Skip to main content

Review: The Beckoning Silence by Joe Simpson


Genre: Adventure memoir.
Subjects:  History, mountain-climbing, self-discovery, fear, friendship, death, survival.
Reading challenge: The 2016 Nonfiction Reading Challenge, hosted by The Introverted Reader
Challenge tally: 1 book.

I read Simpson‘s best-seller, Touching the Void, a couple of years ago and enjoyed it immensely. Perhaps „enjoyed“ is not the right word, rather I found it a thrilling and yes, touching, account of the ability of the human spirit to not give up when all hope seems lost. (There was also a lot of bloodymindedness involved).


This book is written with the same stylistic skill as Touching the Void, but suffers somewhat from being more of a series of loosely interconnected accounts of separate climbing expeditions and adventures, ending with an attempt to scale the Eiger that would be end up being tinged with tragedy. The thread that holds the book together is Simpson‘s growing realisation of his mortality, the discovery that he doesn‘t really enjoy mountain-climbing any more and his quest for an equally thrilling pursuit to replace it, one that doesn‘t have quite the same kind of death toll. 

He describes various climbing expeditions and his experiences with paragliding, the sport he chose as a possible replacement for the climbing, and ends with his attempt, with a partner, to climb the technically difficult and lethal north face of the Eiger in an attempt to finally finish a climb he had wanted to do since he was a novice climber. Simpson had read Heinrich Harrer's history of the attempts and description of the first successful ascent of the north face, The White Spider, as a teenager and this had kindled his interest in mountain-climbing in the first place, so this was a fitting climb for him while winding down his climbing activities.

 It also deals with his recovery from the injuries he sustained in the accident described in Touching the Void and a later climbing accident that's described in This Game of Ghosts (another one for the  wish-list, along with The White Spider).

This is a book for mountain climbing enthusiasts and armchair adventurers alike, and while there is a considerable amount of technical jargon in the book, especially when describing equipment and climbing techniques, it is still accessible to people like me who have never strapped on climbing gear and gone mountaineering. I also came away from it with a number of titles of mountainerring books I would like to read.

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme