Challenge and response

The first four pages of this novel arouse the highest expectations. Some walkers in the Snowdon area stare up at the boilerplate slabs of a crag up which, far above them, a figure is climbing. He is neither carrying the special equipment nor wearing the protective gear usual for a project so dangerous, and he is, as one of the observers remarks in shocked amazement, ‘bloody soloing’. Then all at once he plunges to his death.

Everyone expects the body that lands on the grass below the crag to be that of some reckless tyro. In fact, it is that of a man eventually identified as one of the most famous of English mountaineers. At 53, he is long past the age when a climb so exacting should be attempted. The daring and athleticism with which he has made his way up the crag are matched by the daring and athleticism of the style in which Simon Mawer evokes the whole scene.