Going strong for the top
Sara Wheeler
HOW THE ENGLISH MADE THE ALPS by Jim Ring John Murray, £19.99, pp. 287 KILLING DRAGONS: THE CONQUEST OF THE ALPS by Fergus Fleming Granta, £20, pp. 398 FEARLESS ON EVEREST by Julie Summers Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 290 LEFT FOR DEAD: MY JOURNEY FROM EVEREST by Beck Weathers Little, Brown, £16.99, pp. 286 Few books are about mountains; many concern the men who climb them. Testosterone-fuelled hardbacks with dayglo covers depicting the frozen-bearded author teetering triumphantly on some far-off peak regularly jostle for space on the travel shelves. For the hapless reader the sun breaks through only when a mountaineerwriter can rise above the bivouacs and crampons and enter the heady air beyond, Maurice Herzog did it in his enchanting Annapurna, the story of the groundbreaking French expedition which summited via the north face in 1950. In our own time Joe Simpson entered the immortal zone in 1988 with Touching the Void, a gripping modern classic about near-death on the Peruvian Siula Grande when Simpson's climbing partner cut the sacred rope tying them together.
Climbing literature took wing during the golden age of mountaineering, a brief, 15year period in the middle of the 19th century when the image of a constipated Victorian clinging to a perilous rockface in a tweed jacket bulging with a copy of The Symposium was engraved on the English imagination. The Himalaya were still impossibly foreign: the peaks in the heart of Europe drew those pioneers. In publishing terms lately it has worked the other way round: after an avalanche of books on Himalayan climbing and a cascade of titles on the sainted Mallory, attention has suddenly turned to the Alps, and this year two books appeared on the rise of those mountains as a destination for adventurers and tourists. One has to feel sorry for their authors, as both books cover the same
ground, enlivened with the same epic climbs and peopled by the same vigorous crew of scientists and barking Englishmen.
How the English Made the Alps by Jim Ring and Fergus Fleming's Killing Dragons: the Conquest of the Alps are loose, anecdotal social histories that begin at the end of the 18th century. Both cover the response of the Romantics ('I never knew.' gasped Shelley on his first visit to Chamonix. 'I never imagined what mountains were before') and the role of Ruskin who, according to Fleming, 'approached the high peaks in the same manner as he did his strange, unconsummated marriage: look but do not touch.' Ring calls the fourth volume of Modern Painters the single most influential work in alpine development.
Ruskin later complained bitterly that the Alps were being vulgarised, a process that lies at the heart of these two entertaining books. The railways opened Europe up to the middle classes, Cook's tours facilitated group tourism, and following the rush for a cure for tuberculosis at Davos, alpine sanatoria sprang up specialising in every known ailment (the spa at Pfaffer was pitched at people who had recently been tortured, a pleasing early example of niche marketing). The rise of winter sports and a more technical approach to climbing finished off the old order.
Killing Dragons is an agreeably breezy read (the title comes from the beasts that were believed to inhabit the Alps until well into the 18th century). Deploying the same laconic style that characterised Barrow's Boys, his well-received chronicle of creaky Admiralty expeditions to the Arctic, Fleming favours straightforward narrative rather
than penetrating analysis of the appeal of the mountains to the European mind. He has an eye for the heroic failure, whereas Jim Ring's book is more sober, and on the whole more thoughtful, focussing on intellectual climates and contextual history. As Dickens noted, for a time both the Alps and the Himalaya functioned as a kind of snowy Oxbridge annexe. It didn't even matter if you couldn't actually go: while at Cambridge Geoffrey Winthrop Young, a key figure in British mountaineering circles for half a century, published a Guide to the Rooftops of Trinity. (In my own college, Brasenose, some years later, we favoured indoor ascents. I briefly held the fiercely contested speed record for a complete circuit of the library without touching the ground.) According to Ring, Mallory and his littleknown companion Sandy Irvine 'evoked the climax of the heroic age of English alpinism'. He includes a potted biography of Irvine, but another publisher, glimpsing a small gap in the burgeoning catalogue of Mallorian literature, has just released a whole book on the golden-haired Adonis who so famously vanished 'going strong for the top'. Fearless on Everest by Irvine's great-niece Julie Summers is a workmanlike biography and a useful complement to the 1979 Irvine Diaries. A dashing rowing Blue from Birkenhead, Irvine was an inexperienced climber and a surprising choice for the last summit attempt, but in many ways he is a classic Boy's Own hero, bursting with practical ideas on how to improve the oxygen kit and full of guts. He was 22 when he died, 16 years younger than Mallory, and, like Captain Scott a dozen years before them, in death both men were instantly mythologised.
