Over the last week I read
Blood Sweat and Smears,
Gary Gibson's autobiography. After
his appearance on Grimer's podcast I became keen to read his then-forthcoming book as he seemed like a much more interesting and well-rounded bloke than I'd assumed and I started imagining some quirky self-published oddity that would be an unexpectedly insightful gem, even if only unintentionally. Even a
sycophantic and unpromising review on the other channel ("On humour, Gibson has a comic side.") didn't put me off.
I found the book really pretty dissapointing, partly because a lot of the non-climbing details of his life were covered in a much more engaging way on Jam Crack, partly because the bolting indiscretions aren't covered much differently than in his history sections of the current CC Pembroke and Lundy guides but mostly because there's not really much controversy, revalation or reflection apart from that. He admits to lying about two or three routes and repeatedly disses the quality of his early routes and youthful drive to be in magazines but doesn't mention chipping or other routes that he's commonly considered not have climbed and takes a mildly defiant stance (other people did bad things too/ I wasn't thinking about what I was doing too much/ I did climb bold routes as well as doing loads of bolting/ I don't care about what other people think) on everything else. As the UKC review says lots of juicy legal stuff isn't mentioned and apart from chucking Martin Crocker under the bus (he couldn't understand why Gibson lowered off and tried again when attempting new routes apparently, as he just pulled back on and continued climbing himself
) the only time he really "names names" are the repeated disses of Pat Littlejohn, the Noel Edmonds to Gibson's Alan Partridge.
The most frustrating aspect of the book though is the dearth of descriptive language. It's almost like a
footballer's biography in that it's basically just a list of events with a bit of personal background, interspersed with short pub-story type anecdotes and paragraphs from his climbing partners, mostly summaries of events rendered superflous by also being described in the main text. The many crags mentioned are rarely described in terms other than their location in the country, their height or length and plain adjectives like "amazing" "impressive" and "stunning". The sensible decision to write only for a rock-climbing audience has obviously been made but a climber reading who's never been to the Roaches wouldn't gain any understanding of what makes climbing there any different to, say, Ban-y-Gor apart from the length of the drive from Stoke. At no point is the texture of a piece of rock described or a hold mentioned in terms other than its distance from another- on the three or four times when the actual experience of climbing is described it's in such basic terms that there's no sensation of being able to picture yourself there and the stories of sketchy moments are dealt with so briefly as to be comically bathetic.
I found this amazing as I'd assumed that there'd be plenty of promotion of Gibson's routes, but they're never described more than "a thin crack" "the stunning arete" etc. You really feel like the finding of the crags, the cleaning of the routes and the organisation of a willing belayer and photographer are far more important to him than the climbing. It also completely obscures the details of what is inevitably the biggest issue- where it's appropriate to bolt and where it isn't. The reasons that Cheedale Cornice has become an accepted sport crag while Stennis Ford hasn't are obvious to anyone with a knowledge of the finer characteristics of each cliff but none of those characteristics are mentioned in the book so the inexperienced reader is left as confused as Gibson seemingly is as to why he was vindicated at one and not the other. I know I shouldn't have been surprised that the book would have a quality over quantity-type approach but until about two thirds of the way through I really thought that the story was being rattled through in order to leave space for a longer, insightful chapter about his near-fatal accident and recovery but that gets short shrift too and it's not long before the end is in sight and he's gone full Partridge, talking us though his holidays and telling us how nice the celebrities he met on trains and at marathons are.
There's one brief section where Gibson's cleaning in Huntsman's Leap- he describes the joy of peeling grass away and the sea far below briefly turning brown as each clod of earth falls into it. For one paragraph I could feel the pleasure of the combination of solitude in such an atmnospheric place and excitement of the discovery and forthcoming conquest that must have driven him. Just from that one visual detail. Sadly this is a lone exception that highlights how much better a different approach to the book could have made it.
