Over the top
1/4/12
Over the top | TLS
The leading international forum for literary culture
Over the top ALAN MCNEE
Over the top
W ade Dav is INTO THE SILENCE The Great War, Mallory and the conquest of Ev erest 655pp. Bodley Head. £25.
Published: 9 December 2011
97 8 1 847 92 1 84 0 US: Knopf. $32.50. 97 8 0 37 5 40889 2 Responding to the disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irv ine during the attempt on Ev erest in 1 924, their fellow climber Teddy Norton wrote, “From the first we accepted the loss of our comrades in that rational spirit which all our generation had learnt in the Great War”. Another member of the team, perhaps consciously echoing Laurence Biny on’s poem “For the Fallen” (1 91 4), commented that the two men “had gone, without their ev er knowing the beginnings of decay ”. Mallory and Irv ine were not the first men to die in the attempt to climb the world’s highest peak, only the most famous. Sev en Sherpa porters perished in an av alanche during the prev ious assault, in 1 922, while the ex plorer and scholar Alex ander Kellas and the Indian orderly Asghar Khan both died during the reconnaissance that discov ered the northern route to Ev erest v ia Tibet in 1 921 . The reactions to these deaths had been similarly stoic, and sometimes apparently heartless. “It is v ery rough luck and ev ery one was v ery much upset. Howev er, it can’t be helped”, wrote one colleague of Kellas’s death. As Wade Dav is points out, the men who attempted to first surv ey and then climb Ev erest had, almost without ex ception, surv iv ed some of the worst horrors of the First World War, and in some cases had also been inv olv ed in the brutal conflict of 1 91 9 on the North-West Frontier. They were no longer easily shocked by death, ev en that of their close companions: the war “had changed the v ery gestalt of death”. The story of Mallory and Irv ine has been told so many times that another book on the topic inev itably risks superfluity . Y et Into the Silence, which took ten y ears to research and write, seems likely to stand as the definitiv e work not just on the ill-fated 1 924 Ev erest attempt, but also on the ex peditions of 1 921 and 1 922, as well as a useful introduction to the history of ex ploration, diplomatic intrigue and imperial adv entures that preceded them. Dav is’s lucid and sometimes haunting prose, his masterly handling of a great v olume of material, his v iv id portraits of the astonishing cast of characters, and of places as div erse as Newfoundland, the trenches of northern France, and the Tibetan plateau, all contribute to this achiev ement. His understanding of the racial, class and colonial assumptions of the period is sophisticated, but he is scrupulous in judging his characters by the standards of their own time rather than ours. Perhaps his most important contribution is his account of the complex and sometimes contradictory impact of the First World War on the climbers, ex plorers and geographers who were drawn to the Himalay as in the y ears following the Armistice. It is this, rather than the widely debated but now esoteric question of whether Mallory and Irv ine actually made it to the summit before their deaths, that engages Dav is and allows him to shed light on the motiv es and assumptions of his subjects. Dav is ex amines why Mallory returned to the mountain a third time, despite his own inner conv iction that it would kill him. Without descending into amateur psy chology , Dav is locates the answer in a unique set of influences and personal characteristics, www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/other_categories/article838120.ece
1/2
1/4/12
Over the top | TLS
foremost among them the ex perience of Mallory and his contemporaries in the First World War. If Mallory and Irv ine’s tale is well known, the story of the Great War has been retold and analy sed so thoroughly that it has largely lost its capacity to shock. It is all the more impressiv e, then, that Dav is can still kindle pity and indignation in the reader with his accounts of the characters’ ex periences at the Somme, Y pres, Passchendaele and Gallipoli. His sketch of the war is as deft and readable as his summaries of Sir Francis Y ounghusband’s incursion into Tibet, the tangled history of Sino-British political manoeuv ring in Tibet, Nepal and Burma, the beliefs of Tibetan Buddhism, and the work of the Surv ey of India. Far from suggesting that the men who turned to Ev erest were simply coarsened or brutalized by their ex perience of the war, Dav is shows how ev en the dangerous and punishing pursuit of high-altitude mountaineering could be a life-affirming activ ity . Quotations from the diaries and letters of ex pedition members illustrate the ly rical, sometimes my stical sensibility with which the climbers approached the mountain. Mallory described his first v iew of Ev erest as a “prodigious white fang ex crescent from the jaw of the world”, and the idea of literally “walking off the map” (the 1 921 ex pedition mapped 1 2,000 square miles of territory prev iously unknown ev en to the surv ey ors of British India) appealed to the sensibilities of men who were traumatized by their war ex periences and often struggling to reintegrate into post-war society . Climbing for these men was not a death cult but a way of affirming life;; y et at the same time they were acutely aware of their own v ulnerability and impermanence. As Dav is concludes, “They had seen so much of death that life mattered less than the moments of being aliv e”. Into the Silence is permeated by this mix of sadness and sublimity . A world apart from the gimmicks and media stunts that hav e surrounded the cult of Mallory and Irv ine, Wade Dav is’s book stands as a fitting memorial to a story that is at once poignant and stirring.
www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/other_categories/article838120.ece
2/2
Over the top | TLS
The leading international forum for literary culture
Over the top ALAN MCNEE
Over the top
W ade Dav is INTO THE SILENCE The Great War, Mallory and the conquest of Ev erest 655pp. Bodley Head. £25.
