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Dead lucky: Life and death on Mount Everest

by Lincoln Hall. Random House, 2007.

Reviewed by Ann Skea. http://ann.skea.com/

At 7.30pm on May 26th 2006, at 8600 metres on the face of Mount Everest, Lincoln Hall died. At 9am that morning he had stood on the summit and spoken by radio-phone to Alexander Abromov, the expedition leader at Advance Base Camp. He spoke briefly, letting Alex know that he and the three Sherpas, Lakcha, Dorje and Dawa Tenzing who were with him, were on their way down. One hour later cerebral oedema struck him and he began to hallucinate. For the next few hours he lapsed in and out of coherent consciousness. At times he was lucid and capable, at other times crazy: he refused his oxygen mask, fought to go back up the mountain, and tried to jump off Kangshung Face. The three Sherpas, soon joined by another, Pemba, pushed and pulled him down the mountain.

At Mushroom Rock, still 300 metres above Advance Base Camp, the Sherpas were exhausted, they had no oxygen, no food or drink, Hall was unresponsive and dying, and the weather forecast was bad. The Sherpas were ordered to cover Hall with stones and leave him.No-one had ever survived a night on Everest at 8600 metres. Exhaustion, hypothermia, lack of oxygen, the retention of fluid in the brain so that the whole metabolism is affected, snow blindness, detached retinas, all these things are common at this altitude and all can be fatal.

At the time of Hall's descent eleven climbers had already died on the mountain in the few months of the climbing season, the last just hours before Hall and the Sherpas reached Mushroom Rock. Alex, at Base Camp, phoned Hall's wife, Barbara, and broke the news to her that at 7.30pm, on Everest, her husband had died.

Barbara told their two teenage sons, rang a few people, and family and friends began to rally round to support her. Amongst others, she contacted Ang Karma, a Buddhist friend in Kathmandu, and asked him to perform the appropriate Buddhist ceremonies for her dead husband, who had become a practising Buddhist in the late 1960s. Only late in the evening of the next day did Barbara hear that her husband was still alive, but that he had only a 50-50 chance of surviving.

Hall had tackled Mount Everest twenty-two years earlier but had been forced to turn back before he reached the summit. He joined the 2006 expedition as an experienced, high-altitude cameraman for a fourteen-year-old boy, Christopher Harris, and his father, who intended to climb the highest mountains on each continent, seven summits in all. Unfortunately, Christopher had experienced a severe drop in blood pressure shortly after leaving Advance Base Camp. A second attempt had produced the same result, so, recognizing that it was too dangerous for them to press on, he and his father turned back. Hall however, was urged to go ahead, and did.

Lincoln Hall is a very experienced mountaineer, veteran of some thirty-six years of mountaineering expeditions both as a climber and a guide. He is also a writer and film-maker, and he is co-founder of the Australian Himalayan Foundation.

Dead Lucky tells the story of his last expedition to Mount Everest, his death and his survival. Even for a non-climber like me, it is a fascinating story. His account of the difficulties of the climb, the expeditions and climbers he met, the harrowing descent, and his subsequent treatment for frostbite is gripping and well-written. He has no doubt, just as the Sherpas had no doubt, that he died. His description of his psychological state, his hallucinations, and the few moments of lucidity which surrounded that death alone on the ridge at 8600 meters is totally absorbing. I was surprised to read of the large number of people who now climb Everest during the brief season when summiting is possible. I was surprised, too, to read of the fixed ropes and crevasse-crossing ladders which are put in place by Sherpas each season for some expedition organizers and which make the ascent marginally safer. Nor did I expect to hear that Hall reach the summit after passing a number of dead bodies, some of which have lain there for years, and that the summit was littered with empty oxygen cylinders and marked with yellow urine stains. I was shocked to read his account of the two Sherpas who were sent to help him when another climber found that he had survived the night at Mushroom Rock, and who bullied and threatened him, cut a rope at one critical moment, and attacked him with an ice pick (he had bruises to prove that this was no hallucination). Luckily, other Sherpas arrived in time to save him.

In spite of the organized expeditions, the final stages of the ascent of Everest are still extremely hazardous. Survival above 8300 metres is, to use Hall's word, "desperate". The oxygen level is so low that even with oxygen support just speaking is exhausting. The final stages of the ascent are begun in darkness, vision is restricted by an oxygen mask, and clothing is cumbersome. Gaining the summit and the euphoria of doing so often takes all the climber's energy, so descent is even more hazardous. As Hall discovered.

Dead Lucky tells an amazing story. Occasionally, I found the listing of names daunting and confusing. Hall seems to have felt obliged to name everyone on the mountain that year. His acknowledgements, too (thankfully tucked at the back of the book) run to seven pages and even include the cafe where he typed part of his manuscript whilst attending hospital for the treatment of his frostbitten fingers and toes. Nevertheless, the book is a pleasure to read, the photographs are interesting and the glossary useful. One is still left wondering what prompts anyone to expose themselves to the agony, danger and trauma of trying to reach the top of Mount Everest. Hall's own list of reasons doesn't solve that riddle. Looking back, he sees the mountain as a mirror into which climbers look to find themselves. His brush with death has given him a new perspective on life and, as he says at the very end of the book, now that he has summited Everest his life can move on.

