Jamling Tenzing Norgay: Touching my father's soul

By RICHARD THOMSON

Jamling Tenzing Norgay is the son of Tenzing Norgay, who with Edmund Hillary in 1953 became the first people to reach the top of Mt Everest.

Touching My Father's Soul follows the lives of father and son as each makes his ascent of the mountain.

For Jamling, the climb is very much a means of coming to terms with his father's legacy. (It is interesting to note that the sons of Hillary and Tenzing both felt driven to climb the mountain.)

There is a sense in which the mountain took away the father, and Tenzing's fame created a certain distance between father and son. After his 1953 ascent, Tenzing gained enormous stature in India and Nepal; he was celebrated and revered across the subcontinent as a hero, and his name became embroiled in nationalist politics.

Jamling climbed Everest in 1996 with the Imax movie expedition. That was the year 11 people died on the mountain in one of the worst mountaineering disasters of recent times, the dead including the New Zealand guides Rob Hall and Andy Harris. As he ruefully points out, not since the year his father climbed Everest had the mountain been the focus of so much media attention.

In any case, the story has a pleasing circularity to it, a sense of perspective that is not often found in books of climbing exploits.

The father-son relationship is not the only reason for this.

Jamling was educated in the United States. He joined his expedition as a climbing member, rather than a Sherpa. He understands both cultures and their different motivations for going up Everest.

The book joins a growing number that describe the process of globalisation from non-Western perspectives, albeit for a predominantly Western readership. It has much in common with Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics: a young man finds his way between cultures, a father looms in the background, and the Himalayas take a leading role in the narrator's transformation.

Yet although Jamling could be seen in the modernist tradition of not fitting neatly into any culture, you couldn't describe him as alienated.

As well as discovering his father, Jamling rediscovers his culture. Sherpas are ethnically Tibetan and Tenzing spent some of his early years at the Rongbuk monastery on the Tibetan side of Everest. Much of Jamling's encounter with Buddhism dissolves into the kind of engaging disjunction by which discussions of Chinese-Tibetan geopolitics can be complicated when reincarnated lamas announce their imminent arrival from the womb.

That's not intended to make light of Jamling Norgay's beliefs. If anyone is still looking for reasons why people climb Everest, Touching My Father's Soul has some of the best you're likely to find.

Ebury Press

$45