The ABOMINABLE

It seems to me that the latest novel by Dan Simmons is receiving unjustified criticism. If you have read The Terror , Drood , or Black Hills , you will realize that this is how he writes. Yes, his older novels contained more horror and fantasy, but I think he has moved on to another genre. His latest novels are a mixture of historical fiction and alternate history with a dash of “thriller”. This has to be one of his most clever novels. The twenty two page introduction of Jacob Perry’s meeting with Dan Simmons was awesome. Since the novel had a medley of real climbers, like George Mallory, A.C. Irvine, and Felix Norton, it wasn’t hard to believe that Perry was also genuine. Also impressive was how Simmons was able to keep the 663 page novel down to five main characters, thus giving the reader plenty of time to develop a rapport with the group. On page 247, we meet two fictional Sherpas (Ethnic name for the mountainous people of Nepal) Tenzing Bothia and Tejbir Norgay. They are minor characters at best, and I only bring it up to illustrate Simmons’s probable extensive research for this novel. Mount Everest’s summit was finally reached on 5/29/1953 by Edmund Hilary and his Sherpa (you guessed it) Tenzing Norgay. I noticed that the novel was thoroughly peppered with creative tidbits of information by the author. Well done.

The novel starts out with Jacob Perry, Richard Deacon (the Deacon), and Jean-Claude Clairoux (J.C.) climbing the Matterhorn in the summer of 1924. As they are eating their newspaper wrapped lunch, they see the headline that says British climbers, George Mallory and A.C Irvine, were killed in an attempt to reach Mt. Everest’s summit. According to German witness Bruno Sigl... Lord Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer were following Mallory and Irvine when they were swept away by an avalanche and also killed. The Deacon, a WWI war hero and respected British climber, is a friend of the Bromley family. The Deacon, J.C., and Jacob meet with Percival’s mother, Lady Bromley, who still thinks Percy might be alive and asks the group to find her son on Mount Everest. She will fund the trip but the trio must take Percy’s cousin Reggie with them. The trio spend a lot of chapters practicing and gearing up for the 1925 trip. Once they get to the Bromley tea plantation in India to join cousin Reggie, they are surprised to find out that the cousin is a lady. Deacon protests taking a Lady to Mt. Everest, but has no choice since she controls the funds and also is an accomplished climber. Reggie’s Indian right hand man and M.D. for the climb is Doctor Pasang. Now that the reader has met all five core characters, the group heads to Tibet to find out what really happened on that 1924 expedition.

Once they have permission to enter Tibet (Nepal is off limits to visitors), the core five starts the journey to the mountain. They are warned at a Monastery to look out for bandits and Yeti, or the Abominable snowmen. Simmons’s writing makes the journey so cold that I actually felt chilled reading the novel. The reader learns how the mountain is prosecuted with many Sherpas and animals carrying all the gear and food up and down the mountain. Base camp is pitched along with other camps going to higher elevations. This is where the story bursts with anticipation. Will they find Mallory and Irvine, or Bromley and Meyer? How did they really die? Who is following them? Is it Yeti, or the supposed German witness, Bruno Sigl? Will the core five make a run to the summit? The last 200 pages, or so are filled with intrigue and twists and turns that the reader truly doesn’t see coming. In the afterword, Dan Simmons keeps the ruse alive that Jacob Perry (our narrator) is a real person. Simmons visits Perry’s grave in the autumn of 2012 in a little Colorado town. He says on page 663, “I’m not a religious man, but I’d brought a bottle of the Macallan twenty-five-year-old single-malt Scotch and two small glasses that day. I filled both glasses, left one on the small headstone that said only JACOB WILLIAM PERRY April 2, 1902-May 28, 1992, and lifted the other.” This is a wonderful novel, I highly recommend it.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: Mount Everest is 29,029 feet to the summit and is the tallest mountain in the World. The Tibetans and Sherpas call the mountain Chomolungma, which means "Mother Goddess of the Earth." To date there have been 4,000 attempts to reach the summit with only 660 being successful. 


According to my friend and literary aficionado, Lisa Yoskowitz, the best book written about Mt. Everest is: Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster . barnesandnoble.com says, "A bank of clouds was assembling on the not-so-distant horizon, but journalist-mountaineer Jon Krakauer, standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, saw nothing that "suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down." He was wrong. The storm, which claimed five lives and left countless more—including Krakauer's—in guilt-ridden disarray, would also provide the impetus for Into Thin Air, Krakauer's epic account of the May 1996 disaster.

By writing Into Thin Air, Krakauer may have hoped to exorcise some of his own demons and lay to rest some of the painful questions that still surround the event. He takes great pains to provide a balanced picture of the people and events he witnessed and gives due credit to the tireless and dedicated Sherpas. He also avoids blasting easy targets such as Sandy Pittman, the wealthy socialite who brought an espresso maker along on the expedition. Krakauer's highly personal inquiry into the catastrophe provides a great deal of insight into what went wrong. But for Krakauer himself, further interviews and investigations only lead him to the conclusion that his perceived failures were directly responsible for a fellow climber's death. Clearly, Krakauer remains haunted by the disaster, and although he relates a number of incidents in which he acted selflessly and even heroically, he seems unable to view those instances objectively. In the end, despite his evenhanded and even generous assessment of others' actions, he reserves a full measure of vitriol for himself."