- Copyright Ann Skea 2007

The Australian / Vogel Literary Award 2007

The winner of this year's Australian/Vogel Literary Award is 35 year old Stefan Laszczuk for his unpublished manuscript I dream of Magda. (Even though it currently says '2006 winner' at the top of this page, it is 2007!).

Also shortlisted for the award were:

She played Elvis by Shady Cosgrove
Conditions of return by Daniel Ducrou
The homicidal nerd by Jason Spongberg
Memory vertigo by Michael Sala

Man Booker shortlist announed

The shortlist for the 2007 Man Booker Prize has been announced.
They are:

Darkmans by Nicola Barker
The Gathering by Anne Enright
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
Animal’s People by Indra Sinha

Ian McEwan was 3/1 favourite to win it, but he's just been overtaken by New Zealand's Lloyd Jones.

You can check the availability of this years finalists and place holds on popular titles via our online catalogue.

Shakespeare's wife

by Germaine Greer. Allen & Unwin, 2007.

Reviewed by Ann Skea. http://ann.skea.com/

Introduction: considering the poor reputation of wives generally, in particular the wives of literary men, and the traditional disparagement of the wife of the Man of the Millennium.

In this introduction to her 'Introduction', Greer spells out for us the theme and nature of her book. Ann Shakespeare is the maligned or disparaged wife in question and Greer intends to rescue her from this sorry state. She takes on all the well-know biographers of Shakespeare and points out where they err, and she offers her own biography of the wife of the Bard. As usual, she is argumentative, challenging and controversial. As usual, she will infuriate some readers and delight others. But she is tilting at windmills: and given that she provides us with chapter headings in the manner of Cervantes in Don Quixote, she clearly knows this.

In Chapters One and Two, Greer gallops through the genealogies of both Ann and William at such a pace that the reader is left reeling. Parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, births, marriages, name-changes, contracts, deaths and wills fly past but ultimately prove nothing other than that we don't know and probably will never know why Ann (or Agnes) Hathaway (or Gardner) and William Shakespeare married, or what their marriage was like. All Greer proves is that she can speculate as well or even better than the "bardolaters", in particular the male ones, whose work she frequently quotes. She speculates along the way that Mary Shakespeare, William's mother, married for status and spent her time gossiping and showing off her finery, rather than helping his father in the family business; that a young, love-lorn William wooed Ann with his poems (which, of course, is very likely); and that Ann was blind (although this is probably sarcasm), a milkmaid, or an employee in John Shakespear's gloving business.

Other chapters contain similar gallops through fragmentary archives concerning Stratford, its history and its citizens. Mostly, these chapters concern people whose lives may have been somewhat similar to that of Ann Shakespeare or who may have had some association with her. They provide support for Greer's claims that, for example, Ann was a respected and influential, financially independent townswoman. Which is quite possibly true. Often, however, these chapters bog down in details and connections which are just confusing. They offer speculation supported by too many random and often irrelevant details, which is pointless.

When Greer gets down off her high horse and writes about facts related to contemporary custom and society in general, rather than fantasy, she is very good. Chapter Six, for example ("of handfasts, troth-plights and bundling, of rings, gauds and conceits, and what was likely to happen on the big day"), offers a delightful description of Elizabethan marriage practices, beautifully illustrated by apt quotations from Shakespeare's plays. This chapter is a pleasure to read and provides us with a deeper understanding of the plays as well as some idea of the way in which a sixteenth century audience would have understood them.

Another chapter which I thoroughly enjoyed is that which argues that some of Shakespeare's love sonnets may have been written for Ann, not for some mysterious dark lady (or man). Greer quotes freely from the sonnets and argues her case selectively but well. The romantic in me would happily believe that Shakespeare truly loved his wife and missed her during his long absences from Stratford, but nothing can be proved either way.

It is a pity that in her gallant effort to rescue Ann from oblivion, Greer sometimes contradicts herself. In several places she notes that many people made the three day journey between London and Stratford, and she suggests that Will did this between terms, when the theatres were closed, and for family occasions. At other times she writes of him as having been "estranged from his family for more than ten years". She is also inclined to lapse in slang (Mary Shakespeare was "spoiled rotten", John Shakespeare's business had "flat-lined", someone else "gets an earful"), which is a pity given the overall excellence of her writing.

None of this matters, of course. In the end, all biography is speculation. What does matter is Shakespeare's work, not his life or that of his wife.

As Greer writes in the penultimate paragraph of her final chapter, in which she, "the intrepid author", suggests that Ann may have been very much involved in the publication of the First Folio: "All this, in common with most of this book, is heresy, and probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice".

Exactly!

Copyright Ann Skea 2007

Young adult book reviews

If you're looking for young adult books a great place to start is cool-reads. The site features hundreds of reviews written by 10-15 year olds. An Australian site to try is Inside a Dog. There are reviews, interviews and competitions. You can also download the first chapter of selected books to listen to. They're even starting a teen choice book award: The Inkys.