Joe Simpson

After being blown away by Touching the Void, This Game of Ghosts took me by surprise in that it started with Simpson's account of growing up as an army brat in Malaya and Germany, with boarding school in England during term time. At first it felt a bit disappointing - interesting enough from another writer, perhaps, but not what I'd expected from Simpson. However, he doesn't let the reader down, and it later becomes a useful backdrop to understanding what makes these crazy, risk-taking show more mountaineers tick. If Simpson's anything to go by, the mountaineers of tomorrow are the primary school kids of today who are already on first name terms with their local accident & emergency staff. You know the kind - a dangerous combination of excess energy and fearless recklessness and several plaster casts down before they're in double figures.

This Game of Ghosts is both a prequel and sequel to Simpson's horrific Andes accident recounted in Touching the Void. The latter was gripping, can't-look-away horror, so it seemed unlikely that any follow up book could hold a candle to it, but in many ways This Game of Ghosts takes the drama up a notch and the reader into utter disbelief. Even the most risk-averse armchair reader could probably cut Simpson some slack for being unfortunate enough to have that dreadful accident in the Andes, but then you learn in This Game of Ghosts that he'd had not one but two major falls before that in the Alps which could have killed him, and incredulously goes back to climbing after the Andes fall and is almost killed in Asia.

This is not just a book of mountain escapades and disasters; it's an unsentimental, self-deprecating introspection of reckless passion, loss and what drives mountaineers to take such enormous risks time and time again. The ghosts in the title refers to the huge number of young friends Simpson loses in the mountains over the years, many of whom beam at the camera in photos included in the book, young twenty-somethings who appear carefree and high on life.

I found this book hugely affecting, in many ways more than Touching the Void simply because Simpson exposes just how huge the risks are for those addicted to serious climbing, no matter how experienced.

4.5 stars - sobering yet utterly riveting. True rubber necking territory. Simpson triumphs once again. show less

Set 10 years before Jon Krakauer's account of the Everest disaster in Into Thin Air, the setting of this mountaineering disaster memoir is Siula Grande in Peru.

The premise of these mountaineering disaster books is generally familiar - a group of total nut jobs decide to scale some utterly impossible mountain face, weather closes in, horrific accident happens. Nonetheless, these climbing books draw me in every time. The mountains are my happy place, and when I watched serious climbers going show more up and down the Mont Blanc cable car in Chamonix a couple of years ago I had a stab of envy at their nerve, their freedom of not being held back by their fears. I could never take the risks they take (I worry about the ski lifts holding), but I'm quite happy to join in their adventures from my armchair. It's interesting that so many mountaineers are truly excellent writers as well, and Joe Simpson is no exception.

Touching the Void is famous for recounting the disaster where Simpson's climbing mate Simon Yates ends up cutting the rope that Simpson is dangling from over the side of a cliff to save himself. The subsequent documentary film that followed the book left Yates feeling angry that it was a one-sided portrayal of the accident, with the film leaving out the extensive hours he'd spent trying to save Simpson's life before he made that fateful decision. In this memoir, Simpson is unequivocal in his support for Yates' actions. Having fallen and badly broken his leg, Yates spent hours lowering Simpson down the mountain before unwittingly lowering him over a cliff in the dark. With Simpson tangling in mid air, when the rope ran out Yates was unable to pull Simpson back up, and as Simpson's weight would ultimately pull him off the mountain too he eventually took the decision to cut Simpson away.

This is the ultimate story of survival against the odds, and despite falling many feet down a crevasse Simpson somehow survives and manages to literally crawl back to camp three days later (I hope this isn't a spoiler, but as he wrote the book I think it's fairly obvious that he didn't die).

My own perspective on Yates' action is that yes, he had no other choice if he wanted to stay alive, and Simpson was likely to die anyway either way. However, I did find myself questioning his actions after he got down the mountain and regained some strength. He automatically assumed that Simpson was dead and made no attempt to go back to the lower slopes of the mountain to check, or to see if the body could be recovered for his family. The two climbers had no radios and were climbing in a very remote area without any rescue helicopters on speed dial, so I was surprised that he was so quick to assume the worst and not clutch on to any chance of survival and rescue. He was only 21 at the time, and part of me wonders if he feared Simpson giving a more damning perspective of his actions if he survived. Some sections were Yates' account (written by Simpson but with Yates' input and blessing), and I was surprised by his cool mental ability after a day or so to try to already put the accident behind him. The two are no longer friends today, with Yates stating that they "no longer have anything in common", and I'm not overly surprised.

