The Eiger Sanction

Dr John Hemlock has just excused his students for the semester but finds out in a quick meeting that his work is far from over. For when he’s not lecturing, Hemlock funds his lifestyle and his blackmarket collection of Impressionists by performing contract assassinations for CII. This mission will take him to the Eiger, a mountain Hemlock has twice failed to summit, but he’s the only man the agency has with climbing experience. Conquering the mountain is only half the challenge though, because CII’s intelligence can’t pinpoint which man on the expedition is the target. Hemlock is finally blackmailed into going but he knows this will be his last sanction for the agency, one way or another.

Earlier this year both LibraryThing and show more Netflix began recommending The Eiger Sanction to me. I don’t know much about algorithms but it didn’t take long for me to realize this remarkable conflux between the two came about because of my occasional weakness for James Bond books and films. And so without too much concern over my decision to let the internet influence my choice of entertainment, I gave it a go.

Trevanian (a pen-name of Rodney William Whitaker) wrote Eiger as a spoof of Ian Fleming’s work. It’s clearly an effort to tweak the Bond character, to make his agency less patriotic and his conquests colder than casual. I don’t mean spoof as in funny, because a few scenes were so bad that I couldn’t even laugh (although I’m sure a few people do). Sometimes this type of fiction (especially 1940s-1960s) needles my modern sensibility, although if taken as satire, I try to put it in its place.

I enjoyed the second half of the novel the best, due in large part to the action on the Eiger. I do love a good mountaineering set piece. The mountain came off beautifully in the movie adaptation too. Directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, the film had several scenes verbatim from the book, which surprised me. Not a bad piece of popcorn fiction. show less

Trevanian (aka Rodney Whitaker) wrote the Eiger Sanction, which became a million-volume seller in the 1970’s and was followed by a major motion picture, as a spoof on the super-spy action genre which was very popular in the late 60’s/early 70’s. Although Eiger Sanction has many things in common with Trevanian’s later masterwork Shibumi such as the super-spy trained in martial arts, the secret government-controlled hit squads, and the mountain climbing, the two novels are very different with Shibumi being a more serious work containing various themes contrasting Eastern and Western ideas and an epic-length history of the main character. Eiger Sanction is a much earlier work and more of a Bond-spoof than anything else. In fact, it show more appears that Trevanian was shocked that so few people recognized Eiger Sanction as a spoof and so many took it seriously. The oddities of the book included a super-spy who didn’t want to work for the CII (a spoof on the CIA) and preferred to collect art and teach college-level art history classes, but lived in a vast compound with an underground art storage facility, that he would be sent out to kill an unknown target and that he would encounter the target in a high-grade mountain climb in Switzerland (the Eiger), and that he would engage in a grudge match with another former agent in a posh mountain climbing training facility while preparing for his not- so-secret expedition. Of course, he is invincible in a fight and irrestible to the ladies. This is an enjoyable read as long as you don’t take it the espionage stuff too seriously. The long treacherous climb up the Eiger is perhaps the apex of this novel and it is worth reading even just for that amazing thrilling step by step climb. show less

Jonathan Hemlock is a professor of art history in New York. He commutes to the city from Long Island, where he lives in an abandoned church filled with indulgences large and small, including a greenhouse wing, a giant Roman-style bath, and a humidity and temperature controlled basement gallery to display his priceless collection of Impressionist paintings (most of which were obtained through less-than-legal channels). Hemlock wants what he wants, you see, and--according to the battery of psychological tests given him by Army Intelligence when he was a soldier in the Korean conflict--lacks "the nerve of conscience" to hold him back from the pursuit and acquisitions of these wants.

To make the money to keep him in fine art and to finance show more his travels, Hemlock also works for the Search and Sanction Unit of the somewhat bungling American intelligence agency known as CII. Search and Sanctions eliminates those responsible for the elimination of CII's own agents; Hemlock works in Sanctions, as a freelance assassin, a job for which, considering his lack of a certain nerve, he is perfectly suited. As The Eiger Sanction opens, Hemlock is eying a $10,000 Pissarro with a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity to purchase. How perfect, then, to be offered a gig, called a "sanction," in the euphemistic bureaucratic government speak of CII. But, he tells Mr. Dragon, head of Search and Sanction, it's to be his last job, and he'll be charging double his normal fee. And no, he won't sanction the as yet unidentified second subject, thank you very much, he wants out.

