“On Not Climbing Mountains”: Refusing the Fantasy of Masculine Conquest
- Matthieu Amaré
- 20 hours ago
- 6 min read
In On Not Climbing Mountains, writer Claire Thomas crosses the Swiss Alps after her father’s death. She never climbs. Her book maps out a Switzerland of waiting rooms, trains, and ghosts—writers who died too young, forgotten communist climbers, hidden military infrastructure. The mountains are everywhere, but they remain out of reach. The result is a feminist anti-climbing narrative in which the mountain becomes a metaphor for grief.
A train slips between Zurich and Montricher on a foggy late afternoon. Behind the window, the Alps roll by like a stage set—gray ridgelines, spruce forests, tiny chalets clinging to the slopes. Bee watches the landscape with a kind of muted fascination. Her father has just died, a Swiss emigrant who settled in Australia and never returned home. She is moving through the Switzerland of her ancestors in search of something—what exactly, she doesn’t yet know. But one thing is certain: she will not climb. Not a route, not a summit, not even an alpine hike. The mountains will remain where they are, fixed in place, seen from train stations, train cars, and waiting rooms.
With On Not Climbing Mountains, her third novel, Australian writer Claire Thomas builds a grief narrative that rejects any metaphor of ascent. There is no catharsis at the summit, no symbolic conquest, no reconciliation through vertical effort. On Not Climbing Mountains is a geographical and memorial drift in which the mountain stays inaccessible—not because of physical inability, but because of an aesthetic and political choice. Bee, the book’s main narrator, moves around the mountains, never onto them. She sees them from the human systems that cut through them: railroad tunnels, suspended highways, tourist gondolas. Switzerland becomes a country of transit, a place where you pass through without ever really arriving.
That position—living beside the mountain rather than climbing it—shapes the entire book. Claire Thomas refuses the alpine sublime, that dizzying aesthetic that turns peaks into metaphors for personal transcendence. In her hands, the mountains are not challenges to overcome but indifferent masses, absent presences weighing on the landscape without offering redemption. Gaston Bachelard used the word “topophilia” to describe love of place. Here, what we get is a negative form of topophilia: Bee is fascinated by her father’s Switzerland, but she remains foreign to it, a spectator, unable to fully inhabit the territory. It is as if grief has placed her behind an invisible pane of glass, separated from the world by a quarter inch of window.
The ghosts of altitude
Instead of climbing herself, Bee collects stories about people who lived near the mountains—often women, often dead young, often forgotten. These ghosts move through the book like guiding presences. There is Annemarie Schwarzenbach, the Swiss writer and photographer, a 1930s adventurer who traveled through Afghanistan and Persia, only to die at 34 after an ordinary bicycle crash on a Swiss country road. There is Sophie Taeuber-Arp, a pioneer of abstract art and a member of the Dada movement in Zurich, who died at 53 of carbon monoxide poisoning in a poorly ventilated house.
These women are not climbers, but they lived in the shadow of the mountains, in a country that glorifies male vertical effort while erasing their artistic and intellectual trajectories. Little by little, the book becomes a feminist critique of the alpine myth. In the Swiss and Western imagination, climbing still belongs to men, a fantasy of conquest in which the female body appears only as spectator or victim. By refusing to climb, Bee also refuses that logic: why should she have to prove something by going up? Why should the mountain be the only way to legitimize her presence in this landscape?
There is also Lorenz Saladin, an early 20th-century climber and communist activist, founder of Switzerland’s workers’ climbing movement. Claire Thomas brings him in briefly, as a counterpoint: Saladin wanted to democratize the mountains, to take alpinism away from the bourgeois elite and turn it into a collective, egalitarian practice. But that project failed. Today, Switzerland remains a country where the mountains are privatized, commercialized, turned into an amusement park for wealthy tourists. Bee watches that gap with irony: the gondolas up to the Jungfraujoch—a mountain pass designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site—cost 200 Swiss francs round trip. Access to the sublime comes at a premium.
The impossibility of a summit
Bee’s father never appears directly in the book. He is an absence, a shadow cast over the entire trip. Born in Montricher, a small village in the canton of Vaud, he emigrated to Australia in the 1960s and never came back to Switzerland. Why? Thomas never gives a clear answer. Bee searches for his childhood home in Montricher but never really finds it—or rather, she finds several possible houses, none of them certain. Property records have changed, buildings have been renovated, former residents have died. The search becomes absurd, Kafkaesque.
