Guest review by Graeme Fife: EVEREST 1953 by Mick Conefrey

 

"The final climb itself, a gripping story, loses none of its thrill"

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His latest publication, Memory's Ransom, is published by Conrad Press.

British rock climbers pioneered the craze for Alpine exploration in the early nineteenth century, followed by nationals of those countries which might have laid a more immediate claim to proprietorship of the great alpine peaks in their country. Perhaps it may be put down to a Victorian thrust for exploration and conquest riding the crest of imperial expansion. The often incomprehensible obsession with ice and adversity – the polar expeditions – ensued. They formed a part, we may say, of the similar preoccupation with heroic failure which began with the Charge of the Light Brigade, the spilling of blood on foreign sand, a calamity puffed by Sir Henry Newbolt’s jingoist doggerel, Invictus, and finally belittled by the heroic triumph of the Battle of Britain. The fascination of ice perhaps began with Cabot’s search for the North-West Passage and underpins the drive to ‘conquer’ Everest – named for a Surveyor General of India; local names were rejected because of native hesitation about allowing foreigners entry. The Tibetan name, Qomolangma, means Holy Mother, and it must be clarified, mountains are never conquered; they may be climbed but remain a challenge forthwith.

Edward Whymper laid the benchmark. An English illustrator, born in 1861, he was sent to the Pennine Alps to make drawings and, fascinated by the daunting sight of the Matterhorn ‘peak of the Meadows’ near Zermatt, a mighty wind-whipped, partly snowbound pyramid of rock, a giant of those mountains, he determined to climb it. At 5.30 am on 13th July 1865, he and four other Britons with two Zermatt guides set off from Chamonix, bivouacked overnight and, at dawn next day began their assault. At 1.40 pm, Whymper and another climber ‘skipped up the final slope’ to the summit. (The word had not yet been debased as a verb – Americans again.) Descending, one man, roped to three others, slipped: fatally, all fell.

The triumph is reckoned by some to mark the end of the Golden Age of Alpine first assaults. Whymper is honoured with a statue in Chamonix.

In the 1920s, the outstanding climber George Mallory led three expeditions on Everest, the first two times eschewing oxygen - considered infra dig, albeit they happily used stimulants and other drugs. Two failures preceded their final attempt in 1924 when the climbers did use oxygen to combat the debilitating effect of perilously thin air. Mallory and his companion may have reached the top; nobody knows. but both men died and Mallory’s body was not found until 1999. He is alleged to have answered the question ‘Why try to climb it?’ with ‘Because it’s there.’

From that final effort, somehow, the British thought of Everest as ‘their’mountain and Edmund Hillary, a bee-keeper from New Zealand, exceptional Himalyan climber, took part in several exploratory expeditions mounted by British teams from the 1930s on.

The Swiss mounted their own attempts – all dependent on permission from the Nepalese government - and, in 1952, came very close, even as the organisation of another British expedition team proceeded, headed by Colonel John Hunt, a first-rate mountaineer. Nepalese Sherpas were routinely called upon to act as guides, porters and support climbers; one, Tensing Norgay, an exceptional mountaineer, climbed with the Swiss and, warming to their amiable attitude, found the more militaristic hauteur of the British far from conducive. Luckily, Hunt was no martinet but that rare species among miltary men, a fine, sympathetic leader with none of that egotism characteristic of so many British officers. Tensing’s inclusion in the 1953 team was fortuitous. Not only did he prove himself a priceless asset as a climber but he bonded closely with the highly experienced Hillary, another ‘outsider’ like him, to form an indelible partnership.

The politics, tensions, rivalries, accommodations of assembling the team, martialling the complicated manner of approach, preparation and final assault – who was to be chosen? – are skilfully narrated, without bias, even the drama of getting the news to London for Coronation Day in 1953, itself a mini epic; all described with meticulous detail and understanding. The final climb itself, a gripping story, loses none of its thrill, the outcome being known.

As to the shabby behaviour and misreporting of clamouring newshounds after the climb, this forms a sorry footnote to a wonderful exploit, rightly celebrated as a British triumph, albeit the two men who stood on the top of the world had citizenship by right of inclusion as men of the colonial governance. No matter. Their achievement does not wait on partisan claim. They did something none else had ever done; their bravery and fortitude are for all humanity. If their success inevitably overshadows the work of their companions, without that superlative support they might have failed.

