On Not Climbing Mountains (Claire Thomas, Hachette)

Claire Thomas’s On Not Climbing Mountains is a slyly restless work. It treats travel less as a physical movement and more as an intensity and state of heightened attention. The novel traces the journey of a solo traveller revisiting her father’s home country and becoming increasingly entangled with the narratives and memories of that place. It opens with an old Baedeker guide and never quite stops unfolding. Maps, panoramas, stamps, insects, volcanic ash and Mary Shelley’s cradle-side vigil are all held together by Thomas’s gaze. She isn’t interested in the masculine rhetoric of summits, which is a feature of the large majority of travel-oriented prose. Instead, Thomas (The Performance, Fugitive Blue) is drawn to the margins: the mountains, the quiet rooms, the waiting spaces, the minor histories that accumulate in their shadow. What makes On Not Climbing Mountains so absorbing is how Thomas handles scale. She moves from the intimacy of drying a stamp on a tea towel to the planetary fallout of Mount Tambora with the same clarity. Her prose has the confidence of someone who trusts that a Sebaldian digression – where small details open into wider histories – is often the point, and that is one of the main pleasures of this novel. Thomas has an archivist’s curiosity and a novelist’s ear, and the result is a work that feels both precise and associative. She invites the reader to look harder, and then again and again. It’s not quite memoir, not quite history, not quite criticism, not quite fiction, but something tautly stitched between all three.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Ellie Fisher (she/they) is a writer. Her work has appeared in print and online. Ellie is a PhD candidate in creative writing at The University of Western Australia. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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