Published: 9 December 2011
97 8 1 847 92 1 84 0 US: Knopf. $32.50. 97 8 0 37 5 40889 2 Responding to the disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irv ine during the attempt on Ev erest in 1 924, their fellow climber Teddy Norton wrote, “From the first we accepted the loss of our comrades in that rational spirit which all our generation had learnt in the Great War”. Another member of the team, perhaps consciously echoing Laurence Biny on’s poem “For the Fallen” (1 91 4), commented that the two men “had gone, without their ev er knowing the beginnings of decay ”. Mallory and Irv ine were not the first men to die in the attempt to climb the world’s highest peak, only the most famous. Sev en Sherpa porters perished in an av alanche during the prev ious assault, in 1 922, while the ex plorer and scholar Alex ander Kellas and the Indian orderly Asghar Khan both died during the reconnaissance that discov ered the northern route to Ev erest v ia Tibet in 1 921 . The reactions to these deaths had been similarly stoic, and sometimes apparently heartless. “It is v ery rough luck and ev ery one was v ery much upset. Howev er, it can’t be helped”, wrote one colleague of Kellas’s death. As Wade Dav is points out, the men who attempted to first surv ey and then climb Ev erest had, almost without ex ception, surv iv ed some of the worst horrors of the First World War, and in some cases had also been inv olv ed in the brutal conflict of 1 91 9 on the North-West Frontier. They were no longer easily shocked by death, ev en that of their close companions: the war “had changed the v ery gestalt of death”. The story of Mallory and Irv ine has been told so many times that another book on the topic inev itably risks superfluity . Y et Into the Silence, which took ten y ears to research and write, seems likely to stand as the definitiv e work not just on the ill-fated 1 924 Ev erest attempt, but also on the ex peditions of 1 921 and 1 922, as well as a useful introduction to the history of ex ploration, diplomatic intrigue and imperial adv entures that preceded them. Dav is’s lucid and sometimes haunting prose, his masterly handling of a great v olume of material, his v iv id portraits of the astonishing cast of characters, and of places as div erse as Newfoundland, the trenches of northern France, and the Tibetan plateau, all contribute to this achiev ement. His understanding of the racial, class and colonial assumptions of the period is sophisticated, but he is scrupulous in judging his characters by the standards of their own time rather than ours. Perhaps his most important contribution is his account of the complex and sometimes contradictory impact of the First World War on the climbers, ex plorers and geographers who were drawn to the Himalay as in the y ears following the Armistice. It is this, rather than the widely debated but now esoteric question of whether Mallory and Irv ine actually made it to the summit before their deaths, that engages Dav is and allows him to shed light on the motiv es and assumptions of his subjects. Dav is ex amines why Mallory returned to the mountain a third time, despite his own inner conv iction that it would kill him. Without descending into amateur psy chology , Dav is locates the answer in a unique set of influences and personal characteristics, www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/other_categories/article838120.ece
1/2
1/4/12
Over the top | TLS
foremost among them the ex perience of Mallory and his contemporaries in the First World War. If Mallory and Irv ine’s tale is well known, the story of the Great War has been retold and analy sed so thoroughly that it has largely lost its capacity to shock. It is all the more impressiv e, then, that Dav is can still kindle pity and indignation in the reader with his accounts of the characters’ ex periences at the Somme, Y pres, Passchendaele and Gallipoli. His sketch of the war is as deft and readable as his summaries of Sir Francis Y ounghusband’s incursion into Tibet, the tangled history of Sino-British political manoeuv ring in Tibet, Nepal and Burma, the beliefs of Tibetan Buddhism, and the work of the Surv ey of India. Far from suggesting that the men who turned to Ev erest were simply coarsened or brutalized by their ex perience of the war, Dav is shows how ev en the dangerous and punishing pursuit of high-altitude mountaineering could be a life-affirming activ ity . Quotations from the diaries and letters of ex pedition members illustrate the ly rical, sometimes my stical sensibility with which the climbers approached the mountain. Mallory described his first v iew of Ev erest as a “prodigious white fang ex crescent from the jaw of the world”, and the idea of literally “walking off the map” (the 1 921 ex pedition mapped 1 2,000 square miles of territory prev iously unknown ev en to the surv ey ors of British India) appealed to the sensibilities of men who were traumatized by their war ex periences and often struggling to reintegrate into post-war society . Climbing for these men was not a death cult but a way of affirming life;; y et at the same time they were acutely aware of their own v ulnerability and impermanence. As Dav is concludes, “They had seen so much of death that life mattered less than the moments of being aliv e”. Into the Silence is permeated by this mix of sadness and sublimity . A world apart from the gimmicks and media stunts that hav e surrounded the cult of Mallory and Irv ine, Wade Dav is’s book stands as a fitting memorial to a story that is at once poignant and stirring.
www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/other_categories/article838120.ece
2/2