Everest 1953 is published by Oneworld.

 More reviews by Graeme:

A Telling of Stones by Neil Rackham

The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey

One Day by David Nicholls

Guest review by C J Driver: THE MOTH AND THE MOUNTAIN by Ed Caesar

"This is a man who can't turn back, won't turn back, doesn't turn back ..."

Jonty Driver has kept himself busy in lockdown working with a local firm, Artwrite of Rye, to produce four booklets of his poems, some illustrated by himself, and a card, The Slave-Bell at Doornhoek, a poem and a painting. The booklets are: Image & Image, some old photographs & a dozen unrhymed sonnets; The Journey Back; The Chinese Poems, 1979-2020; and A Winter’s Day at Westonbirt & other poems. All are available from Artwrite. See more on Jonty's website.

I’d better start by mentioning that, though I didn’t teach him, Ed Caesar was a pupil at Wellington College when I was Master there. I admitted him to the school in 1993 as a non-fee-paying Foundationer because his father had been killed on active service with the Royal Navy in 1982. After taking a degree from Edinburgh, Ed has made a successful career for himself as a journalist and is now writing books too: the first, Two Hours, was about the marathon and the chances of someone’s breaking two hours to run it. This one is about an attempt in 1934 by a brave but largely deluded Englishman to be the first to climb to the top of Everest. 

“By any rational measure, he (Maurice Wilson) had not the tiniest chance of reaching the summit.” The third son of a Yorkshire family, he had fought through  the First World War, joining as a private and then being commissioned, and winning a Military Cross for his bravery. Recovered from his wounds, but still mentally damaged, he had left Bradford and emigrated to New Zealand. After various mishaps, marital and otherwise, he returned to the UK and then settled on a scheme to buy an aeroplane to fly, solo, to the lower slopes of Mount Everest, and then to climb the mountain, on his own. He didn’t know how to fly, and he had never climbed a mountain. But he does fly solo all the way to India in his Moth, and evades all efforts to stop him getting to the mountain. And he does set off to climb what no one has climbed before.

It is an extraordinary story, garnered from a variety of sources, including Wilson’s own diary and letters he wrote to a woman he was in love with (she was married to someone else). Ed Caesar is, I think, meticulously truthful; he doesn’t pretend to know what he can’t know and, when he guesses, he makes it clear that he is guessing. In the end, the story becomes somehow close to tragic: this is a man who can’t turn back, who won’t turn back, who doesn’t turn back, even when any rational being would realise he can’t survive. I found the book utterly absorbing, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

The Moth and the Mountain is published by Viking

See also: Touching the Void by Joe Simpson

TOUCHING THE VOID by Joe Simpson, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"It seems that he relived the experience in vivid detail through his writing, capturing the extremes of terror and anguish but also of giddy exhilaration ..."

Linda Newbery has written many novels for young readers and one for adults, Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (published in paperback as Missing Rose). Her Victorian Gothic young adult novel, Set in Stone, was children's category winner in the Costa Book Awards. She is currently working on a new novel and completing a non-fiction title which will be published this year. 

Just looking at that cover is enough to make my stomach lurch in fear. But, although my own experience is limited to walking to easy summits with at most a little rock-scrambling, I love the lure of mountains and am fascinated by the courage and single-mindedness, even fanaticism, of those who tackle forbidding heights.

I read Joe Simpson's account of his extraordinary near-death experience in the Peruvian Andes many years ago, and have seen the Kevin Macdonald film. This time I listened on Audible, and although obviously I knew the outcome - and so does everyone, as here's Joe Simpson writing about it - I was as gripped as on my first reading.

The facts of what happened on the slopes of Siula Grande are well known far beyond mountaineering circles. With climbing partner Simon Yates, Joe completes the ascent of the treacherous, previously unclimbed, 4,500-foot West Face of the mountain. Shortly after they begin to descend, Joe falls, fracturing his leg and driving his tibia through his knee. With conditions worsening, no fuel for their stove and no food left, they attempt to descend quickly to the glacier, Simon supporting his partner on a rope from above, but he inadvertently lowers Joe over a sheer drop. Knowing that both are in mortal danger, and slipping from a snow ledge himself, Simon cuts the rope, sending Joe to (as he presumes) his death.

