These two books about climbing, a memoir set in the Andes and a novel set in the Pennines - each of them as excellent of its own kind as we are likely to get - between them raise again the question posed by all attempts to write creatively about experience in conditions of extreme steepness and altitude: how to do it in ways that evoke the heart of the experience and don't resort unduly to its more freakish terrors?

LRB 26 October 1989 | PDF Download