Customer Reviews

The Ascent of Rum Doodle

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There was a period of time a few years back during which I ate up the literature of British exploration like candy - the tragic story of Robert Scott in the Antarctic, the thrilling survival adventures of Sir Ernest Shackleton, and the like. These yarns had in common their Britishness - a bizarre combination of courage and, frankly, foolishness (Scott thought he could get to the South Pole on PONIES and died in pursuit of that belief, accompanied by some people who had never even been south before, while the Norwegian Amundsen sensibly took dogs and experienced skiers and beat him to the destination).

Fortunately the British have a world-class capacity to poke fun at their own foibles, and that is what "Ascent of Rum Doodle" is all about. It parodies a (fictional) expedition to ascend Rum Doodle, a 40,000-foot (!) mountain somewhere near Everest

Expedition Leader Binder narrates his own story. In the spirit of the literature he parodies, our hero Binder never once falters in his belief of the superiority of his crew and the indomitability of the British Spirit. This, despite his crew consisting of a geographer (who is unable to negotiate the London bus system), a doctor (who is always sick), a climber (too overcome by "lassitude" to get out of his sleeping bag), a native cook (so disastrous that the team attempts to leave him behind on the mountain), and a photographer (who does not capture a single shot during the entire expedition.

This hapless crew are babysat by thousands of native porters, who at one point must condescend to actually carry the British crew (fortified by the many crates of medicinal champagne they have burdened the porters with) on their backs.

Did I mention they accidentally climb the wrong mountain??

It's apparently a kind of cult classic among people who actually do this kind of adventuring (not just armchair folk like me), but it's a quick and funny funny read, so even if "frostbite" has not been a factor in your reading choices up to now, you should have a go at this one. A humor classic that should be better known in the U.S.

If you're a serious student of mountaineering history and/or literature this is a must read. Rum Doodle will help you to put your passion into proper perspective.

If you don't give a damn about climbing but enjoy understated humor this is a fun read.

However, if you don't "get" nice and dry British humor don't bother. It's just not the book for you.

This is without a doubt the greatest spoof of the British mountaineering expedition accounts ever conceived. Every word of the book will ring true to readers that are familiar with the genre. I've read it three times and still find myself laughing out loud. But then again, I'm a climber so what do I know?

You never know with humour, and for the first half of this book I wasn't at all sure I was going to like it. Was it funny at all? I couldn't make up my mind. Then, more or less as the great climb got well and truly under way, something in my mind meshed with the sublime, ethereal imbecility of the author's theme and suddenly I kept roaring with laughter.

In a way, this is a quintessentially English book. Its humour is so gentle, so oblique, so dry. Even the running gags - of which there are many - take a while to bed down. The first reference to carrying cases of champagne up the mountain tends to have little or no impact on your brain. It's such a ridiculously impossible idea that your mind simply rejects it. But it keeps coming back, progressively associated with the expedition leader's stolid persistence in believing that it is all for "medicinal purposes", until suddenly you are swept away by helpless laughter.

If you appreciate dry wit, and you happen to have a day to spare (two half-days will answer almost as well), you really owe it to yourself to join our intrepid heros and share their triumphs, disasters and general roaring incompetence. You won't regret it.

TEST:
When you see photos or films of intrepid explorers risking life, limb and treasure to climb a mountain because it was there, do you:
a)hold your breath find your heart beating faster, admiring them b)always remember that the photographer with equipment was AHEAD of the explorer.
Answer b) and this book is for you. A spoof in the spirit of Dr. Strangelove. A great summer read.

This humerous short novel is about a group of inept mountaineers who attempt to climb the world's highest mountain, the fictional Rum Doodle. The style is sort of low-key Monty Python, understated absurdity. The group is made up of men particularly unsuited for their primary function in the expedition, such as the doctor who is constantly down with one illness or another or the route finder who cannot leave his tent without getting lost. While not chock full of belly laughs as some reviews would have you believe, the book is amusing and a fun read.

I've worked my way through so many copies of this book it's actually not funny! The issue is I can't help lending them to friends or random people I meet, and it is rarely returned. It's the best book ever! Buy me another copy, it's on my Amazon Wish List! Why do Amazon not sell this book in packs of ten?

Anyway, the story is a beautiful tale of British misadventure in the Himalayas. If you've ever been to the region this will add to your appreciation of the humour, but if not - neither had the author, apparently Bowman never left the UK. This book is the Fawlty Towers of Mountaineering, and should really be made into a film (there's already a restaurant named after it in Kathmandu).

