Category: ragdoll reads

#16 – Touching the Void

What an incredible story, as anyone who has seen the documentary knows, Touching the Void tells the tale of two men, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, who summited the West Face of the 6344m Siula Grande in the Peruvian Alps.

During their descent, Simpson slipped, then fell, and broke his leg. Faced with the impossible, Yates began lowering his climbing partner down the mountain using their ropes. In extreme amounts of pain, Simpson’s almost down when he slips right over a crevasse. Faced with himself being dragged over the edge, Simon cuts the rope. And then suffers massive amounts of guilt for doing so, even though, truly, he didn’t have any choice.

Miraculously, Joe climbs out of the crevasse, crawls almost back to base camp, where Simon finds him, and ensures that he gets out of there safely, but barely alive.

I love stories about climbers, granted I’ve only ever read Into Thin Air, but I’ve watched numerous documentaries on Mount Everest and even interviewed Peter Hillary, and I’m consistently amazed at how much can go wrong. How people willingly know that much can go wrong but still push themselves to both the limits of their own bodies and the limits of the Earth, subject to all the whims and fancies of the weather, the elements, and the impossible battle with altitude.

Maybe because I know I could never climb a mountain. The closest I ever came was living in Banff and hiking to the top of Sulphur Mountain, which was incredible for me.

The documentary is good too, don’t get me wrong, but Simpson’s an amazing storyteller, and even if you’re not remotely interested in climbing or climbers or mountains or tragedy or, well, you get the picture, you should read this book anyway.

From Touching the Void:

“If you succeed with one dream, you come back to square one and it’s not long before you’re conjuring, slightly harder, a bit more ambitious — a bit more dangerous.”

Isn’t that a solid observation for life in general, never mind risking life and limb to climb to the top of a mountain?

#14 – Saturday

The extraordinary success of McEwan’s last novel, Atonement, is already starting to be seen in the power of the sales of his latest, Saturday. They are two very different books, but with McEwan’s keen sense for detail and the ability to create almost a perfect story, in that the plot, characters and/or situation seem to entertwine without anything seeming awkward or out of place, Saturday seems more self-contained and close-knit, despite being essentially a family drama, like Atonement.

I loved Atonement. It was a brilliant, bittersweet novel about loss and regret; in Saturday McEwan doesn’t sweep the timespan, but rather keeps his focus on one, seemingly normal Saturday. Henry Perowne, successful neurosurgeon, wakes up early, heads to the window and sees a plane crash in the distance. This tragic event becomes an overarching symbol for the events of the day: the criminal asapect involved in the crash; the near-death experience for the pilots; and the absolute almost absurdity of watching a plane crash in downtown London.

A strange start to a strange, but yet somehow still absolutely normal Saturday. As Perowne goes through the motions of the morning, falling back asleep, having something for breakfast, preparing for his squash game, McEwan fills up the book with far-reaching and intimate details of the man’s life. How he met his wife, whom he loves to distraction; how his children will both be at dinner, one a poet living abroad in Paris, the other an upcoming blues musician.

It’s almost as if McEwan challenges the reader to find the mundane in this everyday life–that is until a minor traffic accident derails not only his perfect day, but it somehow comes back to haunt Perowne much later that night.

To say that it’s an excellent book would be a glossy adjective that doesn’t necessarily exploit the success of the novel. It’s almost Hemingway-esque, not in it’s prose, for McEwan writes long, luxurious sentence, but in structure. It’s a book obsessed with building a character and looking at the world from one day from his perspective, watching that perspective change, and then watching everything float back to normal, but with one of those moments, those ever-changing moments that affect your life forever, behind him.