Into the Silence
by Wade Davis
Summary
The question every Everest book asks is whether Mallory reached the summit before the mountain killed him in 1924. Davis's book, a decade in the research, asks the better question: what made these particular men climb, and his answer reframes the whole story. The men of the 1921, 1922 and 1924 British expeditions were the survivors of the Western Front, and the book opens there, in the mud with the stretcher bearers and gas, tracing what each future climber saw. After that, the thesis runs, death had no more terrors for them; the mountain was not a risk but a redemption, a clean, high place for a generation that had watched the meaning bleed out of the world.
On that foundation Davis builds the fullest account of the three expeditions ever written: the imperial politics that opened Tibet, the trek across hundreds of miles of unmapped country just to find the mountain, the monasteries and the lamas' view of these strange, driven guests, the improvised clothing and oxygen debates, the deaths of the Sherpa porters in 1922 that Mallory carried afterwards, and the last sighting in 1924, two dots going strong for the top before the cloud closed. George Mallory emerges complete, Bloomsbury charm, marriage, doubt, and around him a whole cast, Norton, Somervell, the war haunted Sandy Irvine barely more than a boy.
Around six hundred and fifty pages, with the scholarship of a history and the pull of an epic.
Best for readers who want the Everest story told as the last act of the Great War, which, this book persuades you, is what it was.
Historical Context & Significance
Into the Silence won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2012 after more than a decade of work, and was later shortlisted for the prize's Winner of Winners award, a measure of how it has lasted. Reviewers ran out of comparisons; the consensus settled on the definitive account of the early Everest expeditions and one of the great books about the aftermath of the First World War, which is the pairing the subtitle claims.
Wade Davis is an anthropologist by trade, a Harvard trained ethnobotanist and National Geographic explorer in residence, and the book's most distinctive quality comes from that training: the Tibetan world is rendered with the same care as the British one, the expeditions seen from the monastery as well as the mess tent.
The Mallory question itself the book leaves where the evidence leaves it, on the mountain; the 1999 discovery of Mallory's body frames the telling without settling it.