This Game of Ghosts
Joe Simpson
The Mountaineers Books, 1995, ISBN: 0898864607

Have a look at Everest.com's summary for 2006: "Everest 2006: Over 480 Summits, 11 Deaths". And 2006 was a good year. Compared to the numbers of people dying annually in road accidents, or from tuberculosis, or compared to the number of children around the world who lose their lives from drinking contaminated water every week, these mortal numbers might seem miniscule and they really are. But Everest is just one mountain among hundreds of mountains, one climb among thousands of climbs - and Everest is a safe mountain. You may have lost more than one family member to a motor vehicle accident, or to cancer, or to a heart attack. And yet, if you are a climber, the chances are almost 100% that you have already lost more than one friend to the mountains - and as long as you continue being drawn toward the high points of the world there is no doubt at all that you will lose still more.

Like most people who have dipped their toes in the seductive waters of rock climbing, I was familiar with the story (told in Touching the Void) of Joe Simpson's unwillingness to die after breaking his leg on Siula Grande, then finding himself trapped alone in a crevasse and being faced with the near impossible effort required to get himself off the mountain. While no one can doubt that Joe owed his life on that occasion to both his physical and mental strength (as well as a powerful streak of stubborness - something which comes through clearly in this book), he was also very, very lucky that the wrenching decisions he made over those days turned out to be the right ones. Luck as much as skill determines the outcome of life at all levels, but nowhere is this more obvious than in the high-stakes game of mountaineering.

The story told here does not set out to thrill with tales of adventure in the mountains, though there are certainly plenty of moments that will have you hanging breathless from a crumbling flake of granite - just as Simpson and his climbing partner Ian Whitaker once did for about twelve hours while waiting for rescue from the Bonatti Pillar with a 3,000 foot fall below them. This Game of Ghosts is about the aftermath of a triumph of survival and just how hollow such a triumph can be. It is about the fact that after coming down from a disaster in the mountains there is still a further descent into the reality of healing which can be more harrowing than the worst conditions of any raw quest to stay alive. While you are in the grip of the monster there are certain things you know must be done - you must fight at all costs - once the fight is over, only the mundane is left and often this is far more dangerous than the fight itself. Here Simpson tells of the battle to recover himself that continued long after Siula Grande, but the essential purpose of this narrative is his attempt to make sense of the deaths of so many of his friends and colleagues while he himself has come out alive in this ghostly game of chance not just once, but many times over.

At one point Simpson talks about where the writing of Touching the Void came from; the encouragement of a friend, a desire to separate rumor from fact, a need to recount for himself where he had been and what he had come back from. The result was an award winning piece of mountaineering literature and an inspiring story of survival. In This Game of Ghosts he gives a fascinating insight into how such books come to be written, of both the mechanical side (contracts, publicity appearances and the like) and the sheer amount of work involved, but he also tells of the toll that reliving the experience took on him.

He reminds us that we don't have to climb mountains to court death: as well as having several serious falls and being caught in an avalanche he has also survived a serious car accident, an attack by some drunk thugs, and depression (which resulted in him breaking off studying for a degree in english literature, despite good grades, by the sudden suicidal feeling that life was going nowhere). All things that can be experienced by 'normal' people, not just by mountaineers. He maintains a dry humour where appropriate: the story of a trip into the Himalayas with a stoned maniac driver at the wheel had me laughing out loud at times (in spite of the fact that I was in tears for other reasons).

'Attrition' sounds so impersonal, and it is one of Simpson's gifts that he gives every accident victim a moment, however small, even if it is only to honestly say that he felt nothing on hearing the news. On almost every page there is death, or a foreboding of it, or a terrible injury, a rescue, or a near miss. A friend's discovery of two climbers fallen to their deaths in the Alps leads to a discussion with the photographer who recorded the event, who then went to climb elsewhere because of another friend killed in a rockfall there the previous year; the photographer was then killed by lightning on another climb. On the same page Simpson learns another friend, the experienced Rob Uttley, has died on Annapurna; on the next page yet another friend falls to his death and another is seriously injured. It is in the aftermath of these events that Simpson and his friends plan their trip to Siula Grande.

Simpson writes well and he writes with feeling. He comes across (paradoxically, one might say) as a very down-to-earth man. He has little time for hype or pretence, and is certainly open about his own failings and imperfections. Some people might find that the book reads more like a diary... and at times it feels more like the unstructured outpouring of a troubled psyche, shifting forward to some events and back to others, but the timing actually does make sense.

It also helps for the reader to have some familiarity with the different mountain regions and some of the events he describes, so this probably shouldn't be the first book in this area that you pick up.

There is an intangible sense of sadness underlying this book, something we sometimes feel tapping us on the shoulder but in the normal course of our lives manage, for the most part, to shrug off. Joe Simpson doesn't try to fool or reassure anyone with easy answers as to why people climb and why people die, but he has thought long and hard about it. This Game of Ghosts is well worth reading for the adventures alone, but it is the insight it offers into the psychology of mountaineering from the perspective of an experienced climber that make it an important contribution to both mountaineering literature and to the analysis of risk at any level.

Reviewed by: C.A.L. 21/3/07

Other mountaineering books by Joe Simpson:

Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival, Harper, revised edition 2004, ISBN: 0060730552
Dark Shadows Falling, Mountaineers Books, 1999, ISBN: 0898865905
The Beckoning Silence, Mountaineers Books, 2003, ISBN: 0898869412