Imaginative Climb
The Last Blue Mountain. By Ralph Barker. (Chatto and Windus, 21s.) THIS is the story of the disastrous Oxford Univer- sity expedition to climb Haramosh in the Kara- koram, which ended in the death of two climbers and the maiming by frostbite of a third. There are any number of bragging, breezy books written by members of the 'adventures' which come off; so few written about the ventures which went wrong that on the topic of mountaineering, 'for ex- ample, the reader has no longer any imaginative appreciation of how exceedingly dangerous and deeply terrifying a high climb can become when accidents begin. Jokes about arctic latrines, speeches of falsely modest mutual congratulation swapped among the victors have drowned the re- mote voice which said : 'Great God! This is an awful place.' The survivors of the Haramosh climb preferred to forget what had happened, but Ralph Barker has written it for them as a novel out of their own diaries and their conversation. Satisfied that he knew the narrative itself and that he understood the five men concerned with sufficient intimacy, he reconstructs the emotions and thoughts of each person fictionally, in their feelings about mountaineering, in their capacities for love, in their uneasiness, self-doubts and occa- sional disputes with each other, in their reactions to a disaster which in the end offered them one of the most painful choices possible : to leave a wait- ing, helpless man to die, or to return to him at the probable cost of their own lives as well as his. Mr. Barker's method, which is bold and always open to suspicions of unjustified embroidery of his characters' thoughts, is astonishingly dramatic in effect. If it was mere fiction, the plot would be a magnificent one : the knowledge that the charac- ters are 'real' flings them and their struggles into an intoxicating, slightly phoney 3-D which will overwhelm the resistance of most readers and make this book a wild success.
HEAL ASCILERSON
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