With the somewhat macabre discovery of Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine’s foot, still in its boot, on Everest last October – Mallory’s body having been found some years before – my interest was awakened in the vast industry of Everest books out there. As a relative newbie, I thought it might be interesting to do a round-up of the ones I have read so far, how I think they differ from each other, and what I particularly enjoyed about each one. Doubtless others will have their own views and choices – I don’t claim any kind of insider knowledge here!
The basic known facts are few: 37 year old Mallory – probably the best climber of his generation – and 22 year old Irvine – a young Oxford rowing blue, technical whizz and experienced skier, who had made the first crossing of the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in 1923 – set out on the morning of 8th June, 1924, on their attempt to climb to the summit. Noel Odell, a member of the party, saw them at 12.50 through broken cloud ‘at the base of the pyramid’, as he said in his diary, ‘going strong for the top’. The cloud closed, and they were never seen again until the discovery of their bodies or body parts (in Irvine’s case, just over a hundred years later). Their route is unknown.
Into The Silence, by Wade Davis
Out of those accounts I have read, this really is the daddy imo – a comprehensive and well-written volume which is also very readable. Lyrical and thorough, its strength, I think, is how it sets the whole expedition in context. The background of the Empire and of the Great War is ever present – not just in the men’s own experiences of military service, or in the pervasive sense of nostalgia for the country’s terrible recent losses (Mallory once said to his father that his generation were just deeply unhappy), but also in the feeling that Englishmen still had a duty to have a role in ongoing exploration, conquest and global discoveries. The scientific basis of the trips is brought out – the Himalayas (or Himalaya, as they are now known) were literally uncharted territory, needing to be mapped, described and photographed: samples of plants and rocks needed to be gathered. The book starts fairly slowly, with a memorial service for dead climbers overseen by Geoffrey Winthrop Young, a mountaineer who himself lost a leg in WWI but continued to climb on his prosthetic limb, and weaves its many-threaded story in a hypnotic fashion, taking in the Victorian mapping and surveying trips and the 1921 reconnaissance as well as the subsequent expeditions up until the Mallory/Irvine tragedy. If you just wanted to read one book, this is the one as far as I am concerned.
Last Hours on Everest, by Graham Hoyland
Hoyland, the 15th British man to ‘summit’ (as they now say) Everest, is a descendant of Howard Somervell, a WWI surgeon who was also a member of the Mallory/Irvine team. I really liked this one, as it is such a personal account. When Hoyland was small, he met ‘Uncle Hunch’, as Somervell (then in his eighties) was known, and Somervell related to the small boy how he had lent Mallory his Kodak Vest Pocket camera before the final attempt. ‘If you could ever find that camera’, he told the boy, ‘and the film could be developed, you could prove whether or not Mallory made it to the summit’. The child was entranced. The search for the camera continues – indeed, according to various accounts, there may be as many as four cameras missing – but Hoyland did indeed go on play a major role in the search for Mallory’s body through his ‘Mallory and Irvine research expedition’. He writes especially well not just about the tangled mystery of who may have got where, but about how it actually feels to be hacking your way with an ice axe up a frozen slope. Two sections stand out: first was the examination of Somervell’s own meteorological records, not published before, which lead Hoyland to conclude a sudden drop in barometric pressure took place on the day Mallory and Irvine set out which would have rendered the mountain much more difficult to conquer, effectively making it even higher than it would normally be. Secondly, a chapter when Hoyland tests out specially-made replicas of Mallory’s clothing – several layers of silk, flannel and Shetland woolies, a Burberry overjacket and leather hob-nailed boots – and gives his opinions on their effectiveness, is worthy of note. Hoyland gives his own analysis of what he thinks probably happened on their last day, although strangely (after such a forensic examination of detail) the back cover gives the date ‘6th June 1924’ for the happening instead of the 8th. In a bizarre twist, when Hoyland later bought his house in Derbyshire, it turned out – unknown to him – to have once been owned by a relative of Mallory’s.
The Wildest Dream: Mallory, his life and conflicting passions, by Peter and Leni Gillman
This was a fascinating biography, taking Mallory from his boyhood as the son of a Cheshire vicar through his schooling at Winchester and student days at Cambridge right up to his teaching career and that fateful day in 1924 when he and his climbing partner Irvine disappeared. His destiny seemed fixed early on. Aged seven, Mallory was sent to his room for some sort of childish misbehaviour, and was next seen on the church roof next door having shinned down the drainpipe, climbed the church wall and then clambered up onto the tiles. (Another account says he was told, ‘You were supposed to go to your room’, to which he replied: ‘But I did go to my room – to get my cap’). His older sister Avie said you could never say anything was impossible to him as a child, or he would take it as a personal challenge: he once announced he thought he could lie between the railway tracks and let a train run over him with no ill-effects, and Avie knew she had to remain silent, or he would do it. This daredevil side of his nature is explored further. Athletic, energetic and superbly balanced (reports say watching him climb was ‘like watching water flow uphill’), the consensus seems to be that he simply did not know how good he was, and maybe did not make sufficient allowances for others.
