Books of the Month

'Mountains of the Mind' by Robert Macfarlane

Sometimes you just know a book is going to grab you when you've barely started it. A few pages into Mountains of the Mind, which won the Guardian First Book Award in 2003, I was pretty confident I'd found my Book of the Month.

First, a few isn'ts. This isn't a book describing the great mountains of the world. It isn't a book about the people who've climbed them over the years. And it isn't even about imaginary mountains. What it is, in fact, is something much more interesting, which draws in part on each one of those isn'ts. The book's subtitle is 'A History of a Fascination', and it's this which Macfarlane chooses to focus on: what it is about mountains which has inspired, excited, terrified and traumatised writers, thinkers, explorers and climbers over the centuries.

The historical reach of the book is broad, but it's in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that things get really gripping. Macfarlane takes us on an impressive journey through the last few hundred years, illustrating how Westerners have moved from being in awe of the craggy heights of mountains like the Alps (sometimes actually blindfolding themselves on mountain passes so as not to pass out wth sheer fright), to learning to appreciate the aesthetic pleasures of mountain scenery. Using illustrations from literature and art of the time, he shows how they began to equate height and altitude with success and domination, and then quickly became obsessive about bagging peaks and exploring regions which lie off the map. To each age mountains have represented something different, and each generation of altitude-loving adventurers owe their world view in good part to their forerunners.

The penultimate chapter of the book is a brilliant recreation of George Mallory's three trips to Everest which is every bit as good as fast-paced fiction. Macfarlane shows how the myth which has built up around Mallory sums up so many of the attitudes towards moutains, and exploration, and adventure and Britishness.

If you think that this might be a dry chronicle of mountain references through the ages, think again. Macfarlane is a wonderful writer, and his descriptive sharpness would be the envy of any literary fiction writer. He's also made the astute decision to include his own experiences in the book, which not only brings a personal touch which lifts the book from the realms of straightforward history, but adds both to our empathy with his own fascination, and our respect for him as a someone who knows at first hand what he's talking about. It's an intelligent, imaginative, thoughtful book, extremely well written.

Susan Tranter

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