Hemlock travels to Montreal to carry out his assignment. There he meets up with the contact who will be providing him the specifics of the assignment, the lovely Felicity Arce--pronounced as you would expect--whom, with very little effort, he beds even as he is receiving said assignment.

Hemlock is just that good.

In addition to his superior knowledge of paintings and his talents as an assassin, Hemlock is also a world class climber. This talent is the impetus behind the enigmatic albino Mr. Dragon's ardent pursuit of Hemlock to carry out the second sanction. It seems that although Search and Sanction hasn't identified the second man on the Montreal job they have managed to ascertain that he will be involved with a party that has been organized to climb the Eiger, one of the most difficult, even murderous, of Alpine climbs. Although Hemlock has not climbed in several years, and although he has twice been defeated by the Eiger, he's the only man in the organization who could both endure the conditioning needed to prepare for a climb of this caliber and already possesses the skills.

He really is just that good.

It takes some deliciously underhanded manipulation on the part of Mr. Dragon and his minions, but Hemlock is eventually convinced to accept the job. He's whisked off to Arizona for his conditioning, and from there to Switzerland, where he must deal with a whole new class of criminal annoyance: the Eiger Birds, wealthy tourists--including a Greek shipping magnate and his American wife and a pair of bigger-than-life married actors--who descend upon the hotel facing the mountain as soon as word gets out of an attempt on its summit, so that they can watch the climb's progress and--hope upon ghoulish hope--be there to see any tragedies that might unfold. The action on the Eiger, including detailed descriptions of climbing technique, routes, and weather challenges, is gripping, as are Hemlock's attempts to suss out which of his fellow climbers is his target...and then get him before he gets Hemlock.

The Eiger Sanction is a wry, self-aware, action/adventure story, a spy novel which simultaneously holds its own with the best of the genre while rigorously spoofing its conventions. It is truly a damned shame that nobody reads Trevanian anymore (the copy of The Eiger Sanction that I read was literally the only copy available from both the sprawling City of Los Angeles Public Library system and the County of Los Angeles Public Library system). One can only hope that the release of Satori, Don Winslow's prequel to Trevanian's Shibumi, in March will also see the reissue--and reintroduction to the reading public's eye--of Trevanian's backlist. show less

Excellent suspense. The author makes the main character someone you can despise, fear and feel sorry for all at the same time.

Saw movie in the 1970s and was irritated by inaccuracies of climbing scenes. Read to see if I disliked it as much as the movie, and I did. Both do a serous disservice to understanding mountaineering.

Best thing I can say is it felt like an American spoof on very British James Bond form. Not recommended if you have ever climbed anything.

My husband is a fan of the Clint Eastwood movie that was adapted from this book so I purchased it for him. I decided to read it after he told me that it was the most accurate book to movie adaptation he had ever seen. I have to agree. In fact it was so similar to the 70s movie that I found it distracting me from the real book.

Johnathan Hemlock is a college art professor by day and a secret agent assassin when he needs the extra money (especially to fund an extensive black market art collection). He is called by his agency to perform a sanction that requires his particular expertise as a mountain climber. He must climb the North Face of the Eiger, a mountain on which he has failed twice before. One of the members of his team is also an show more assassin, Hemlock must figure out which one before he is finished off himself.

The book was well written with a great deal of wit and interesting descriptions. Those not familiar with mountaineering and climbing may find the technical parts of the book a little hard to understand. And as mentioned earlier, it is remarkably similar to the movie and the differences can be fun to point out. It is also a very 70s James Bond kind of book, the ease at which Hemlock can hop into bed with women in this story is laughable. Perhaps it's because I've grown up in a generation constantly educated about the risks of being promiscuous. show less

Textbook male fantasy.