More like Thin Story - Thin Air by Michelle Paver

1935. There’s a mountain. It shall be climbed. For God and Empire, five plucky Englishmen will undertake to be the first heroic men to reach the top of the mountain which has claimed, oh gosh, many lives. They, alone, with all of their porters, will climb the mountain. They will be heroes. 

It probably didn’t help that I’ve not long since read Sarah Lotz’s The White Road, also a ghost story about a mountain climbing expedition (in that instance, Everest to Thin Air’s Kangchenjunga) and really loved it. I found it difficult not to compare the two books, especially as they cover much of the same ground and same ideas - as one would understandably expect for ghost stories about mountain climbing. Thin Air definitely came out wanting.

It takes a while to get going. Our narrator is Dr Stephen Pearce, younger brother (and very much the spare) to Kits, the driving force behind the expedition. As children, the brothers were obsessed with Bloody But Unbowed, Edmund Lyell’s account of his heroic failure to climb the mountain. Now they’re ready to succeed, hopefully with a lower body count than the Lyall expedition managed. 

Their expedition begins by calling in at the home of Charles Tennant, one of the survivors of the aforementioned expedition. Tennant has never spoken about what happened on the mountain and isn’t keen to now. Especially not to Stephen, who stumbles in on his private rooms to be given hints Lyell left much out of his account and that Tennant is terrified of the great hunk of rock he’s chosen to live out his life in the shadow of. Dun dun DUUUUUN. 

From there, we have the long trek to the base of the mountain. It serves to introduce our team, their dynamics, and the scale of the challenge ahead. There’s some attempts at foreshadowing the spooky stuff to come, but even when that does arrive spooky it is not.

Paver makes a stab at a 30’s setting. I was glad to see her include a degree of casual racism (because I think it’s important not to act like we white people weren’t all arseholes back then and still have much to learn today) but at the same time there felt to be a certain degree of pulling back - an effort to acknowledge without being too offensive. 

It’s a short book and shorter on period context. Although the style tends towards that of a Boys Own adventure, these characters didn’t strike me as existing in a 30’s way beyond their discussion that it’s unsporting to use oxygen cylinders to get the the peak and looking down on people for being German (although - would they?). The plucky middle-class voice of the narrator isn’t great and seriously weakens the descriptions of the “spooky” goings on.

There are also some odd mistakes which really should have been picked up by the editor, such as a reference to their base serving as GCHQ which is off because 1) it wasn’t called GCHQ until after WW2, and b) there’s not much encryption and intelligence gathering done at base camp. 

Finally, the grand “why” lacked any real horror. Again, it came down to the style of the writing for me - what should have been this grotesque reveal was just… meh. I didn’t feel much was done with it once it was revealed. It didn’t change anything.

I’ve tried to put my finger on why this didn’t work for me without spoilers or without going down the road of “the book should have been written this way”. I think it’s because I never felt as though there was an antagonist. In a ghost story, the antagonist can often be a setting: the haunted house which is trying to get the occupiers to leave or whatever, but Paver doesn’t do this. The fearsome mountain never feels like it’s anything but a mountain they’re climbing, for all that initial buildup. Pearce never feels as though he is being targeted. I didn’t feel there was anything deliberately working against them, which is vital for pretty much any story. Without an antagonist, there’s just a bunch of lads doing stuff.

I didn’t care for Thin Air. The writing was clunky, the story was pretty dull, and - having recently read another mountain climbing story - there wasn’t enough of other stuff to interest me. Read The White Road by Sarah Lotz instead.

2 stars.

Spare yourself - The White Devil by Justin Evans

I loved Justin Evans' A Good And Happy Child - loved it - so I was rather enthused to read this one. Sure, I wasn't too struck on the blurb, but that was true of his other book and that turned out to be great.

This one, not so much.

Part of it is not the fault of the book: I am hypersensitised to errors about Britain made by US authors. However, this was inadvertently hilarious.

We begin with a short and threatening prologue which fulfils the role of bad prologues everywhere: making up for the fact little happens in your first chapter. The White Devil opens proper with American student Andrew getting to grips with the oddity that is Harrow. We get parts of the welcome pack, the glossary - but don't worry if you're not paying attention, it doesn't actually make much difference.

Then, Andrew meets Matron, who is cross that he's an American. Later, he meets the other chaps in the 6th Form, all of whom are astounded to meet an American. They tell him to go f**k himself, he calls them assholes, they're all "Woah, mate, bit aggressive, what? That's how we greet each other in England!" Then there's a conversation in which Andrew doesn't know what a gap year is, or what A levels are. Later one of the English people will be completely confounded by the phrase "rain check" but that's okay because Andrew doesn't know what lager is.

Assuming you haven't thrown the book across the room by this point, you have further delights to come: Harrow admits girls! Oh, no wait, just one girl, and that's for reasons which are completely realistic and would totally happen in real life; just like Harrow offering Agriculture as a subject, and Andrew being the only American in the school, and the only new person in the 6th form, and everybody there being white and English (apart from Andrew, oh and Rhys, the Welsh Agriculture student).When a location is (as far as I can tell) so important to the plot it can't be remade as an unnamed public school - as in Patrick Gale's Friendly Fire, which is based on Winchester - you'd better, at least, glance at the website.

I gave it till P78, but even when the story had got going my suspension of disbelief was shot and I was questioning everything (would the police have conducted the interview like that, or does Andrew count as a minor?) Andrews motivation was flimsy. The final scene I read - that of an attempted rape of a child who I fully anticipated finding out was a ghost - pointed too heavily towards public school cliché and, frankly, made me disinclined to read any further.

Terrible. Go and read his other book. That's much better.