Wade Davis, Into the Silence

Into the Silence is an insightful chronicle of the early British expeditions to Mount Everest, climaxing in the fated and famed 1924 expedition in which George Mallory and Sandy Irvine met their death near the summit of the fabled mountain. It begins in the trenches of the Great War, chronicling the unimaginable horror that met British soldiers as they were slaughtered by the thousands at the hands of German artillery and machine guns. The war experience was not glorious, but instead horrifying and life altering, exposing soldiers to wanton death and destruction mere hours from their home shores but seemingly continents away from the perceptions back home (or even from the perceptions of commanding generals). Returning soldiers, those who made it home, were often irreversibly changed, and it is this change, along with the horrors many had faced, that sets the stage for the quest for Everest. The British colonial illusions and national psyche were altered in a decisive way by the first world war, in a way that makes the push for Everest both a quest for meaning in a seemingly meaningless quest and also a dying convulsion of colonial imperialism in the far-flung Raj. "In reality, the war left the nation bitterly divided, spiritually exhausted, and financially ruined . . . 'We have been moved already beyond endurance, and need rest'" (198-99; the latter half of the quote is a quotation from John Maynard Keynes). It was almost as if the country needed a new quest in which to be caught up.

Davis does a great job of chronicling the formative experiences of a number of key players in the years leading up to the Everest treks, and he allows their myriad motivations and aspirations to drive them toward the mountain. It is this element of the book that really gives it life, and take it beyond a simple historical chronicle of logistics, altitudes, and accomplishments, or even a mere adventure story, and into the hearts and minds of the Mallory and the other key figures in the push for the summit of the world.

The expanse of the narrative is truly epic, as it follows a group of men who literally trek off of the map into the harsh and uncharted wilds of the high Tibetan and Nepalese plateaus and mountains of the great Himalayas. Each of the three Everest journeys is followed in detail, with its challenges, discoveries, tragedies, and triumphs. Striking throughout the narrative is the almost casual approach to the mountain that pervades the first two approaches to the mountain, and even persists into the final push in 1924, in the selection of men who were not either young or fit enough for the rigors ahead, the lack of the necessary cold weather gear, and the stubborn refusal by most to even consider the merits of oxygen (or of down coats, introduced to the expedition by oxygen-advocate and climber George Finch on the 1922 attempt), though Mallory seems to have come around to the merits of the supplemental air as critical to any hope of success.

There is much to commend this wonderful book. It contains a great story of human endeavor in the pursuit of what is still considered a gargantuan feat (though countless deaths in the years since testify both to the harshness of the mountain and to attitudes that can sometimes become too casual with regard to the risks inherent in the attempt). The narrative is warm with personal detail, and captures and conveys a rich portrayal of British culture in the period between the wars, still replete with imperialist ideals and the flickering shadows of waning humanist optimism. It also serves as a vivid portrayal of the human cost of the British victory in WWI. It includes a number of maps, which decorate the endsheets, and which prove essential as you follow the various treks through the Himalaya. It also has a wonderful sixteen-page gallery of photos from the expeditions that help the reader envision the people and landscapes, though I was disappointed by the very curious and seemingly random arrangement of the photos, with pictures intermixed from the three expeditions, making it hard to find people or events without simply paging through the gallery.

The gallery arrangement isn't the only weakness, however. I greatly enjoyed the book, but found it too long. Especially in the first half of the book, detailing the run-up to Everest and the first exploratory expedition, I thought there was too much laborious detail. We are treated to a mini-biography of nearly every person we encounter, most of which include a review of the horrors of the WWI battlefields and each character's involvement therein. We also learn about every contour of the trail on the whole months-long march toward Everest in 1921, a journey that is essential to the story but should have been more abbreviated in my humble opinion. But once the 1922 expedition gets underway, the writing seems to streamline and the action begins to take over, leaving the last two hundred pages of this nearly six-hundred-page journey as the page-turning adventure writing I had hoped to encounter. It was the laboriousness of the heart of the book that kept this from being a truly great book, but it is still worth reading and has much to commend it. It is thoughtful, colorful, and insightful, and will certainly prove a definitive historical account of these landmark journeys and of these early chapters in the quest for Everest.

Thank you to Amazon Vine and the publisher, Knopf, for the review copy.