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‘The edge – it was broken and granular, livid yellow against the weathered ochres. I touch it delicately, caressingly, as a nurse cleansing a raw wound . . . ’ (written after the funeral of Paul Williams, 1995). Sixty essays spanning four decades of writing about climbing form this unique and beautiful memoir of ‘a man in love with touch’. In his introduction Robert Macfarlane writes, ‘contact of every sort is everywhere in this extraordinary book.’
For Jim Perrin, there is something which goes far beyond the sensuality and satisfaction of playing ‘body-chess’ with a hard rock face. It is something he describes as metonymically complex – sometimes a mystical experience, when the outer landscape shapes our inner world, a brief glimpse into the mysterious.
His sensual and incisive prose, his poetic use of language, his ‘secular theology’, philosophical questioning and devil-may-care approach are all infused with an anarchistic spirit – transient, passionate, generous and sincere. Each essay is a celebration of life and its impermanence, masterfully told through his relationship with the landscape, to climbers, to his loved ones and to himself.
He meditates on the nature of climbing, warning against hubris and he holds a deep respect for nature. Inspired by the glimmer of the minarets of the Taj Mahal under a bright full moon, he has an intuition that there are ways of approaching mountains: ‘if your own character is to grow through contact with them, it must be by appreciation of their beauty, by respect . . . it must be to do with love and not the assertion of power, it must be a marriage and not a rape. Good! Know that! Kiss the joy as it flies . . . ’
His approach to mountains shapes his approach to life, and death. It is his belief that ‘We must love each other and die’ which inspires the difficult, deeply moving and empathetic accounts of the loss of climbing friends, often in tragic accidents, and the loss too of his own son Will, aged 24, and his beloved Jacquetta to whom this book is dedicated. It is in the descriptions of these events that the author’s perception of the natural world is heightened, offering us some of the most beautiful nature writing in the book. After Jacquetta’s death he writes:
‘That evening, sitting on the crystalline rock, the little lilac helium balloon that had floated above her bed was released. There was not a breath of wind, the curlews were calling from the marsh and courting redstarts flitted in and out of the leafless branches of ash. The balloon rose straight up for 50 feet, and then at great speed and on an unwavering course, it took off westwards. At the exact point and moment of its disappearing from view, a star came out, blinked once, and was gone.’
In his funeral address to his son, Will, he asks anyone wearing a black tie to remove it to help themselves to breathe more easily. This is his invitation to cast the ‘hypocrisy of appropriateness’ aside and live a life unhindered by convention: to celebrate the freedom of the human spirit; the surrender to the moment; the beauty of spontaneity, and adventure ‘without calculation’. Perrin has little time for human construction or artifice of any kind, including any pretensions he or his fellow climbers might have: ‘One of the things that I’m not really sure I like about us . . . is that on the whole we take ourselves very seriously . . . we inflate our deeds, philosophise into our beards, sports bras or whatever, elevate self-preservation and invited catastrophe to noblest status . . . to anyone from outside we must come over as a pretty sanctimonious tribe.’
Far from appearing as a ‘sanctimonious tribe’, Perrin’s essays on individual climbers offer us exquisite portraits of rare, exceptional people he has known through his climbing life: Joe Brown, Martin Crook, John Redhead, Peter Biven, Cathy Powell, Al Harris, Stevie Haston, to name but a few.
An award-winning author for mountain literature, author of River Map (an essay on love and the landscape) and Visions of Snowdonia, as well as four other collections of essays, Jim Perrin is undoubtedly the pre-eminent writer on British landscape. A fusion of his writing talents and the culmination of 40 years work, Climbing Essays must surely be destined to become a classic memoir in mountain literature.
Jane MacNamee
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
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