Into the Silence (2011)

What an astonishing, marvelous book. Epic but also intimate, its subject matter wide-ranging but also tightly focused, and so profoundly moving that from the very first pages I found myself listening to the narration with my heart in my throat, alternately revolted, astonished, full of pity and amazement. I have already recommended it to everyone I know - I have begged a few friends to read this book - and now I recommend it to you, too.

And now this review is going to get a little personal, so take my recommendation and go or, forewarned, read on. A little over a year ago, I visited the Everest museum in Darjeeling. For some reason I didn't take a picture of the museum, but I did take a picture of the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute next door, and they look about the same:



The museum is sort of dinky and faded but fascinating. The displays consisted mostly of climbing equipment through the ages, representative from every major expedition, and I was completely boggled when I saw sample gear from the first expeditions to tackle Everest in the twenties. The glass cases showed tweed jackets that I would have considered barely adequate on a cold day in New York City. I have done a little tiny bit of casual backpacking - I had, in fact, taken a three-day hike through the western Himalayas only a couple of weeks earlier - so I was primed to look at that useless tweed jacket and see it for what it was: proof of the wearer's almost superhuman strength; a testament of what the human body is capable of when pushed to the limits. And then I saw this face, a dead climber's face, in a black and white photo next to the case:



George Mallory. He was so beautiful.

So this display just haunted me. I googled Mallory to find out more about the expedition and see more pictures and when, a few months back, Liz reviewed INTO THE SILENCE it was Mallory's name in the title that hooked me. I wanted to know everything about him.

Well, as they say, be careful what you wish for.

Years ago, after reading [b:Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass|26474|Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass|Karen Blixen|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348243802s/26474.jpg|1382759] and [b:West with the Night|1624|West with the Night|Beryl Markham|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1335344130s/1624.jpg|192528] I became a little obsessed with Denys Finch-Hatton. He figures prominently in both books as a Mallory type, a gorgeous man who oozed charisma and lived a charmed life up to the moment when he died young and tragically. When [b:Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton|640450|Too Close to the Sun The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton|Sara Wheeler|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320449261s/640450.jpg|1183927] came out, I jumped on it. I had to find out more about Finch-Hatton. I had to find out what went on inside the head of a man who seemed to float through life on a cloud of adoration. But Wheeler's biography is weak soup; Denys Finch-Hatton didn't leave much of a record of his own life. The biography had little to offer that Dineson and Markham hadn't already put into their own books. It had no real view from the inside.

Unlike Finch-Hatton, Mallory left a paper trail. Letters, diaries, lecture tours, essays, photographs. Wade Davis gathered them all together to paint his portrait of Mallory, and it's brilliant, but I think he's killed my crush not just on Mallory but on all the golden boys. Because it turns out that Mallory was awful.

Mallory was born respectable, white, male, and British at the height of the Empire. He oozed charisma; people wanted to be around him. And everyone who knew him remarked on how very, very good looking he was. He had taste and a fine artistic sensibility but really excelled as a physical specimen. As a climber. He walked faster than anyone else, remained strong longer, leapt over crevasses, climbed terrifying chimneys of ice, and did it all gracefully. When the other climbers collapsed, he was still strong enough to help them stumble back to camp, to rub oil into frostbitten limbs, and maybe to read a little poetry afterwards, or dash off a quick letter.

But, good lord, he lacked humility and self awareness. Mallory was pitiless in the way only someone who takes his overabundance of natural gifts for granted can be. He scorned the other climbers for their weaknesses. He happily avoided the worst of the war. He saw nothing to admire in India or Tibet and spoke contemptuously about the people he met on his way to and from Everest. One of the other climbers described him, damningly and aptly, as a "very good, stout-hearted, baby".

And I should take a step back now and say that Mallory doesn't really dominate the pages of INTO THE SILENCE until the latter half of the book, and doesn't take over until the final quarter. Wade Davis describes three separate Everest expeditions that took place in 1921, 1922, and 1924 and he spends much of the first half of the book setting the stage. He writes about World War I in a way that might not shock people who are very familiar with the war but came as an absoute revelation to me. Davis' language is vivid enough that I felt disoriented and almost ill after listening to the WWI chapters; I simply hadn't realized what a terrible travesty had taken place, what a stupid, appalling waste, and how culpable the British command was.

And this is another area where INTO THE SILENCE absolutely excels. At first there's no obvious reason to connect the Everest expeditions to WWI, but anyone who's ever watched an Everest documentary, who's seen a camera pan over a corpse that never gets moved or buried or zoom in on a frostbitten foot, who's listened to a narrator describe how many fingers, toes, ears and noses were lost this season has asked the question: Why? Why do this insane thing?

World War I is Wade Davis' answer. There's the climb as a national project, a symbolic victory for Empire, and Davis also describes the political landscape - the last years of the Raj, a half-hearted conquest of Tibet, the rise of Ghandi. But mostly he tells us about the individuals who made up the expedition parties, the men who traveled halfway around the world to hurl themselves at the mountain. Who were they? Former soldiers. Many of them wounded, alienated, numb to death and unable to recover from the things they'd done and the things they'd seen. The lasting trauma of war is beautifully, and heart-breakingly evoked in the book; combined with the fumbling reach of colonialism, one has the impression that none of these climbers set foot on Everest without stepping through a pool of blood.

