I can't put my finger on exactly what is wrong with this book, but it is lacking something essential. The writing is just fine, but a bit too stiff. Every page has an awkwardly constructed metaphor or two (I will insert some examples later!). The characters are flat, and I found myself not caring if the whole lot of them fell off the roof while "night climbing."

The idea behind this book is really interesting - a group of Cambridge students who climb the university walls. The book is blatantly marketed towards fans of The Secret History (aren't they all?) and, as promised, follows Donna Tartt's formula to a T. However, it comes across as a cheap knockoff.

My hope is that Ivo Stourton hones his writing skills and character development and produces something original in the future. ( )

Although I found this quite laborious in places, I did enjoy it. There was a lot to admire in the prose style, but I felt it could benefit from quite a lot of pruning as the book went on. The plot was too lean to sustain the weight of ponderous description. For this reason, it took me some time to fully appreciate the thematic strands, as I initially mistook some key elements as extraneous description. ( )

Het verhaal past geheel niet bij de titel. Ik denk dat de schrijver gehoord heeft dat er op Cambridge wel studenten waren die zich hiermee bezig hebben gehouden en dacht : dat giet ik er nog als een sausje bovenop. Het hele verhaal vond ik zwak. Een onwaarschijnlijke zwendel, personages die stuk voor stuk onsympathiek zijn. De schrijver heeft gewoon een aantal ingredienten door elkaar gemixt, maar het resultaat is een 'natte cake'. ( )

On the back cover Nicholas Coleridge states that the book was 'so exhilarating, authentic and vivid it made... (him) want to become a Cambridge student all over again.' Well if that's the kind of devilment Cambridge students get up to yeah who wouldn't. Though I doubt it involves art forgeries.

The opening introduces the central character, James, who is trying to settle into college life and all the formalities that such a life offers. The rest of the characters Francis, Michael, Lisa and Jessica offer James a life of parties, friendship and freedom that he is hungry for. Little is mentioned about night climbing and it seems that the plot veers from strained friendship and inner clique politics to an art forgery and subsequent millions that are made. This takes the story down a slippery slope from which it can't escape.

The novel pretends to be clever with descriptive language though this lags and grows tiring and archaic. I kept on reading hoping to find out more about night climbing and the possible dynamics that might exist within a circle of friends. Apparently night climbing wasn't as important to the plot as I thought. Instead the author 'cleverly' decides to land you in an Ocean's Eleven plot. Come on! The characters were manipulative, vain, pretentious, greedy, childish, stuck up twats that I had no interest in. I ended up delighting in their misery and misfortune. If you lapped up The Secret History then this is not for you. ( )

“The Night Climbers”, Ivo Stourton

Ivo Stourton’s debut novel was, for me, a classic library impulse borrowing. Nestling in that awkward genre somewhere between crime and literature, with an appealing cover and an engaging description it fitted easily into my late May borrowing, and then, regrettably sat on the shelf while other books competed with it for my attention – so much so that it very nearly went back unread.

That didn’t happen – and I am enormously pleased about that. The slim paperback made its way into my briefcase last week for a trip to Ankara, and proved the most pleasant of surprises – an engaging, erudite, and accomplished work that had me rechecking the author’s details, astonished my the maturity of the writing.

Set in a Cambridge that must be the late 1990s (although at times it feels much earlier, bygone era) and a contemporary London (it doesn’t pay to try and over analyse the dates, as I’m pretty sure they don’t quite add up – this however does not matter in the slightest) it follows the development of a young undergraduate, James Walker, as he moves from shy undergraduate, through socialite student, to prosperous lawyer. This transformation, from likeable youth to thoroughly unpleasant 30 something is an absorbing morality tale, accurately portrayed in the first person, as Walker punctuate his narrative with observations such as

How foolish it is to believe that you cannot love someone for their fortune.

This cuts to the heart of the novel. This is a story about the corrupting influence of money and its power to ruin. The undergraduate Walker is not rich, and does not come from vast wealth, his father now living in what is hinted at being somewhat straitened circumstances. To live up to his new found friends, who delight in flouting authority, from pirating essays to the nocturnal scaling of college buildings the title refers to, he spends profligately, if unnecessarily, and when his doomed friend, Francis, is cut off from his wealth, Walker is a ready accomplice in their descent into more extreme forms of crime – even if throughout he remains by no means the most criminal or corrupted of his set.

Make no mistake however, despite Walker not being the worst of people, the London lawyer he becomes is thoroughly unappealing. An arrogant, alcoholic-in-denial (with the damning tell-tale phrase of “I never really got drunk any more” appearing), habitual user of pornography and prostitution fails utterly to stir much sympathy in us, the ‘redeeming’ quality of his acquired wealth doing nothing to make him a better person. The roots of this behaviour are signposted throughout the novel; in particular his admiration for Michael’s sexual prowess is depressing.

He was much further advanced in seduction techniques than the rest of us, who still thought that sex in some way was linked to mutual affection.

Intriguingly Walker initially does not rashly plunge into friendships at Cambridge, following the advice of his father and Evelyn Waugh to choose his friends wisely not quickly. His reaction to Michael’s arrival through his window and ensuing introduction to the rest of the night climbers, which sets him on his path to ruin, show that perhaps he was not so judicious in his choice, and that the comment of the porter, initially chasing the climbers, that much worse could stem from what appears to be just youthful antics, was indeed prescient.

This is not a long book, it was read between arriving at Ankara’s eerie deserted airport to fly home and landing at Heathrow, and ultimately this is a fulfilling book, reminiscent in some ways of Hollinghurst’s “Line of Beauty”. There is a trace of redemption at the end, with some level of closure being found, and a realisation that Walker had been misled by others, as well as misleading himself. None of this excuses much of his behaviour or lifestyle, but by the end one starts to realise that his cold night odyssey with old fellow night climber Jessica, her beauty now faded, is a journey out of his depraved existence, in the same way his night climbing in Cambridge sucked him down. To close the book, and realise that you cared about his fate, is testament to the precocious skill that Stourton has brought to his tale. Following this up will not be easy for him.

Review archived at: http://southlondonbook.blogspot.com/2009/06/night-climbers-ivo-stourton.html