i3low-out
bavid Holden
Alive Piers Paul Read (Alison Press/Secker and Warburg 0.00) Finding, as I do in my advancing middle age, growing difficulty in sustaining faith in anything save the boundlessness of human it has been both a chastening and 'roeartening experience lately to read three °ooks offering a message of genuine hope and Uplift drawn from the extremes of human experience. The first was The Fearful Void, Geoffrey Noorehouse's powerful account of his selfInflicted torments in the Sahara. The second Was Jan Motifs's Conundrum — for me, at any a convincing record of what love and 8.neer mervtal toughness can do to wrest Individual falfillment from the most bizarre ,41.1d potentially tragic of human situations. "ow here is a third book.
Piers Paul Read's Alive is the story of a collective human experience so harrowing that one can hardly bear the thought of it in the dark reaches of the night, yet out of it there shines a light of love, endurance and of nobility, even, that must impress the most World-weary reader. The bare facts behind the book are wellknown. In October, 1972, a Uruguayan rugby
football team, with friends and supporters, set off from Montevideo on a charter flight to play an annual fixture in Santiago, Chile. Lost in foul weather, the plane crashed far offcourse 12,000 feet up in the middle of the Andes. By rights, all forty-five passengers and crew should have died there and then, but by a miracle (the word hardly seems too strong) the fuselage of the aircraft, stripped of wings and tail, hit a snow-slope and skidded to rest, severely damaged but basically intact.. Thirty-two of the occupants survived the crash and sixteen managed to stay alive for ten more weeks, amid the most appalling desolation. Then, long after the world had given them up for dead, they launched an expedition through the mountains to initiate their own rescue. It would have been a remarkable tale in any event; but what made it notorious at the time and gives it now, in the sensitive hands of Piers Paul Read, a profoundly stirring extra dimension is, of course, the fact that the sixteen survived only by resorting to cannibalism.
Literally, they lived off their dead companions. The impassable snow-drifts around them formed a natural deep freeze for the bodies and, little by little, the survivors carved and gnawed their way though most of them until, by the end, the surface of the snow was covered with bones, skulls and other human refuse like the floor of a charnel house.
Yet the effect was not to brutalise them. On the contrary, when rescuers were approaching at last, one of the first reactions of the survivors was to look nervously at the grisly mess around them and mutter, "We'd better clear this lot up a bit." It may seem trite to say so — and even old-fashioned nowadays when the voice of the new brutalism is so loud — but does not such a concern for decent appearances contain the true mark of civilised man?
Certainly these youths — all the final survivors were male and nearly all were under twenty-one — proved themselves a remarkably civilised group. The decision to eat the bodies of their relatives and friends was taken only with revulsion and at the point of utter starvation when all other food was exhausted and all hope of rescue gone. The stronger led the weaker to face the choice of cannibalism or death; and being good Catholics, one and all, they called on God and their theology to aid them in the argument.
"But what have we done," asked one of the frailer brethren, "that God now asks us to eat the bodies of our dead friends?" "It is meat," replied a tougher voice, "That's all it is. The souls have left their bodies and are in heaven with God." Rationally, it was an argument they could all accept — as, indeed, does the Catholic Church itself. But what still stuck, literally, in many gullets was a far more primitive taboo. Yet again, the stronger helped the weaker in exemplary fashion. Arguing, coaxing, soothing and sympathising, but insisting over and over again that they all had a duty to stay alive if possible, for the sake of their parents, friends and sweethearts as well as God, they somehow forced a little flesh into everyone.
Avalanches, injuries and exposure still took their toll, but the sixteen who emerged astonished the doctors by their physical condition. The two who made the final expedition in search of rescue, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, deserve a place in some international pantheon for sheer guts. Wrapped against the cold in a ludicrous assortment of unsuitable garments, carrying old socks stuffed with human flesh for food, they climbed rocks and ice walls 2,000 feet higher itito the surrounding mountains, thinking in their innocence to see the green valleys of Chile on the other side. Instead, they saw only more peaks, more snow and ice; yet they launched themselves undaunted into that wilderness and after ten days of scrambling, walking and stumbling, came at last upon an unbelieving Chilean peasant who carried the good news of their return from the dead to an equally unbelieving world.
So astonishing a story would have been easy to sensationalise but Piers Paul Read tells it with beautiful judgement. Technically, he is superb, cutting his narrative vividly trom scene to scene, never losing a moment of suspense or drama, nor sacrificing any of the forward impulse that grips the reader from start to finish — from Montevideo through the horrors of the mountains and back at last to the almost unbelievable calm of Montevideo again. Morally and emotionally', Mr Read is equally sure-footed. He was, we are told, chosen by the survivors themselves to tell their story from what must have been a raging horde of aspirants; and it is not the least tribute to their own good sense that they made so happy a selection.
He neither sanctifies nor condemns them. He reveals their selfishness and weakness as well as their mutual love and nobility. He sees clearly the macabre aspects of their survival and the pain and pathos of those families whose sons and daughters did not, after all, return. He never pushes his moral messages, but rather lets them rise, questioningly and disturbingly, out of the reader's own reflections. He has in short, contrived a masterly piece of story-telling about a group of human beings who rose, in extremis, to heights beyond their own, or anyone else's expectations; and it left me, at least, feeling a good deal better than usual about belonging to the human race.
David Holden is chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Times.
Previous page
