The Big Five

The Climbers by Keith Gray

Barrington Stoke, 2021

Obsession is an unusual theme to observe in a children's - or even young adult - novel, at least when it takes the form of the threatening kind that drives Keith Gray's new novella, The Climbers. It is the kind of madness that grips tightly,
making its unfortunate victim believe the unreal, and which occludes their eyes to their own personal shortcomings. 

Sully's determination to climb the tallest tree in the town park and name it as his reward has overcome everything for him. When Nottingham, a boy who has just arrived in the town, shows his exceptional prowess at climbing and announces as his goal to race to the top, the worst side of Sully comes to the fore and the competition becomes fierce and deadly. 

Blind to seeing what his obsession has made him, Sully is not the usual kind of protagonist in literature for young people.  He may seem to be the hero at the start, but very soon it is revealed that he is 'a right arsehole' - to use Nottingham's words; being party only to Sully’s view of things in the narrative, this makes for uncomfortable reading indeed. Like the unstable branches on which the climbers place their Adidas Swift runs, we are on treacherous ground to the very end. 

Keith Gray pinpoints exactly the teenage mindset, desperate to break free and find their own place in a world that has contained them, passive for the first fifteen years of their lives. Sully's friend, Mish, is determined to go to university and leave behind a small town that is easily excited by (but which all-too-soon loses interest in) the antics of the climbers. Sully and Nottingham still need to find what it is they want but they have for the moment settled on being the big cheese among their peers. They have much to learn...much of which from each other. 

And then, of course, there are the trees. Silent imposing guardians of the natural world, they stand astride the human world that buzzes around them. They haunt the book like green ghosts; you can smell their bark, sap and chlorophyll as they thwart the boys' plans to dominate them. One in particular, 'The Last Tree', fights especially hard - it has never been climbed without a fall - and, like Moby Dick, will not give up without adequate compensation. It is the major success of the book that through his vivid  characterisation, both corporeal and arboreal, Gray's depiction of humankind's determined plan to conquer all, even the very earth from which it was birthed, is subtle and sharply pointed.

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The Climbers is published on August 5th by Barrington Stoke, and can be bought from all good bookstores - do support the independents where you can!