Since I read John Krakauer's Into Thin Air back in April, I've been somewhat obsessed with Mt. Everest and stories about it. So when I found out that Jeffrey Archer had written a fictionalized biography of George Mallory, who vanished in his attempts to climb Mt. Everest in 1924, I leaped at it.
Like a Quentin Tarentino film, Paths of Glory opens up in 1999, when climbers on Everest discover a body lying frozen on the landscape of the mountain. A label, sewn in to the shirt of the deceased, reveals that this unfortunate climber is none other than George Leigh Mallory, the most famous Mt. Everest victim of all time. Rewind backward, and Archer gives us scenes from Mallory's life, starting as an adventurous child at the beach, with no mind for danger, and culminating in the fateful climb years later.
I started reading this book because I was interested in Everest, in hearing about George Mallory and his fateful climb. I didn't realize that the book was going to be mainly about Mallory's life, his aspiration as a teenager, his relationship with his wife Ruth, etc. And I'm not naysaying that! It was a little offputting at first, but I started to enjoy it around the midpoint. I do think several of Archer's "childhood stories" of Mallory's life are thinly-stretched at best -- especially the idea of Mallory climbing a tower in Venice just to win the attention of his sweetheart -- and they gave me the eye rolls several times. You can tell when Archer is making up stories as filler in this book. But there is definitely enough to make it stand on its own.
I don't often cry at books, but reading Mallory's final letter to Ruth made me tear up at the end. Like with Into Thin Air, I found myself enraged at Mallory and the other Everest climbers several times. They had their whole lives ahead of them, they had families back at home, and why did they set out to climb a mountain that nobody had ever climbed before? Just because, as Mallory put it, "it is there"? That sort of mentality is alive and well in a lot of people; Krakauer wrote about some of them. But to a nobody like me, I guess, it's going to make no sense.
Rating: ****
I started reading this book because I was interested in Everest, in hearing about George Mallory and his fateful climb. I didn't realize that the book was going to be mainly about Mallory's life, his aspiration as a teenager, his relationship with his wife Ruth, etc. And I'm not naysaying that! It was a little offputting at first, but I started to enjoy it around the midpoint. I do think several of Archer's "childhood stories" of Mallory's life are thinly-stretched at best -- especially the idea of Mallory climbing a tower in Venice just to win the attention of his sweetheart -- and they gave me the eye rolls several times. You can tell when Archer is making up stories as filler in this book. But there is definitely enough to make it stand on its own.
I don't often cry at books, but reading Mallory's final letter to Ruth made me tear up at the end. Like with Into Thin Air, I found myself enraged at Mallory and the other Everest climbers several times. They had their whole lives ahead of them, they had families back at home, and why did they set out to climb a mountain that nobody had ever climbed before? Just because, as Mallory put it, "it is there"? That sort of mentality is alive and well in a lot of people; Krakauer wrote about some of them. But to a nobody like me, I guess, it's going to make no sense.
Rating: ****
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