phil Rickman's series of novels about a Church of England exorcist (the Church still has them, but now calls them "Deliverance Ministers"), and the mysteries she encounters which, if I recall correctly, usually seem to have solutions that are in large part material, but don't rule out the supernatural. One of the ongoing threads in the novel is the tension between the exorcist, Merrily Watkins, and the increasingly secularizing Church which no longer has much time for woo-woo explanations of evil. That, for the space of the novels, my sympathies were with Merrily is surely the result of Rickman's skill in creating characters who convince us. And as is the case with all successful series, it is the recurring characters that keep us coming back. We look forward to updates about the lives of her crusty old mentor, about Merrily's lover, Lol, a folkie singer-songwriter who is al...