This Novel Has Readers Climbing the Walls

Apart from a song off a mid-’80s Cocteau Twins album, I’d never actually heard of anybody named Ivo until Ivo Stourton‘s The Night Climbers showed up in my mailbox a couple weeks ago. Unfortunately, Stourton’s video tour of Cambridge, where his novel is set, doesn’t actually feature any footage of him scaling the walls of the university buildings. But a crucial piece of his source material, The Night Climbers of Cambridge, is also available online, and it’s got lots of photographs of the original Climbers in action, along with a rather dry sense of humor: “Passing along an archway with pillars on the left, we come to the high railings separating the Old Library from King’s,” runs a typical sequence. “Along the top is a row of revolving spikes, so that the railings cannot be climbed direct. This does not matter, for it is the building on which we want to climb, and not the spikes.”