I learned to hate Mallory, yes, but fell a little in love with Howard Somervell (a surgeon in WWI who became a pacifist, made it pretty high up Everest, and abandoned his career in England to found a hospital in India) and Edward Wheeler (a surveyer on the first expedition who roamed the mountain alone, and spoke sympathetically of the Tibetans). Wade Davis captures all the outsize personalities, but he never glosses over the faults of the men, or the mistakes that were made along the way.

George Finch was the most polarizing figure, and Davis managed to simultaneously make me hate him - he was a jerk, and treated women horribly - and hate everyone else for him. Finch was a brilliant ice-climber and a scientist, the first real champion of supplemental oxygen as a necessary component of high-altitude mountaineering. But because he had rougher, Australian origins, and didn't rank as high on the class scale as the other climbers, he was treated abysmally - disrespected, mocked, his every achievement greeted with resentment.

Let me finish up with one last observation: Wade Davis is himself an explorer & he writes about the rigors of cold and altitude with the respect it deserves. By the time he's in the thick of describing the expeditions, of whole days spent trying to gain one or two thousand feet, of climbers who have to turn around and head back less than a mile away from the summit of the mountain, he knows how to drive home how crushingly difficult their tasks were. He weaves together the first-hand accounts from letters and reports with his own amazingly evocative language, and the result is immersive. And then, at the end, when Mallory and Irvine's first-hand accounts drop out of the narrative and Davis is left to tell us what others saw, what they conjectured, the loss of those voices is chilling.

Bah. I want to go on! I want to tell you more and more! Listening to this (really, really well narrated) audiobook was an experience in and of itself. I felt so many things. It stirred up so many memories. INTO THE SILENCE is a long book, a bit of an undertaking, but it deserves to be read. My highest recommendation.



( )

It's a very academic book and quite dense. There's a lot of spent on World War I and I think it distracts from the main point about the mission to summit Everest. I understand it was important to set the tone of the time and also define where these climbers came from (namely from a terrible time, when men put their lives on their line for something called honor), but I don't think it was handled well and there was just too much focus on it.

When the book shifts into George Mallory the pace is a bit faster and more interesting.

A dense book with many players. It was enjoyable, but I think only if you have a real interest in climbing or mountaineering. ( )

A vast sprawling book but well worth the effort. Wade Davis, and adventurer himself has not only travelled to Tibet, but has brought a huge amount of research to the telling of the story of the first three British attempts to conquer Everest in the context not just of Empire, but of a generation that had experienced the cataclysm of the First World War. There is a slimmer book that could've been edited out of this book, but on balance I enjoyed it's detail and discursiveness. Definitely not a quick read and I had some niggles over the details of the maps and the photographs (many photos are described but not reproduced) but I'd recommend it to Everest tragics, adventurers, and those interested in how history spills over the neat lines we tend to try to corrall it into. I bought this at a lecture (on another topic) given by the author and interestingly enough his talk was vastly engaging and sprawled well over the allotted time - a characteristic of the author I suspect! ( )

Davis covers quite thoroughly the Everest expeditions of 1921, 1922, and 1924. Certainly this is from the European perspective. We get some names of the various Asian participants, the porters and the cooks etc., and some glimpses into their characters. I doubt there would be any kind of written record for them, and hardly any oral history either. But for the European participants Davis traces back their upbringing and especially their experiences in WW1. That is a major theme of the book, the way that WW1 shaped these Everest expeditions, not just for the immediate participants but for the folks back home, the various sponsoring organizations, the media, and the public at large.

While we don't learn much about the immediate Asian participants, we do learn a bit about some of the broader Tibetan context, from the abbot of Rongbuk monastery at the base of Everest, to the 13th Dalai Lama and the broader context of the Great Game where England, Russia, and China were competing to extend their Asian spheres of influence.

A fascinating thread was the shifting attitude to technology. There was a kind of parallel between military and alpine shifts. At the beginning of WW1, the old British generals thought that sabers were more proper weapons than machine guns. Similarly, the old climbing guard held that to use oxygen at high altitude was improper.

Another interesting shift was how climbing became more of a media event sponsored by advertisers etc. Davis includes copious excerpts from letters home from the various climbers, including several by Mallory which make it clear how conscious he was of his audience, of how he would appear in the media. Certainly he was a courageous and determined climber, but it seems he also felt a sense of obligation to fulfill a public role.

Davis presents a remarkably detailed narrative of these three expeditions, but also provides enough layers of context to allow us to give rich meaning to the core details.

Still today people risk their lives on all sorts of wild adventures: extreme sports, explorations in harsh environments, etc. Still today people can be consumed by their own myth, the myth they have become through the mutual co-construction of celebrity and public. Here Davis gives us such a story on the kind of grand scale that practically doesn't exist any more, as technology has so shrunk our world. ( )

I am a big fan of Canadian writer Wade Davis. I have read several of his books and enjoy his approach to subject always with a metaphysical curiosity. Before I read this book I saw him speak about it in Ottawa at the Writers Festival and was mesmorized. This book took 10 years to write and it shows. Magnificently researched to give a full expression of what otherwise seems like an overshadowed and blotted out generation revealing a collective identity and a record of not just Mallory but well rounded perspective of everyone and everything involved. Yes, lyrical. ( )