Scaling peaks in tale of epic failure
By Sara Wheeler |
April 28, 2013, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
GEORGE Mallory, like Robert Falcon Scott, has departed the ranks of mere humanity and entered British consciousness as a Galahad of the snows, a titan who showed what a chap can do if he's made of the right stuff. It's fertile material for fictional recasting, and in her first novel Tanis Rideout adds a twist to the tale while making it her own.
"Above All Things" relates the gripping story of Mallory's third and final attempt to conquer Mount Everest. It is 1924, and he is 37 and married, with three small children. The narrative alternates chapter by chapter between his wife, Ruth, doing the laundry at home in Cambridge, and Mallory belaying on the slopes.
Flashbacks provide context. Mallory is famous, and famously good-looking. "Six foot high, with the body of an athlete by Praxiteles, and a face - oh incredible - the mystery of Botticelli," swooned Lytton Strachey.
Rideout, a young Canadian poet, traces Mallory's expedition from Bombay to Darjeeling, through the Mahabharat Range and into Tibet. She evokes the physical atmosphere (the "lowing yaks" at base camp) as well as the strained relationships among the men as they encounter the rasping air at 27,000 feet, frost-nipped, taut as wire, sucking on gritty oxygen tubes. A porter's brain explodes.
The tension builds inexorably to the last days, when Mallory makes the final ascent with 21-year-old Sandy Irvine, setting out from a tent "perched on a fragile outcrop of snow, the world dropping away from them on two sides." Opinion remains divided on whether the pair got to the top before they perished, and the discovery of Mallory's frozen corpse in 1999 failed to yield definitive evidence either way.
You will have to read "Above All Things" to learn what this author makes of it.
Rideout reveals her sympathies by casting her chapters on Ruth in the first person while leaving her husband's in the third. When George is bound up with Everest ("It's my mountain"), at home in England, Ruth cares for the children ("They are always wanting something, their insistent demands giving shape to the long days").
Wisely, Rideout eschews hagiography. Mallory comes across as a bit of a twit, especially when he is briefly seduced by the Bloomsbury set and then cheats on Ruth while in New York lecturing.
Rideout's creative use of form is admirable and she has researched the primary material thoroughly.
But she can be overly sentimental, her prose lacking in discipline. There are too many pages of undigested direct speech, and the use of the dramatic present tense doesn't quite work here.
As for the myth: how very English to prefer one's national heroes not only dead but effectively failures. That would never happen in America, would it?
"Above All Things" relates the gripping story of Mallory's third and final attempt to conquer Mount Everest. It is 1924, and he is 37 and married, with three small children. The narrative alternates chapter by chapter between his wife, Ruth, doing the laundry at home in Cambridge, and Mallory belaying on the slopes.
Flashbacks provide context. Mallory is famous, and famously good-looking. "Six foot high, with the body of an athlete by Praxiteles, and a face - oh incredible - the mystery of Botticelli," swooned Lytton Strachey.
Rideout, a young Canadian poet, traces Mallory's expedition from Bombay to Darjeeling, through the Mahabharat Range and into Tibet. She evokes the physical atmosphere (the "lowing yaks" at base camp) as well as the strained relationships among the men as they encounter the rasping air at 27,000 feet, frost-nipped, taut as wire, sucking on gritty oxygen tubes. A porter's brain explodes.
The tension builds inexorably to the last days, when Mallory makes the final ascent with 21-year-old Sandy Irvine, setting out from a tent "perched on a fragile outcrop of snow, the world dropping away from them on two sides." Opinion remains divided on whether the pair got to the top before they perished, and the discovery of Mallory's frozen corpse in 1999 failed to yield definitive evidence either way.
You will have to read "Above All Things" to learn what this author makes of it.
Rideout reveals her sympathies by casting her chapters on Ruth in the first person while leaving her husband's in the third. When George is bound up with Everest ("It's my mountain"), at home in England, Ruth cares for the children ("They are always wanting something, their insistent demands giving shape to the long days").
Wisely, Rideout eschews hagiography. Mallory comes across as a bit of a twit, especially when he is briefly seduced by the Bloomsbury set and then cheats on Ruth while in New York lecturing.
Rideout's creative use of form is admirable and she has researched the primary material thoroughly.
But she can be overly sentimental, her prose lacking in discipline. There are too many pages of undigested direct speech, and the use of the dramatic present tense doesn't quite work here.
As for the myth: how very English to prefer one's national heroes not only dead but effectively failures. That would never happen in America, would it?
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