Robert Macfarlane: Mountains Of The Mind

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Mountains Of The Mind: A History Of A Fascination

A mountain, writes Robert Macfarlane, is in fact "a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans - a mountain of the mind".

His own fascination with mountains and mountaineers began as a small boy at his grandfather's house in Scotland, pouring over such books as The Fight for Everest, about the 1924 expedition that ended with the deaths of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine.

In this wonderfully thoughtful account, he wrestles with the "why" of our passion for mountains - their desolate beauty; the journey back in time that they, ancient edifices, effectively are; their immensity and danger.

So many mountaineers die, their ends "in keeping with their ruling passion".

Macfarlane's writing is eloquent, frequently beautiful and always evocative: granite slopes like porridge, basalt bubbles, limestone folds like blankets.

He takes us, in this book which won the Guardian First Book Award, on a
riveting, often heart-stopping cultural history of mountaineering, along the way explaining to us fully our mad love of such dangerous adventuring.

A must for all those with a passion for those granite peaks, those wide open spaces.

Granta, $29.95