Climbers tend to be obsessive; few have been quite as fanatical, surely, as Beck Weathers, the American pathologist who lost his nose and hands on the unforgiving slopes of Everest after spending a night in the open during a storm which killed nine other climbers. This was the famous May 1996 catastrophe featured in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, the bestselling mountain book of all time. I approached Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest with trepidation, anticipating the usual American chintzy parable about how a brush with death has enabled the digitally challenged victim to lurve his family.
Weathers was obsessed all right. Turning to climbing as a cure for depression, by the end he was getting up to exercise at four in the morning six days a week. To enable him to see better on the mountains he had a radical keratonomy in which tiny incisions are made in the corneas to alter focal length — but nobody knew that at high altitude a cornea thus altered flattens and thickens, which means you can barely see at all. High on Everest, lost, blind, profoundly hypothermic and in mortal danger for many hours, Weathers finally made it to a tent. Lying in it, he heard the others talk
ing about 'a dead guy' inside. He wondered who that could be.
The team waiting at base camp called his wife Peach on the satellite phone and told her he was dead, then rang back later to say he wasn't as dead as they had thought. She organised, from Texas, the highestaltitude helicopter rescue ever. The book reveals how the Weathers' marriage had become unmanageable as the astonishingly solipsistic Beck became increasingly involved with the mountains. Peach is the heroine of the volume. 'He believes,' she says of her husband's insane exercise routine, 'that no pain equalled no gain, which added up to no brain.'
It does get schmaltzy (That day on the mountain I traded my hands for my family and for my future'), and I got bored with the early autobiographical chapters. But Weathers redeems the story with shafts of black humour, unusual for American adventure books, and even squirts of irony (against the law in some states). Left for Dead is curiously compelling. It benefits enormously from a script-like structure, with lengthy first-person interjections from all the bit-parts, and the direct-speech immediacy suits the subject matter. Weathers' ghostwriter is called Stephen a Michaud and he is a star.
The account of the disaster itself vibrates with implicit judgment. According to Weathers, on the crucial day Anatoli Boukreev, a guide with another group, 'had forsaken his duty as a guide' by summiting alone. Boukreev can't answer back now as an avalanche has killed him, but he did publish his own account of those terrible days on Everest. The Climb (St Martin's, £5.99) got very little coverage over here, and while it is not a literary masterpiece it certainly sheds new light on what has become the most famous mountaineering disaster of all time.
Almost everyone who writes about Everest now gnashes their teeth over the depredations of mass guided climbs and the Coke cans littering base camp. The events of 1996 provoked the same cries of cui bow? as Edward Whymper's 1865 Matterham tragedy that killed four; as far back as 1786 the Alpinist Horace de Saussure expressed the same contempt for guides that we think a modern phenomenon (Karkauer memorably describes a New York socialite being pulled up Everest on a lead while a Sherpa bowed under the weight of her satellite equipment). Alison Hargreaves' death on K2 leaving two small children motherless unleashed a storm of moral outrage. But I think the mountains will win in the end. Innumerable gleaming faces remain unclimbed, and while they do men and women will respond to the ancient human impulse to get to the top. One or two might even be able to write as well as they can climb — spirits, as Mallory's obituarist wrote of the nation's knightly hero, that can go 'higher than the highest summit of the known world'.
Previous page
