50 Book Challenge: book three
Everest South West Face by Chris Bonington
I love books about mountaineering even though I can barely climb a ladder without a serious attack of vertigo. Other works in this genre that I have greatly enjoyed include A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by the incomparable Eric Newby and the thoughtful and erudite Mountains of the Mind by Robert MacFarlane – a read that could very easily make you reconsider your own relationship to risk and to the great outdoors. Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void is sitting in the pile of books to be tackled in February. So when I found this sitting on a shelf in a second-hand bookshop, with myself in a buying mood, I could not resist.
[Buy from Amazon
The book is an account of the 1972 expedition to conquer the south-west face of Everest told partially as a retrospective commentary and partially through contemporaneous diary entries. I thought I might be in for a slog but Bonington’s style is highly readable and he knows how to inject a good measure of suspense into the narrative. One of the most interesting features is the insight he offers into the task of managing such an expedition – something that, when you take into account the cultural requirements of dealing with sherpas and the challenge of telling highly individualistic and hard-headed mountaineering types what to do and how to pull together, makes herding cats look like a doddle.
The foreword, written by Lord Hunt, calls this “one of the great stories of our time” and he’s not wrong. I personally wish a little more had been done to keep the end of the story from being spoiled – but I guess the book was published soon after the expedition when it was fresh in everybody’s mind. Nevertheless, a highly recommended read.