Joe Simpson has always made it clear that he doesn't blame Yates; it seems to be climbers' ethos that anyone in that dreadful situation would do the same. But Joe, instead of falling to his death, plunges into a crevasse, landing on a snow bridge. Astonished at still being alive he finds himself in darkness and extreme cold, with frostbitten fingers, a fathomless drop beneath him, an excruciating injury, fading torch battery and no provisions … Yet against fearsome odds he slowly extricates himself, facing then a long, agonised crawl over glacier and boulder fields before reaching the relative safety of base camp. Even then - will he reach camp (itself the height of Mont Blanc, and two days' rough walking from the nearest village) before Simon and their waiting colleague Richard depart for Lima, as surely they will, with no reason to wait? It says much for the skill of the writing that even though Joe obviously does make it, tension remains high. 

Whether your knowledge of climbing paraphernalia and techniques is greater or less than mine, it's a mesmerising read. A large part of the appeal is that while describing his 25-year-old self in retrospect as "bold, ambitious, or even a little crazy ... too much testosterone and too little imagination," Joe Simpson is also frank about his feelings of weakness and despair. Though loth to let Simon see how scared he is at particularly dangerous moments of the ascent - his tough, capable persona must be maintained - to us he lets the mask slip. It seems that he relived the experience in vivid detail through his writing, capturing the extremes of terror and anguish but also of exhilaration. There is so much I could pick out, but I’ll just give these samples:

On reaching the summit: "I felt the usual anticlimax. What now? It was a vicious circle. If you succeed with one dream, you come back to square one and it's not long before you're conjuring up another, slightly harder, a bit more ambitious - a bit more dangerous. I didn't like the thought of where it might be leading me ... the very nature of the game was controlling me, taking me towards a logical and frightening conclusion."

After the first fall: "We both knew the truth, it was very simple. I was injured and unlikely to survive. Simon could get down alone. While I waited on his actions, it felt as if I was holding something terrifyingly fragile and precious." Simon could, he realises, simply leave him there to die.

When he emerges from the crevasse and realises that his struggle is far from over: “I would probably die out there amid those boulders. The thought didn’t alarm me. It seemed reasonable, matter-of-fact … If I died, well, that wasn’t so surprising, but I wouldn’t have just waited for it to happen. The horror of dying no longer affected me as it had in the crevasse … In a peculiar way it was refreshing to be faced with simple choices … I had never been so entirely alone, and although this alarmed me it also gave me strength.”

In a new epilogue, following the making of the film, Joe wonders what course his life would have taken without his Siula Grande experience, concluding that he’d have looked for more and more extreme challenges and probably killed himself in the process, as many of his peers have. Instead, although he continued climbing, the international success of Touching the Void launched a career as writer and speaker.

I think I’ll continue my armchair mountaineering with another Joe Simpson memoir, This Game of Ghosts. Who else can’t resist mountain books? What do you recommend?

Touching the Void is published by Vintage.

The Audiobook is read by Daniel Weyman (Joe) and Andrew Wincott (Simon), with an introduction by Chris Bonington.

See also: Linda Newbery's review of a ghostly mountaineering novel, Michelle Paver's Thin Air.

Two eerie tales: MR GODLEY'S PHANTOM by Mal Peet and THIN AIR by Michelle Paver, reviewed by Linda Newbery

'With both these novels, you'd better have uninterrupted time ahead before you begin.'

Linda Newbery has published widely for young readers and is now completing her second novel for adults. Her latest book is The Key to Flambards, which follows K M Peyton's classic Flambards quartet but is set in the present. 

I've admired Mal Peet's work since reading Tamar, a story of the Dutch resistance combined with a present-day mystery. Published for young adults, it won the Carnegie Medal, but is of equal interest to adults (must read it again.) Life: An Exploded Diagram, a coming-of-age novel set at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, was equally impressive. Mal Peet reminds me of Aidan Chambers in that his novels - intelligent, inventive, provocative - blur the boundary between young adult and adult fiction. At his death he had left three unpublished novels: The Murdstone Trilogy (which isn't a trilogy and wasn't intended to be); Beck, a young adult novel still in progress which was completed by Meg Rosoff; and this - a first draft with notes to himself for its revision.