The fact that Simpson carried on climbing after two years of rehabilitation, and went on to have another accident in a serious mountain climb tells you everything about the mentality of mountaineers. They know the risks are very real, but the pull of the mountain and the climbing experience transcends everything.

5 stars - I was totally gripped by this book and would have read it in one sitting if circumstances had allowed. The quality of writing was excellent, and I'll definitely be seeking out some of Simpson's other titles. show less

This is my third Joe Simpson book, and probably my last; no reflection on the quality of his writing (which is once again superb), but I feel I've probably read the best of him now, and there are only so many more mountains left to climb with him.

As touched on to an extent in This Game of Ghosts, Simpson is now seriously considering giving up climbing. The tally of friends lost to the mountains grows every year, and despite his climbing ability improving year-on-year, the danger and show more fragility of climbing expeditions is more and more at the forefront of his mind. In the first half of the book, he jumps between a number of climbs which seem there to serve one main purpose - a back-story so yet another friend's death could be written about. Perhaps because he'd already covered some of this ground in This Game of Ghosts it rubbed me up the wrong way a little in The Beckoning Silence, feeling included for the sake of sensationalism and selling books.

In the second half of the book, Simpson is talked into tackling the north face of the Eiger by a climbing friend, and at this point I really settled into the book, absorbed as always by his ability to make the mountains come alive. I've skied in Grindelwald, the closest town to the Eiger, so for that reason this account particularly hooked me in as I could visualise the areas he was talking about. Simpson also delves into some of the history of the doomed Eiger climbers of the 1930s who paved the way for other climbers, and I really enjoyed his retelling of their stories (which were new to me) and the fantastic photos included. Sadly, there's yet more tragedy on the mountain at the same time that Simpson and his friend are climbing, yet somehow his writing is so immersive that I found myself torn between wondering why anyone ever climbs mountains this difficult and desperately wanting to experience it for myself. It's not too hard to guess which sentiment will ultimately win me over, but it's testament to Simpson's writing skill that he does leave you with a great pull for the mountains.

4 stars - an incredibly skilled writer, but probably with little more to say that's new and shocking by the time you've read a few of his titles. show less

A real-life survival story that is scarcely believable, Touching the Void is, to begin with, scarcely readable but goes on to become a psychological tour de force. The first fifty or sixty pages are a slog, as the build-up to the disaster lacks any real, well, build-up. There's no attempt at providing context or explanation to the trek or a portrait of mountaineering in itself, leaving the reader at a loss. There's also a lot of jargon unexplained, from belays and sticht plates to cols and show more Prussik knots, and the writing in this early part is clunky and laden with unnecessary prosing. In these early sections, it's almost as if the text was written for serialization in a mountaineering magazine than for the general public.

All of these middling concerns go out the window when disaster strikes at around page seventy, and the rest of the book is indescribably enthralling. Most people know the story by now: Joe Simpson broke his leg near the top of a fearsome mountain in the Andes and his climbing partner leveraged him down an almost vertical cliff-face in the pitch dark to try and get him to safety. When things go wrong during the descent, Joe's partner Simon is forced to cut the rope holding them together and Joe plunges hundreds of feet into a crevasse. Simon understandably believes Joe to be dead and returns to camp, so Joe crawls out of the crevasse and, without food and water, drags his mushy purpling broken leg – now six inches shorter than his healthy one – through blizzards and over rocky ground back to camp over the course of days.

It is a phenomenal feat of endurance, and in contrast to the early pages is well-told by Simpson. From describing the cringe-inducing gruesomeness of the untreated broken leg, through the terror of the pitch-black descent, the lurch of the severed rope and the existential dread of the crevasse, to the delusion and desperation of the crawl back to camp, Simpson is clear-minded, eloquent and completely riveting. The time spent in the crevasse is particularly astonishing: to my mind no greater expression of the communion between man and the raw forces of nature can be found. There's no story quite like this and, speaking selfishly, it is to our great benefit that the person it all happened to was also one able to tell the story so eloquently. show less