That geographical wandering becomes a metaphor for grief itself. After someone dies, we all go looking for something—an explanation, a meaning—but we never find exactly what we are looking for. We circle it, gather clues, and eventually accept that resolution is not coming. Claire Thomas rejects the usual grief-story arc—denial, anger, acceptance—in favor of something flatter, more uncertain: movement without destination. Bee rides trains, visits museums, reads memorial plaques, sleeps in anonymous hotels. She does not “get over” anything. She moves.
The Swiss artist Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, whom Claire Thomas visits in Basel, spent years painting waiting rooms—railway waiting rooms, transit spaces where no one does anything but pass through. Thomas sees in them a metaphor for grief: being stuck in an eternal waiting room, waiting for a train that will never come. Grief as the inability to start moving again. The mountains play the same role. They are there, massive and permanent, but they can neither be crossed nor inhabited. All you can do is move at their feet, just as Bee moves through Switzerland without ever truly arriving in it.
Heidi, bunkers, and an alcoholic novelist
The Switzerland Claire Thomas describes is not the postcard version. No alpine purity, no flower-box chalets, no Heidi skipping through the meadows. The writer invokes the myth of Heidi ironically—that Johanna Spyri novel from 1881 which fixed Switzerland in the cultural imagination as a soft-focus pastoral scene—only to tear it apart. Bee visits “Heidi Village” in Maienfeld, a tourist attraction where the little mountain girl’s house has been reconstructed. It is a dollhouse, a studio set, a Disneyfied Switzerland. Thomas notes, acidly, that the real Switzerland—the one built out of military infrastructure, bunkers hidden beneath chalets, highway tunnels blasting through mountains—remains invisible to tourists.
Because Switzerland is also a militarized country, an alpine bastion built during the Cold War as a fortress against Soviet invasion. Thousands of bunkers are hidden in the Alps, disguised as barns, boulders, chalets. Thomas visits a few of them, now decommissioned and turned into museums or data centers. She lingers on the paradox: a country that sells the image of peaceful neutrality while building massive war infrastructure. The mountain is not just a landscape; it is also territory colonized by the state—mapped, militarized, made productive.
That colonial dimension also appears in the history of the railroads. The Gotthard Tunnel, inaugurated in 1882, cost the lives of hundreds of Italian workers—poor immigrants, exploited, buried alive in collapses. Claire Thomas mentions those anonymous deaths briefly, but does not stay with them for long. That is one of the book’s limits: the Switzerland she describes remains white, European, middle class. The immigrant workers who built the roads, tunnels, and hydroelectric dams remain ghostly. Bee looks at the infrastructure, but never really asks who built it, under what conditions, and for whose benefit. The mountain was not tamed by heroic explorers, but by disposable labor made invisible by official history.
Patricia Highsmith, who lived in exile in Tegna, in the canton of Ticino, during the 1980s, inhabited a bunker-house: thick walls, tiny windows, nearly fortified. Claire Thomas visits it with fascination, seeing in it a metaphor for Switzerland itself—a country that protects itself, folds inward, refuses openness. Highsmith, an American novelist, fled the United States to take refuge in this alpine fortress, but remained isolated there, alcoholic and paranoid. The mountain was not liberation. It was more like a gilded prison.
Staying down low
Montricher, tiny station, end of day. Bee waits for the train that will take her back to Zurich, then the plane back to Australia. She has not found her father’s house. She has not climbed the mountains. She has not resolved her grief. Behind her, the Alps cut into the gray sky, indifferent and intact. They will still be there long after she has left, long after everyone is dead. Claire Thomas ends her book without consolation, without final revelation. Bee leaves the way she came: a spectator in a landscape she will never possess.
On Not Climbing Mountains is a radical book of passivity, using stillness as an antidote to performative motion. It rejects the usual drama of climbing—effort, fall, victory—in favor of a contemplative, melancholy, feminist form of presence. To live near the mountains without climbing them is also to reject the masculine fantasy of conquest, that vertical obsession that turns nature into an opponent to be subdued. Bee stays down low, and that becomes a political act. As if to say that you can exist in the mountains without needing to defeat them.
Read: On Not Climbing Mountains by Claire Thomas (Hachette Australia, 298 pages)ia, 298p.)