It's a novella really, though generously spaced, illustrated by Ian Beck and handsomely produced in hardback (now in paperback too, with the striking cover shown below). As Daniel Hahn says in his Afterword: "It is many kinds of book rolled into one: a story about a man recovering from trauma, a historical novel, and even a police procedural." It's also a ghost story of a sort. The phantom of the title refers - partly, at least - to Mr Godley's pride and joy, his Rolls-Royce Phantom Three Sedance de Ville, with the bonnet mascot shown on the cover. It's this car that entices Martin Heath, a distinguished young war veteran suffering from what we'd now call PTSD, to take up a post as Mr Godley's chauffeur and handyman at a remote Devon mansion, Burra Hall.  

But there are other 'ghosts', too. The frail and elderly Mr Godley himself reminds Martin, horribly, of the pitiful sights he saw on entering Belsen: 'Martin had felt neither rage nor even revulsion. rather, it was like discovering that he had contracted an incurable disease; that, having inhaled the miasma of death, he could never be well again. That his heart might eat itself.' And Mr Godley in turn is haunted by his son Julian, who was killed in action less than a month before the 1918 Armistice, and of whom Martin seems to remind him.

This might sound unbearably grim, but in Mal Peet's hands it isn't - at least, not all the time. Peet has an expertly light touch that enables him to indicate horrors without ever overdoing the pathos or telling us how to react. Martin's recovery is aided by the willingness of servant girl Annie to engage in regular and vigorous sex, and there's humorous observation: Godley's laugh is "four dry, chickeny sounds" and Martin, assessing Annie's appeal on first meeting her, notes that "it was difficult to judge the attractiveness of a woman eating cabbage." There are unexpected turns, and then more, with light relief provided in the viewpoints of Detective Inspector Sheepstone and DS Panter, called in to investigate the old man's disappearance. But towards the end, reading Mr Godley's years-old journal which is presented in a plausibly crabbed and not easily legible hand, the emotional power was such that I felt I was prying into the private anguish of a real person.

The title, subtitle, and many things in the story don't yield all their meanings at once. As with all Mal Peet's work, it's a novel that will repay re-reading.

Like him, Michelle Paver first made her name by writing for young readers; she's best known for her award-winning Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series. I was gripped by Dark Matter, with its high Arctic setting, so was eager to read Thin Air, which takes us to the Himalayas in the mid 1930s in the company of an expedition attempting to reach the summit of Kangchenjunga. They're following the path of a failed attempt made thirty years previously; five mountaineers of that party were killed, as documented in a published account by leader Sir Edmund Lyell.

From the moment when narrator Dr Stephen Pearce meets the only living survivor of that expedition, the omens are unsettling. Dogged by guilt over a broken engagement and constantly needled by taunts from his brother Kits, a more accomplished climber, Stephen soon realises that he's not the only one alert to forebodings; the 'coolies' on whom the party depend for the conveying of supplies to Base Camp and on upward have many superstitions of their own, partly to do with the demands of the mountain gods but also connected to the presence of an uneasy spirit. When these 'coolies' find an old rucksack, identified as the property of a climber from Lyell's expedition whose body was never discovered, Stephen is assailed by mounting feelings of dread. His scientific background only makes his hallucinations the more worrying: "... even if I'm wildly mistaken about everything, about what I saw on the Crag and now here at the crevasse - even if  it's all simply the result of oxygen deficiency - how does that help? The idea that altitude is giving me waking nightmares, that thin air is altering my very perceptions and deceiving my own mind into betraying me ... I find that horrifying. It's a kind of possession." And the dog Cedric who's adopted the party acts as a barometer, frequently disappearing when the atmosphere darkens.

As bickering breaks out among the group and individuals suffer from frostbite and worse, we're all too aware of the dangers that must be confronted before the summit is reached. But the real horror in the story comes from the cleverly contrived realisation of the fate suffered by the owner of the rucksack - and how the truth about the Lyell expedition has been concealed.  

Michelle Paver excels at taking us with her characters into extreme conditions. I simply couldn't put this book down; it's a ghost story for which I'll willingly suspend disbelief, full of tension and thoroughly convincing on the details of terrain, the lure and terrors of the mountains, bodily frailty and survival. With both these novels, you'd better have uninterrupted time ahead before you begin.

Mr Godley's Phantom - an infection of evil is published by David Fickling Books

Thin Air - a Ghost Story is published by Orion

(Pictured: Mal Peet, and the new paperback cover for Mr Godley's Phantom, published 1st August; Michelle Paver and her latest novel, Wakenhyrst.)