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BLACK CAR BURNING, HELEN MORT
t’s hard to write fiction that portrays climbing, maybe we are too close to it to see it used as a narrative device. Maybe the realness of the climbing experience eludes attempts to fictionalise it. Maybe all the good writers just write about something else. If we knew why it were so hard we would be writing a book about trust, loss and climbing, is one of the good ones. Obsession, possibility and grief all play out amidst broader issues of immigration and the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, which happened in Sheffield. We see how a life climbing – and a climbing life – is sustained by the relationships that connect people as much as by the ropes that connect them. Perhaps the book’s most interesting device is Mort breathing life into the crags themselves, which appear as characters through the prose poems in their imagined voices strewn like boulders through the book. Read.
