Summit Fever: An Armchair Climber's Initiation to Glencoe, Mortal Terror and the Himalayan Matterhorn

by Andrew Greig

published

November 10th 2005 by Canongate Books Ltd

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binding

Paperback, 286 pages

isbn

1841957135 (isbn13: 9781841957135)

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(review of isbn 0898865549)

09/22/08

bookshelves: biography-autobiography, climbing

Read in September, 2008

Andrew Greig, Summit Fever, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2005. (First published 1985)

In recent months I have returned to reading climbing books, once more from the safety of my armchair. Over the years I have been enthralled by the writings and adventures of many of the great mountaineers, always seeing in their stories insights into the human performing and thinking in extreme situations, always sensing the absurd urge to go beyond safety. To a lesser extent there has been the narrative satisfacti...more Andrew Greig, Summit Fever, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2005. (First published 1985)

In recent months I have returned to reading climbing books, once more from the safety of my armchair. Over the years I have been enthralled by the writings and adventures of many of the great mountaineers, always seeing in their stories insights into the human performing and thinking in extreme situations, always sensing the absurd urge to go beyond safety. To a lesser extent there has been the narrative satisfaction of relaxation after stress, something which in a minor way millions of us who to a greater or lesser extent set ourselves physical challenges in the ‘great outdoors’ also experience.
The poet, Andrew Greig made the extraordinary decision to take up an offer by the climber Mal Duff to learn climbing from scratch and accompany a team on an attempt of the Mustagh Tower in the Himalayas. As a member of the team, he would be its witness and write a book about it. Not surprisingly, much of the pleasure of the book comes from admiring the self-deprecating author’s considerable achievements against the odds: there but for the grace of sanity or cowardice could be ‘one of us’.
Too, the book like any other climbing book maintains its fascination by telling of the inevitable problems, frustrations, risks, near disasters, struggles against the odds, and the relationships between people of very different temperaments in often dire circumstances. The book is interwoven with the diaries of four of the climbers: “Four diaries, four inner worlds drifting in the mountains, touching like soap bubbles and bouncing away again…. The diaries are a salutary reminder that we’re each a unique world in ourselves, and that there are as many expeditions as there are members of the expedition.”
The old truth that one is always battling with oneself more than the mountain comes through sharply: of the seasoned climbers, Greig observes, “Enduring fear, danger, hardship and disaster has given them an unusual degree of self-knowledge. They’ve lived over and over the naked confrontation with the self. When life is hanging by a thread on a mountain, there is no room any longer for evasion and self-deception, for better or worse you know yourself as you are.”
So what is it that drives them on? Early, as the initial preparations start, as acclimitisation and setting up Camp 1 fill the days, there is “the Look. The Look that every party we met on their way down had. At once worn and fit, alert and withdrawn; the weathered skin, the eyes not so much distant as self-absorbed, relaxed yet revving…. The on-the-hill look, the early stages of summit fever.”
There are many, many neat observations, moments of drama and hilarity, and some beautiful writing that tries to suggest the almost Zen-like sense of being beyond the shabbiness of the quotidian, the mulch of thoughts racing in past and future. All sounds new-agey perhaps, but the writer can write! And you trust him, and this writer recognises the limits of words in communicating: “Why do climbers climb, why did I do it, what does it mean? Somehow I no longer want to talk or think about it… It is in the experience itself that the value lies. I can really only talk about it with other climbers, and with them there is no need to explain…. With self-possession comes a certain reticence.”
This is a lovely book, and for me given the extra edge by in some way being about writing itself which is, like climbing, “a supremely satisfying central activity that seems pointless to many – sometimes to ourselves.” There is a scorn of safety, a ground-down dissatisfaction with the security of the ordinary life, no matter how successful and full. Beneath writing and climbing, the sense of our fragility: “our lives are erected over crevasses and we thread our way through visible and invisible icefalls. Our faith and our sanity hang belayed from a tottering heap of shit.” By the way, there is deep affection in that last bathetic phrase which you will discover if you are lucky enough to read the book. “And yet we press on. Our protection may be illusory, but we use it. We go places, we achieve things in the face of our fear…Creatures of hope, living on amnesia, riddled as the times.”
I won’t quote from the ending. It is worth waiting for. The ‘postscript’ is added as the writer sits writing his book looking through a window onto an Edinburgh Street. Suffice it to say that the qualities, values and greatness of human spirit are evident too down in the everyday valleys of routine and security if we but look.
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