Joe Simpson: The Beckoning Silence

By MARGIE THOMSON

Joe Simpson is one of the most famous mountaineering writers of modern times, one of those crazy obsessives who has, with not a second thought, rushed off to all corners (or peaks) of the globe to scale what to most of us look like vertigo-inducing rock faces, in often perishing temperatures.

He has had his share of near-death experiences, most notably as recounted in his first bestseller, Touching the Void, where he fell hundreds of feet, broke a leg and had to crawl in appalling conditions for help. Since then, he has continued to address with incredible frankness many of the issues, both personal and political, in which those who risk their all to climb the world's most challenging peaks involve themselves.

In The Beckoning Silence, he - now aged 40 - turns his attention to questions of fear, risk and mortality.

The perilous slopes and ice fields up which he climbed so brazenly a few years ago are beginning to give him the jitters, and he has an awful feeling that the odds are stacking up against him. Should he - could he - give it all away and take up something safer?

So this book is a coming-to-terms with himself and the mountains he loves more than just about anything else - a meditation on the many climbers who have fallen and died, on the many friends he has lost ("Sometimes I feel completely unnerved, wary of the cupboard crammed with skeletons that sometimes seem to constitute the sum total of my climbing memories," he writes).

Mostly, though, Simpson doesn't forget what it is that draws him again and again into such perilous positions.

"There is something about mountains that moves the soul," he writes. "They arouse a powerful sense of spiritual awareness and a notion of our own transient and fragile mortality and our insignificant place in the universe. They have about them an ethereal, evocative addiction that I find impossible to resist. They are an infuriating and fascinating contradiction. Climbing rarely makes sense but nearly always feels right. As Syd Marty, the Canadian mountain poet, wrote in his poem Abbot: Men fall off mountains because/ they have no business being there/ That's why they go, that's why they die."

The book begins with Simpson almost losing his nerve in awful conditions on the Alea Jacta Est in the French Alps.It ends wryly, on a note of slightly cynical self-knowledge, and we realise that despite escaping by the skin of his teeth from a storm that killed at least two others on the notorious north face of the Eiger in Switzerland, chances are he will still be heeding the siren call for a while yet.

In between is a lot of wonderful writing in which he demonstrates his constant dilemma. Torn always between horror and heroism, he retells many fascinating, appalling, inspiring stories of climbers who have died for their sport or, another way of putting it, for their dreams.

Even at its most terrifying, there is something inspiring about the extreme risks but also extreme rewards of climbing to the top of the world.

If I was braver I would give it a go, but I'm afraid even the photos make me feel giddy. Fortunately we have writers like Simpson who can speak to us armchair enthusiasts as well as the real McCoys.

Jonathan Cape

$59.95