Update: Incidentally I have now read the source book which Rum Doodle set out to parady - The Ascent of Nanda Devi by HW Tilman, and I can report that the source book is funny too, though not to the extent of RD (it is a proper mountaineering account, after all!). I gave a copy (3 for 2 at famous London map shop at the moment ;) to a friend a few days ago and yesterday he rang me merely to tell me that he was reading RD on the train and had to stop because of the roaring laughter it was inducing. NB the litmus test is whether you like Jerome K Jerome humour - if you found Three Men in a Boat funny, you will love this book!

This deliciously absurd, very short book can be enjoyed in a few hours. But the real pleasure is in reading it again to pick up the jokes missed first time. The story of an incompetent group of British amateurs and their attempt to climb the world's tallest mountain (the forty thousand and a half foot Rum Doodle), it is told in the first-person by the hapless expedition leader, Binder. Much of the humour comes from the contrast between Binder's stoical optimism and the disasters which he describes. Rum Doodle has been a classic word-of-mouth hit in the UK. Written in the 50s by an unassuming railway engineer who led a quiet, unassuming life, this flash of genius could easily have remained unread had it not been discovered and championed by Bill Bryson, the US author and Anglophile (who has written the foreward to this edition). If you like Monty Python or the UK version of The Office, you will love Rum Doodle.

If you are an arm chair mountaineer and love climbing books, you'll like this one. It reads closer to the ascent of the Matterhorn than of Everest, but its still a great read. It of course is a fictional account but it has all the classic elements of climbing books but with a very funny twist.

Bill Bryson, in his introduction to this book, calls it one of the funniest books a person will ever read. I'll grant that it is funny, but certainly not the funniest book I've ever read. (Actually, I'd really have to think long and hard about what was the funniest book I've ever read, but that's not germane to this review.) It's well-written, with the typical understated British dry wit that does have the reader, occasionally, doubling over with laughter, although most of the time I just chuckled at the writing. It's about a singularly unsuited team of mountaineers attempting to climb Rum Doodle, the world's highest peak at 40,000 and a half feet. No one member of the party seems to be actually fit to play his part in the expedition, and the leader of it seems peculiarly unaware of what is going on about him, from drunkenness to dereliction of duty, and other things. He spends his time finding out about his party members either having, or not having, a fiance. There's a guide who couldn't find his way out of a telephone booth, an interpreter who constantly enrages the porters because he can't get the local language correct, and other assorted misfits. Read the book by all means, bcause it is funny, but take with a grain of salt some of the extravagant praise heaped upon it.

"For most people, it appears, RUM DOODLE is the funniest book they have never heard of." - Bill Bryson, in the Introduction to THE ASCENT OF RUM DOODLE

Even if you've never climbed, or thought in your life to climb, an Asian massif, THE ASCENT OF RUM DOODLE is worth a couple of hours of your time. The book's author, W.E. Bowman, an English civil engineer, himself never ascended anything more challenging than the gentle slopes of England's Lake District. RUM DOODLE is, according to Bryson, a parody based on the Ascent of Nanda Devi by H.W. Tilman (1937).

Rum Doodle is a forty-thousand foot peak in the fictional country of Yogistan. The narrative of the assault on its summit is told in the first person by the British expedition's leader, who's known to the reader only by his walkie-talkie pseudonym, Binder. (The time is presumably the mid-1950's when the volume was first published - no sat phones here.) The six others on the ascent team are: Burley, the commissaryman, Wish, the scientist, Jungle, the route-finder, Shute, the photographer, Constant, the translator, and Prone, the physician. It should come as no surprise that each is either incompetent or otherwise unsuitable for the mission. Binder himself is as about an unheroic and ineffectual as can be imagined; he has no concept of the leadership qualities required for an expedition on which the greatest dangers not posed by the mountain itself are the horrific, panic-inciting concoctions served up by the chief cook, Pong. Indeed, it's Binder's utter cluelessness that is the lynchpin of the story's humor.

I would politely disagree with Bryson that THE ASCENT OF RUM DOODLE "is the funniest book (most people) have never heard of." In my opinion, that honor goes to The Complete McAuslan by George MacDonald Fraser, which is, most assuredly, the most laugh-inspiring book I've ever read. But, THE ASCENT OF RUM DOODLE, at 171 pages, is a quick read in a small package amenable to inclusion in a backpack for the hike down into the Grand Canyon last week. During a longer than expected stop at Indian Gardens on the Bright Angel Trail, it, between the arrival of the mule trains, proved a most amusing, four-star diversion while I awaited someone ascending on foot from Phantom Ranch.