Review by Stephen Goodwin the editor of The Alpine Journal in Climber Magazine March 2007

An Afterclap of Fate: Mallory on Everest
by Charles Lind

When the body of George Mallory was discovered on Everest on 1 May 1999, some of the romance drained from mountaineering's crowning story. Mallory, from then on, became the property of a kind of forensics industry, picking over his remains and poignant possessions for evidence that would clinch the hoary question - did he and Andrew Irvine reach the summit in 1924 or not?

Analysts, historians, publishers and a number of professional climbers have been making hay ever since. The hunt will soon resume for Irvine's body and the elusive vest pocket camera that might tell all. But how will it be when we know? Might our western obsession with reducing mystery to its often prosaic reality end in a feeling of empty disappointment?

Confirmation that Mallory and Irvine - "the Light Blue and the Dark Blue pulling together" as Lind puts it - had indeed beaten Hillary and Tensing to the top of the world by near 30 years, would, I must admit, be a hoot; all that re-writing of history and eating of humble pie by the majority who have declared the pair couldn't have done it. But confirmation of failure would be a dull blow, a triumph of the analysts and tomb-raiders over the romantics.

Charles Lind, in the remarkable prose-poem that forms two-thirds of this book, has reclaimed Mallory from cold inquiry and given him a voice; an elated, agonised voice, reflecting on war, fellow Everesters and his beloved Ruth as he pushes for the summit. It is an inspired way of bringing Galahad of Everest back to life and Lind has accomplished it with élan.

The back third of the book are chapter notes in which Lind not only backs up his belief that Mallory and Irvine made it but colours in the 1920s; climbing on Lliwedd and Scafell, the milieu of Cambridge and Bloomsbury, and the aftermath of the Great War, all mud and poetry as it emerges here. Boiled down, Lind's contention is that the Second Step would not have seemed an insurmountable barrier at a time when combined tactics were standard. And through both the poem and the narrative there comes a strong sense that the 1920s Everesters, tempered by war and living more active, less centrally-heated lives than we do today, were physically and philosophically better attuned for the grim business of high altitude mountaineering.

But this is too much dwelling on the analysis when the richness of Lind's book is the narrative. It is told in the first person, an elegy of sorts, Mallory's thoughts wandering freely as he makes his way up "to the place where desire ends "twenty nine thousand and two feet up in the thin, frigid air". At first he is discursive, as when moving gracefully from the red poppies of Flanders to the blue of Tibet, "happy flower of an Arcadian world: a bright poppy that doesn't bear the mournful memories of the dead". And gazetted among the dead, alongside Rupert Brooke, is Siegfried Hereford . . .

It seemed only yesterday we picked him up at Bangor . . . our Double Traverse of Lliwedd together, the sunlit, Christmas memory of it still . . .

Gaining altitude and increasingly exhausted, Mallory's thought lines become disjointed, sometimes gasp short, lucid appreciations of their progress and later predicament merging with hallucinations and the wanderings of a well stocked mind. In one versifying moment, Lind/Mallory plays with the names of familiar hills . . . the gently undulating Gogs . . . Mam Tor . . . the fantastic hills of the Chankly Bore . . . (I almost went to look up that last, then remembered.) Then goes on:

And will the railway still be running
Up to the top of Mt Snowdon for tea . . .

Exactly how Lind deals with the movements of Mallory and Irvine beyond that last sighting by Noel Odell I am not going to reveal here. It is a work of informed imagination, wonderfully plausible, Mallory's version of events at last!

To Lind's great surprise, and the bemusement of the mountaineering literati, most of whom had neither seen the book nor heard of its author, An Afterclap of Fate was awarded the 2006 Boardman Tasker prize for mountaineering literature. Somewhat reticent about his background, Lind is probably best described as a 'poet-scholar'. In his early 50s, his home is in Hove, Sussex, though he is temporarily resident in Berlin, learning German to aid his next writing project. His only direct experience of climbing was in his late teens in Scotland.

The BT judges are to be congratulated for their courage and sensitivity, for this isn't a book with an instant or easy appeal for a climbing readership. Initially it takes concentration to get the rhythm of the prose-poem form and an ear for the language and wordplay of 80 years ago. Even the subject could have been a turn off. The trio of judges must have groaned when first confronted with an entry subtitled: Mallory on Everest. How much more could be said about gorgeous George and his amazing disappearing act? Well it depends how you say it. And no one has said it like Charles Lind before.

Stephen Goodwin