Everest, by Harriet Tuckey

This book, as the subtitle explains, makes a bold claim: Griffith Pugh was the ‘unsung hero’ of the 1953 ascent of Everest, his achievements neglected and nearly lost to posterity. Harriet Tuckey is Pugh’s daughter, so this assertion might be little more than a kindly attempt to revive her father’s flagging reputation. Yet, Pugh was clearly no ordinary father, and Tuckey’s advocacy on his behalf is correspondingly unusual.

She casts her father as a ‘uniquely talented, turbulent man,’ ‘truly great,’ ‘difficult, bad-tempered,’ ‘rather cruel’ and ‘totally selfish’. Many pioneers are Janus-faced in this way — those fervent, half-mad, ambitious men and sometimes women who scale mountains, chart the uncharted and meanwhile terrorise or abandon their families.

Tuckey describes her account in deliberately analogous terms, as a ‘personal Everest’:

a voyage of discovery of a daughter provoked to find out about the father she hardly knew and, in so doing, attempt to banish for ever a ghost of past trouble and resentment.