Title: Summit Fever
Author: Greig, Andrew
Published by: Canongate, Edinburgh
Year: 1997
First published: Hutchinson, 1985
Date reviewed: 01.01
ISBN: 0-86241-742-2

Despite the quote from Chris Bonington on the front cover – “a wonderful, gritty expedition book” – Summit Fever is a very different expedition book. Successfully different, and an excellent read.

Joe Simpson introduces the book –

In Summit Fever, Andrew Greig, performing poet, musician, and novelist, suddenly finds himself in the role of budding amateur mountaineer on an expedition to the Mustagh Tower in the Karakoram. Quite an introduction to climbing! It was to be an attempt on what was once dubbed “the unclimbable mountain” with a disparate bunch of strangers by a man better armed with a pen and note-book than cramponed boot and ice axe.

… Grieg’s role was primarily as the expedition writer with a chance to do some high-altitude load-carrying on the way. His task … at first seems an extraordinary one given that … he had had ‘no mountaineering experience at all’ when Mal Duff cheerily invited him on the trip. … Yet the very fact that he saw this alien world … through wholly innocent eyes gives Summit Fever a refreshingly honest ambience. It is an account by a ‘climber’ with nothing to prove … and whose appreciation of the high, hard world of the world’s highest mountains is not tainted by the ennui of habitual acquaintance.

As a portrait of an expedition – warts and all – it is a well-drawn piece with a dramatic and satisfying finale. … [Greig] reveals a sensitive awareness of this strange world. It portrays all the frustrations of a mountaineering expedition – the insanity of third-world bureaucracy, and the surprising drudgery and sheer hard work of Himalayan climbing, the boredom of forever waiting for something to happen and then the explosive frenetic activity when it does, so often likened to warfare – 90 percent boredom and 10 percent terror.

Joe Simpson – Introduction

And Andrew Grieg sets out his approach –

Until the November evening when Mal Duff banged on my window, I was purely an armchair climber, happy to enjoy mountaineering from a comfortable distance. (After that, common sense deserted me.) But I’d found that most climbing books left me vaguely dissatisfied in the same way as the freeze-dried meals we were to eat on the Mustagh Tower – something was always left out.

Climbing books are written by dedicated climbers, people for whom mountaineering has become second nature and habitual. The result is there is much they have ceased to consciously notice, and an equal amount they notice but don’t think to mention. They also have to observe the general ethos of mountaineers, and so adopt a certain style towards danger, fear, loneliness, endurance, ambition, exultation – usually jokey exaggerations or complete supression in favour of purely factual accounts.

The upshot is that, as with those cursed freeze-drieds, the contents are there but the whole juice and inner substance of the experience is missing. So I have tried to write about this adventure freshly, as it all happened to me for the first time. Having nothing to prove as a climber, I can afford to be honest about how it felt.

Andrew Greig – Foreword

So what we get is a mountaineering book with a great story to tell, enhanced with much better than usual portraits of the characters involved and their relationships, and an honest account of the highs and lows Greig experiences. Even the story of the walk-in, usually quickly skipped over, is told with interest and zest.

Near the end, Greig tries to sum up and answer the unanswerable question.

So what’s it all about? Why do climbers climb, why did I do it, what does it mean? Somehow I no longer want to talk or think about it. I’d begun climbing eager to analyse my companions, myself and climbing; now I’m reluctant to draw any conclusions at all. There is no clear answer to these questions, and even if there were it would not be very important. It is in the experience itself that the value lies. I can only really talk about it with other climbers, and with them there is no need to explain. … It is the texture of these last months that I wish to convey in the book. There will be no message.

Just one more quote, not from Greig himself, but one of the other group members: “I don’t know the meaning of fear – I go straight to abject terror!”