Climbers: a Novel
“Empty ground stretched away to the caravan site under a heavy sky. Everything – the shingle belt, the frieze of corroded side panels and deformed chrome window frames, the sky itself – had a brownish tinge, as if she had exposed the film in an atmosphere of tars.
‘It would have been a really nice place,’ said Normal. ‘Apart from that.’ His own photographs, of the moquette sofa on the Pennine Way, he had sent to the climbing magazines – there were three of them at the time, two monthly and one b...i-monthly, all glossy – but he knew they would be returned. What these magazines wanted, he said, was good colour shots of well-known climbers laybacking on the tips of their fingers above an exotic valley. They weren’t interested in anything else. (Ideally, the climber should be soloing, but you could sometimes get away with a rope, as long as it was brand new and pinned elegantly to the rock below him by a few well-spaced runners. Later, I was to hear shots like this called ‘the pornography of risk’, but this seemed a little too apt to be true, or anyway useful.) While we waited for the better weather at the hinge of March we spent the mornings in a cafe in the town, drinking tea.MoreLess
‘It would have been a really nice place,’ said Normal. ‘Apart from that.’ His own photographs, of the moquette sofa on the Pennine Way, he had sent to the climbing magazines – there were three of them at the time, two monthly and one b...i-monthly, all glossy – but he knew they would be returned. What these magazines wanted, he said, was good colour shots of well-known climbers laybacking on the tips of their fingers above an exotic valley. They weren’t interested in anything else. (Ideally, the climber should be soloing, but you could sometimes get away with a rope, as long as it was brand new and pinned elegantly to the rock below him by a few well-spaced runners. Later, I was to hear shots like this called ‘the pornography of risk’, but this seemed a little too apt to be true, or anyway useful.) While we waited for the better weather at the hinge of March we spent the mornings in a cafe in the town, drinking tea.MoreLess
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