Jim Curran: The Life and Climbs of Chris Bonington

Robinson

$29.95

Review: Richard Thomson*

In one British climbing magazine's millennium list Chris Bonington was described as "the housewives' choice."

It's a cruel jibe, and not just at housewives, an allusion to Bonington's stature as the best-selling mountaineer of his generation.

High Achiever strings his extensively documented and quite incredible climbing achievements together in a concise, readable fashion - how he made his name on the first British ascent of the north face of the Eiger and subsequently led first ascents and new routes on innumerable other peaks throughout the world.

Author Jim Curran is one of Bonington's mates, and has been on a few of his expeditions. He sticks up for Bonington - worryingly so in a cloyingly admiring first chapter, though things settle down after that.

But good mates don't allow themselves to get too close; Curran backs away from getting too intimate. Indicative of this is the way quirks of personality are attached to the surname and a definite article: "the Bonington anger," "the legendary Bonington snoring."

Curran combines this self-conscious detachment with a certain defensiveness. For several reasons, including his professionalism in a country that lauds amateurs, his single-mindedness and, not least, jealousy at his success, Bonington has received a fair bit of criticism from the British climbing community, despite the adulation of the wider public. High Achiever takes the line that, while Bonington isn't perfect, if you just got to know him better you'd see what a great guy he basically is.

He does appear to be a nice enough, slightly nerdy bloke. As well as having a consuming passion for climbing, he is obsessed by military history and the internet (see www.bonington.com), and possesses irrepressible enthusiasm and an immunity to public embarrassment.

But climbing, especially as practised by Bonington, is not just a holiday with your mates. There's intense competition between motivated and individualistic people - and that's just to get on the expeditions.

On the climbs you must accept appalling suffering and a horrifying death toll. There are, on Bonington's all-male climbing trips, wives and children left behind.

It's a bizarre subculture, and as a climber himself, Curran takes it too much for granted.

Bonington is the acceptable face of a marginally acceptable activity: expeditioning is dangerous, pointless and expensive.

To achieve social approval requires a link with nationalistic fervour (Everest is usually good for this) or corporate drum beating (Bonington was once sponsored by a condom manufacturer). But when the public sees Bonington the mountaineer on telly, other mountaineers see the sales pitch.

All these things are touched on in High Achiever. But the book's theme, that at 65 Bonington has risen above his limitations, sounds to me dangerously like the kind of media complicity his choice of career has consistently required.

* Richard Thomson is a journalist and former editor of New Zealand Climber magazine.