In her third novel, On Not Climbing Mountains, Australian author Claire Thomas examines the cultural and personal significance of the Swiss Alps through vignettes and historical references. The story follows narrator Beatrice “Bee” Angst as she navigates grief amid mountain-inspired scenes. The book draws on figures like Virginia Woolf and Johanna Spyri to highlight themes of mourning and connection.
Claire Thomas's latest work, On Not Climbing Mountains, published by Hachette, structures its narrative around Baedeker’s Switzerland, a 19th-century guidebook. The novel unfolds in five parts, each tied to areas of Switzerland and its surroundings, spotlighting the Alps' influence on authors, scientists, historians, and artists.
The protagonist, Beatrice “Bee” Angst, a young woman grieving her father's recent death and her mother's long-ago passing, journeys beside the mountains. Her experiences evoke Virginia Woolf's “moments of being,” capturing fleeting connections and the sublime comfort of the landscape. Bee finds inspiration in Jean-Frédéric Schnyder’s Wartsaal series, 92 paintings of Swiss train station waiting rooms featuring benches, walls, ceilings, and clocks.
One scene describes Bee encountering a train advertisement stating: “Life is too beautiful to spend it in a waiting room.” Yet, for Bee, these spaces buzz with possibility; she reflects, “engrossed in the possibilities of the rooms,” feeling as if she might “step into a painting at any moment and sit down on one of the chairs.” The novel's conclusion focuses on a painting emphasizing a mountain glimpse through a window, symbolizing hope and forward movement. Bee muses on her father: “I could have known more.”
Childhood memories of Johanna Spyri’s Heidi evoke Heimweh, or nostalgia, for alpine meadows and simple joys, though Bee later views it as sentimental. The book also references Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein near Lake Geneva; James Baldwin composing Go Tell It on the Mountain in Leukerbad; Patricia Highsmith in Ticino for A Long Walk From Hell; Monique Saint-Hélier in La Chaux-de-Fonds; and Elizabeth von Arnim in Crans-Montana for In the Mountains, where cousin Katherine Mansfield visited for tuberculosis treatment and penned mountain-reflective stories.
Thomas quotes Woolf’s The Symbol: “The mountain […] is a symbol.” The novel, Thomas's third after Fugitive Blue (2008, Dobbie Award winner) and The Performance (2021, shortlisted for Christina Stead Prize and longlisted for Miles Franklin Literary Award), portrays mountains as emblems of beauty, loss, and potential.