Book Review: Into The Silence

I have read several books about Mallory, and was somewhat daunted at first by the 600+ pages. 

Needlessly though, and I realised quite soon, that it in order to tell the story, the Great War must be included. 

Everything builds up to that final assault, and with no heed to those terrible years before it is not possible to comprehend what went on. 

This is an excellent book, with a fluent and exciting telling of the story, and comprehensive research.

In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: "The price of life is death." Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but "a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day." As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much of it that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived, the moments of being alive.

For all of them Everest had become an exalted radiance, a sentinel in the sky, a symbol of hope in a world gone mad.

Andy Weston