Until the late 18th century, before they became objects of conquest, Switzerland’s mountains were considered just “a landscape backdrop, distant and best left alone”, Claire Thomas writes in her latest book, On Not Climbing Mountains. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was particularly to blame for the shift, reframing the mountains as “a site of spiritual sustenance and potential enlightenment … the people arrived, and started to climb, and they have been climbing ever since.”
On Not Climbing Mountains is a novel, but it draws from and references a great deal of actual historical and literary sources, and is told in a curiously impersonal tone. We follow Beatrice, our solitary narrator, as she journeys by train through Switzerland, her father’s birthplace, all the while longing to be “beside the point, outside time, somehow untethered to the measurable”.
Each of the book’s vignette-like chapters centres around a historical figure – Mary Shelley, James Baldwin, Charlie Chaplin, Katherine Mansfield – whose life or work is connected to Switzerland in either clearcut or tenuous ways. These are not conventional portraits, instead told aslant and with a beautiful lightness of touch.
In particular, Beatrice is fascinated by the work of Swiss painter Jean- Frédéric Schnyder. In a country of such dramatic peaks, Schnyder chose to depict “small, unassuming interiors” such as the waiting rooms of train stations (one of which is featured on the book’s cover). Each of his paintings “seems to suggest a vast story behind its confined dimensions” – a description which could equally apply to each of Thomas’ carefully crafted chapters. Each chapter feels very consciously framed; each historical detail meticulously selected. There is a sense, throughout, of the author just behind the scenes, in tight control of her material; of history churning beneath her prose.
The import of particular images or scenes is not always immediately apparent: Thomas repeatedly foregrounds small details before revealing the bigger picture. As a result, her subjects are often ambiguous, and this is part of the book’s pleasure. Figures which we might assume to be historical, for example, turn out to be characters from a Graham Greene story. Lines from Nabokov – “wondrous crystalline world”, “blindingly white arena” – might appear to be describing an alpine landscape, but are actually describing a butterfly seen under a microscope.
The most ambiguous presence of all, though, is Beatrice herself, who only makes her presence known intermittently; we don’t even learn her name until halfway through the book. One passage describing specimens from Nabokov’s butterfly collection in a museum in Geneva, for instance, suddenly shifts into first person for a single line: “I noticed his name on the labels in the exhibition I visited.” The reason for her detachment is eventually revealed to be grief over the loss of her parents. The profusion of Swiss-related material is an attempt at a distraction, though “it’s becoming increasingly clear such a diversion is impossible”. In one of the few present-day scenes, she receives a visit from a friend of her father’s but when he leaves, she feels “emptied once more … scared that the books stories art obsessions are no longer working”.
Like Thomas’ two previous novels, this is a book interested in the endurance of art. But stylistically it represents an ambitious departure. Where The Performance was propulsive, this was a far slower and more effortful read. The Performance was characterful and frequently hilarious. On Not Climbing Mountains is a much subtler work, accruing meaning through association, digression and resonance. At one point, Thomas makes reference to WG Sebald, and his fans will surely recognise his influence here: the melancholy tone; the solitary, contemplative narrator; the blurring of fact and fiction; the intertextuality; the deep preoccupation with memory.
I don’t consider myself the kind of reader who needs much to happen in a book – and yet, I did find myself clinging to the very limited action here and wanting more. Of course, Beatrice’s emotional withdrawal is in keeping with her predicament, and entirely intentional on the part of Thomas. Nevertheless, I felt frustrated that any access to her interiority was so very fleeting. A different sort of reader – perhaps a more patient one – may find On Not Climbing Mountains more satisfying than I did. Ultimately I found this an impressively intricate work, but one a little too oblique to fully absorb my attention.
On Not Climbing Mountains by Claire Thomas is published by Hachette Australia ($32.99)
