Joe at his most thoughtful
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I am a huge fan of mountaineering literature and I especially enjoy a pacy tale, however The Beckoning Silence moves at quite a slow pace and appropriately so. In this book Joe Simpson is feeling the effects of advancing years, losing his nerve. So many of his friends have died tragically that he comtemplates abandoning mountaineering altogether. He reflects on his early years considering that he was perhaps obsessed at that time.
A friend encourages him to have one last hurrah - to climb the mountain that inspired him to become an mountaineer in the first place - the Nordwand of the Eiger - aka the Mordwand because of the death toll of climbers who perished attempting to scale the wall.
Joe gives an interesting account of the history of the Eiger and explores his own fears and reason for them in great depth. Certain paragraphs of this book are so beautifully written I am tempted to take it up again. It is an elegy combined with mountaineering adventure.
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Mid life crisis?
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This is a stunning book from Joe Simpson; I prefer it to Touching the Void. The account of his ascent up the north face is a masterclass in storytelling.
But it's more than a book about climbing a mountain, or the history of climbing that mountain, which is covered well and sensitively. It's about the journey of life; how one changes as the years pass, and friends disappear. Anyone who has been through such life events will identify with Simpson wrestling with his conscience as he ponders why he does what he does. And you get a better answer than 'because it's there'.
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When danger becomes too dangerous
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Joe Simpson's first book, Touching the Void, is a gripping description of a climb that went (almost tragically) wrong. If you haven't read that first, I would recommend doing so - it provides much of the emotional set-up for The Beckoning Silence. Here Simpson describes many tragic trips of other climbers; treading an uneasy path between sensationalism and his urgent need to share the feelings inspired by being part of such a close-knit yet endangered community. Simpson does an excellent job of taking the layperson inside a world where life is fragile, hanging by the thin thread of a climbing rope on an all-too-precarious perch.
The possibility overshadows the book that Simpson spends so much time dwelling on the tragedies of others so that readers will not criticise him for trips where he has backed down. Fair enough - although there is a sense that he does not want his decisions to be harshly judged, this is unlikely from anyone who has first read Void. Simpson's courage could never now be called into question, and it is interesting to read his judgements on when danger becomes too dangerous. Essentially this is the crux of the book - whether we are reading about Simpson's own decisions or those of others which now haunt him, this is the central decision at every turn: when to face peril and when to retreat from it.
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Beautiful, but standing on the shoulders of giants.
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Joe Simpson doesn't seem to be the man I'd choose to try climbing with - some major catastrophe always seems to be just over the next pitch. In 'Beckoning Silence', Joe wrestles with the deaths of some of his closest friends, and a couple more near escapes, and attempts to capture his deliberations as to whether to leave climbing altogether.
Simpson continues with his great writing style in Silence, with an ability to capture the emotion of the mountains that he is climbing. He manages to make you feel involved in each of his expeditions, even if you've never climbed before. His choice of drama gives the book a power to take your breath away, and he can make you feel like you are hanging eight feet out over a two thousand feet drop, all from the safety of your living room.
However, I don't feel this is his best book. I felt he was guilty of borrowing too heavily from other authors, particularly 'The White Spider', and the rapid changes of continent deny the reader the chance to feel part of the sustained climb that drove you forward in the other books. My greatest disappointment though was a feeling that he trivialises the deaths of other mountaineers, which is sad, as I think this is the opposite of his intent in writing the book. In attempting to set each scene, he uses descriptions of each accident, I feel, rather too sensationally. With unnerving rapidity, he moves from one macabre scene to the next, more to maintain momentum, than perhaps offer a fitting memorial to each climber. Without spoiling the latter part of the book, as he describes the deaths of some climbers on the Eiger, you feel more like a gory tourist, rather than a comrade to the souls described, and this left me very empty. I wanted time to contemplate each of these men, the lives abruptly ended, and I felt the pace of the book denied me this.
This ultimately prevented the book from reaching a conclusion, and although this may be where Simpson ended up in his personal journey, I do not feel it is a fair place to leave the reader.
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Likes blowing his own trumpet...
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I really enjoyed the accounts of climbing, the recounts of famous climbing disasters, and his descriptions of the authors' friends. However, while reading this book I began to get annoyed with Mr Simpson constantly blowing his own trumpet (he is entitled to in some respects). I'm not sure his editor introduced him to the notion of modesty. Most of the chapters should have had the sub-heading of "Goodness me, I'm quite someone- just read on to find out how good I really am."
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