Touching the Void

Joe Simpson

London: Pan Books, 1989 [1988]. ISBN: 0-330-30859-9. Pp. 174.

Siula Grande is a 21,000-foot peak in the Peruvian Andes (Cordillera Huayhuash). It was conquered in 1936 but "the true prize, the daunting 4,500-foot West Face had so far defeated all attempts" (p. 14). It is this route that Mr Simpson and his climbing partner Simon Yates would tackle in 1985. The book is about the harrowing events that unfolded when Joe slipped on the descent and shattered his knee.

Despite the low chances of success and high probability of perishing along with his injured partner, Simon attempted to abseil Joe down the precipitous slope. Mr Simpson records Simon's thoughts at the time and they reveal just how little hope he had. That Simon would risk his life in circumstances where some more pragmatic people may have elected to abandon Joe to his own devices reveals a character that could easily stood up to all the abuse that some ill-informed readers have hurled at Simon for "leaving" Joe to die. The abseil goes as smoothly as it possibly can under the circumstances but when they are almost down, Joe get lowered over the edge of an overhanging rock and the rope comes to an end while he is still dangling more than a hundred feet above ground. He cannot climb back up, and he has no way of communicating with Simon who is belaying him from a freezing seat in the ice out of earshot. The snow begins to accumulate behind Simon pushing him out of the seat, his fingers get frost-bitten, but he holds on to the rope not knowing whether Joe is even alive at its end. Eventually, he comes close to falling off the face of the mountain himself, so he takes the painful decision to cut Joe loose.

Astonishingly, Joe survives the fall and finds himself on a ledge in a deep crevasse. When Simon descends next, he fails to see his partner and leaves, firmly convinced that Joe is dead. With a broken leg, without food or water, and almost without hope of success, Joe struggles for his life. He lowers himself into the gaping hole and as luck would have it ends up on a snow ledge that leads out of the crevasse. For three days he crawls in agony down the glacier and through moraines back to the camp where, incredibly, Simon and Richard have delayed their departure just enough to meet him.

There is nothing heroic about Joe's almost miraculous escape, as he is first to admit. After all, we human beings have a built-in defense mechanism that simply urges us on while there is a glimmer of hope, and even when this glimmer is probably only in one's own befuddled mind. Joe calls this urge to survive the voice, its rationality periodically cutting through the hallucinogenic daze caused by the exhausted body's attempts to get some much-needed rest, both physical and mental. I have never believed stories of people dying just because they gave up, it sounds all too improbable. Survival is not simply a matter of will, we all have that will, it is a combination of luck and skills that enable some to take advantage of their tenacity while denying it to others. Joe's ordeal is a moving drama but in some respects, Simon's decisions are the more painful ones. After all, Joe had no option but try to survive. He had no choice, and without choice there is no heroism. Simon had a choice, and he chose to risk his life to save his partner. Now that's something to write about.

Although much of the book details Joe's astounding struggle to survive, some of the most hair-raising moments actually happened on the ascent. Although the book drips with climbing jargon (I, for one, can't tell a crevasse from a bergschrund), Mr Simpson's skillful writing manages to convey enough detail for the reader to imagine what being on the mountain must have felt like. It is this sense of immediacy that renders every slip an almost palpable danger for the reader. Take, for example, the drop down the gully between two flutings on pp. 52-53: Joe slips and comes to a halt only when he crashes into Simon nearly knocking him over and almost dragging both of them to an appalling end at the bottom of the ridge. The flash-back of Simon watching two Japanese climbers fall to their doom under analogous circumstances helps imagine the kind of thoughts that must have raced in his head. There are several places in the book where one almost has to put it down and wait for the adrenaline rush to subside. As a writer, Mr Simpson is a world apart from the usual dry and pedantic authors of many mountaineering books.

Given Mr Simpson's account of other near-misses (e.g., the accident on the Bonatti Pillar, pp. 31-33), it is hard to fathom just why he would persist in this dangerous hobby. But then again, the one thing that separates a successful climber from an unsuccessful one is that the former is still alive. I do not know how many climbers die away from a mountain, but it does seem that a great many legends perish in the environment they have spent life-times getting to know. My guess then is that a near-miss for most mountaineers is equivalent to success, after all, anything that does not kill you is by definition a good outcome, and only these seem to count.

The UK edition of the book is horrendous. It is a cheap paperback with awful reproductions of the photographs. By the way, there are all too few photographs, which is surprising because Joe seems to have taken more pictures according to the book and because they could have used some photographs taken later. As it is, the hand-drawn map of Joe's crawl-out is the only aid in visualizing the terrain. The photos of the aftermath are not all that helpful. At any rate, I would still hunt down a worthier edition for the pictures that made the cut.

There is now an acclaimed film with Joe, Simon, and Richard playing themselves in this semi-documentary adaptation of the eponymous book. There was a much-publicized falling out between the director and his subjects, as well as between Joe and Simon. It is a bit ironic to think that what Siula Grande could not destroy fell victim to the pressures of filming and public relations. As usual, man turns out to be the most destructive thing on this planet.

September 29, 2005