The crux of climbing
Crux by Gabriel Tallent
In rock climbing, “crux” refers to the most difficult part of a climb—the crux of the matter. This is the exceptionally talented Gabriel Tallent’s second novel. His first, My Absolute Darling, drew considerable attention.
I didn’t expect to enjoy a novel about teenagers who climb mountains. I certainly didn’t plan to fall head over heels in love with it. This is not only a coming-of-age story. It is brimming with every human and earthly complexity. It hits you on the side of the head and steals your heart.
The characters are unforgettable. There is Tamma (named after tamarisk, a shrub that grows along the roadside). She is seventeen but looks eight: small, slight, and unremarkable, with wild hair, sticking-out ears, acne, and two left feet. She talks too loudly and too much, is clever and full of opinions. She lives in a caravan with her once-beautiful mother and her mother’s loser boyfriend. She has only one friend, Dan. Dan is attractive and cool, and his parents live in a proper house. But his mother, a writer, has fallen into a years-long depression. She can hardly get out of bed.
There is a great deal of love and rough camaraderie between Dan and Tamma, but Tamma is gay. They share a passion: rock climbing. They live near Joshua Tree National Park, and whenever they get the chance, they climb an almost impossible rock face, Fingerbang Princess. They don’t have money for ropes or protective gear. They have old, worn-out shoes and lots of skill. Dan thinks to himself that Tamma is the clumsiest girl he knows on earth, but among the cliffs she is a ballerina. They fall often, catch each other, or break each other’s falls.
The children’s conversations initially puzzled me a bit. They are both brilliant and eccentric and use expressions I don’t know:
“You dickhole! You can’t go ker-splatting yourself. All we gotta do is make it through this year. It’s one school year that stands between us and a life of freedom and sendage and seeing Alex Puccio at the crag and asking for her number and getting shut down, but gloriously shut down. So don’t joke about that: because you don’t get to die. I won’t let you.”
It’s hard to describe how an outstanding writer like Tallent can bring cliffs and peaks to life. The reader holds their breath:
She began drawing her right foot up to the hold, hooking her leg around the back of her arm, aiming to share space with her fingertips in a hand-foot match. She was trembling all over, canting her hips, engaging every muscle. Then her left foot slipped out from under her and she came cheese-grating down the slab, and at the last moment her foot snagged an edge and she flipped over backward. Dan reached up to catch her and she came toward him headfirst, her hands extended in a backward somersault. She put her thumb into his eye and he twisted away, her thumb catching in the socket, bringing his chin down and still reaching to catch her, but she slipped out of his grasp and hit the ground headfirst.
Apart from the cliffs, the children’s lives are full of challenges. Tamma’s older sister’s husband falls asleep with the baby, their third, on his lap. The baby falls and injures its head. Her sister has to work twelve-hour shifts as a nurse, and the husband has simply disappeared—he couldn’t cope with what happened. So Tamma has to care for the little ones at night, go to school during the day, and climb in the afternoons—the only thing that matters to her.
They dream of one day climbing professionally and tackling all the great peaks of the world together, but their lives fall apart daily.
It’s gripping, funny, and thrilling. I read it with great pleasure.
Crux by Gabriel Tallent is published by Penguin and costs R420 at Exclusive Books.
The Courtship Gift by Julie Parsons
What do you read after a hit like Crux? Everything seems colourless. At the beach house I picked up an old book that someone had bought for R5 at a second-hand shop—it was published in 1999. There’s hardly any mention of cellphones or email in the novel. It’s a good old-fashioned psychological thriller that grabs you and won’t let go.
The reader first meets Michael. It quickly becomes clear that Michael is not well. He lives inside his head and stalks women. Woe betide the woman who catches his eye. In this case, it is Anna—poor Anna. She is married to David, who is much older than she is and was in fact her aunt’s friend (and lover). She was still at school when he noticed her (poor Anna is often noticed, because she is tall, slender, and beautiful). He overwhelmed her with attention and they later married. They lived in his house and she danced to his tune. One day she found him dead at home: stung to death by bees—he was allergic. There was also an envelope delivered to him containing a box of bees, including the queen.
It was, of course, Michael, who had been watching her for a long time. He sees it as a courtship gift, like the offerings insects give females when they want to mate. It soon becomes clear that David, who lived extravagantly, left behind nothing but debt and had not been faithful to Anna at all. She has to sell the house and is left with nowhere to go.
Fortunately—or rather unfortunately—a new acquaintance, Michael, comes to her rescue. Oh dear. What happens next you’ll have to read for yourself, if you can still get hold of the book. It’s classic domestic noir before it became a buzzword. I recommend it for a beach house or an autumn evening.
The Courtship Gift by Julie Parsons is published by Simon & Schuster and costs R211 at Amazon.