The book sheds a lot more light on his marriage to Ruth, a pre-Raphaelite beauty with whom he fell in love almost instantly. She had never climbed before, but took up the sport enthusiastically when she met George, even though he once helpfully pushed her off a ledge in Wales on a rope when the wind took away his words saying that they should descend. He himself seemed a stranger to fear.
The background of the Mallory family is very interesting, including a moment when George’s father Herbert applied for a coat of arms only to discover they were officially in the virtually unknown position of having no surname: a previous ancestor had given up his name, but this change of name had only been legally valid for his first marriage yet he had continued using it after his second. Herbert applied to have a new, double-barrelled surname registered, which was approved, but sadly the coat of arms wasn’t. As a result, his son George Herbert Leigh Mallory became George Herbert Leigh Leigh-Mallory, a form which his father insisted be used when signing the register on George and Ruth’s wedding day.
What also emerges is the extent to which Mallory was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury set, and also connected to those who went on to found Gordonstoun: had he lived, he would probably have joined them, or set up a similar establishment of his own.
Mallory’s untimely death left Ruth with three small children to bring up. In a bitter twist of fate, their eldest daughter Clare later married an American scientist who was also killed in a freak climbing accident, leaving her too with three young children to raise on her own.
Into Thin Air, by John Krakauer
Although this book is often hailed as a classic, personally I didn’t enjoy this as much as the others: that may be my fault, as it isn’t what I thought it was. I expected it to be another investigation into the earlier attempts on Everest, but it actually centres round the 1996 expedition when adverse conditions led to a terrible loss of life: eight climbers sere killed. Krakauer, who was there at the time, was a journalist and climber detailed to write up his ascent for an adventure magazine. Quite understandably, he is not happy with the way Everest is now almost becoming a tourist attraction, with people even queuing up to go up the taxing ‘Second Step’ (a sheer 90-foot cliff, the single hardest rock formation on the way to the top), to which the Chinese actually attached a metal ladder in 1975, still used to this day. The competitive spirit among ‘guiders’ scrambling to get their charges to the top seems to have had a detrimental effect on safety. Krakauer is a good writer and I very much enjoyed his ‘Into the Wild’, a previous book about a young man who disappeared in the US, but this one just didn’t grab me for whatever reason. There are also allegations from others that Krakauer has changed his version of events a few times. No idea if that’s true, but I leave it there for what it’s worth.
The Lost Explorer: Finding Mallory on Everest, by Conrad Anker and David Roberts
David Roberts is an American mountaineer whose climbing partner used to be Rick Millikan, George Mallory’s grandson. Anker is the man who in 1999 actually found Mallory’s body, lying frozen face-down in the scree at 27,000 feet on Everest’s north face. “I knew at once that he’d been tied to his partner, and that he’d taken a long fall,” Ankers wrote, noting that Mallory’s right leg was badly broken and his left laid over it afterwards, indicating he did not die in the fall immediately. His snow goggles were in his pocket, suggesting the two had fallen in the evening while descending. A picture of Ruth that Mallory had promised to leave on the summit was not on the body, hinting that it might still be up there. The authors, who write alternate chapters, investigate the various clues to try and ascertain whether or not they think Mallory and Irvine did indeed get to the top before Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay in 1953. In pursuit of this quest, Anker scaled the Second Step without using the 1975 Chinese ladder (I think he had to put his foot on one rung, at one point), to evaluate whether or not he thought Mallory and Irvine could have done so in their day. The significance is that, officially anyway, as already mentioned, the last sighting of the two was by Noel Odell (who was out searching for fossil specimens as he waited at a lower camp) at 12.50 on the Second Step. Odell’s accounts vary, and his evidence is ambiguous on this point as he later changed his account to say he saw them on ‘the last step but one’, leading some to speculate that the pair may have alternatively been on the previous rock face known as the First Step (in which case, they would not have had time to complete the climb), or the later Third Step (not so named that at the time), which in some ways makes more sense and would mean they were far nearer their goal, as Odell said, ‘going strong for the top’. To add to the confusion, there is also an unnamed ‘rocky outcrop’ and another rock currently called ‘Mushroom Rock’ among the numerically-named ‘steps’ which would probably have been visible from Odell’s viewpoint on the horizon that day, and these are much easier obstacles for Mallory and Irvine to have got up in five minutes, which is what Odell said he saw. If you want more discussion on this point, there is a YouTube channel by Mike Tracy which I found very helpful – although it is not mainstream opinion – and a website called jakenorton.com which explains a further theory.
I have still to read a new biography of Ruth Mallory by Kate Nicholson, one of Sandy Irvine by his great-niece Julie Summers, and ‘The Third Pole’ by Mark Synnott, who made his own ascent up the infamous north face to try and find out the truth. After that, I think I might be all Everested out. But then again …
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