Customer Reviews

In the Ghost Country: A Lifetime Spent on the Edge

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

It seemed that every five or six pages I'd look up and say to my wife: ``Just listen to this.'' It's a bad habit of mine, and it usually drives her nuts. But with In The Ghost Country, she became as captivated as I did. The relevations are sobering and surprising, the writing is seductive and dreamy, some scenes are almost trippy in their cumulative power. I've seen Peter Hillary as a motivational speaker, and he puts on a pretty good show, with a good sense of humor, but you don't see just how much this man has been through. There's a lot of death in this book (and even dark thoughts of murder), and a lot of wonder and amazement too. But in the end Hillary chooses life, and has made the right choices under the most perilous circumstances to stay alive. He's survived where so many of his friends have not. I actually shed tears when I came to a small scene in part four, where Hillary has inched across the ice shelf and is moving up the glacier. He's been out there for about seven weeks and virtually been alone the whole time because he's estranged from his two team mates and there's only been the company of his ghosts, which is the worst kind of loneliness. On the glacier, at minus-20 degrees, he finds a tiny patch of algae miraculously growing on a rock. He writes: ``That is was so beautiful to behold had everything to do with place and time, where it was, where we were, how long it had been, how long it had been since we'd seen something fresh and green... it was like we'd discovered life on Mars.'' I suspect for Hillary it was like an affirmation of hope and a reminder to just keep going. After sharing his journeys through seven kinds of hell, I found it very moving and weird to say but a kind of consolation for my own lonely moments in the dark. We all have them.

Just like Joe Simpson's Touching The Void, this book will probably become controversial and well known because of a rope-cutting incident where a climber is released to oblivion. Reviewers aren't supposed to spill the beans and spoil it for other readers, so I'll just say it makes one hell of a story. But Hillary's book is full of great stories, and the glue that holds them all together is his strung-out search for comfort and meaning on his lonely trek to the south pole. The joy for me was finding depth and revelation in each rollicking or harrowing episode. My one quibble is that there is no index. It doesn't detract from the big read, but it would have been useful when I was going back through the book, to re-read various passages. Hence I've gone against the grain and docked it a star.

If you love a good old-fashioned gut-spill, especially by somebody with a famous name, then you'll love this book, too. It reads like you are walking through a very strange and colorful and often violent dream. Through a series of recollections in the form of hauntings, famous son Peter Hillary shares the very-high highs and the brutal lows of an extraordinary restless life. And thankfully he does it with a stoic and often very black humor, without losing respect for the people he's mourning. He admits there is a big cost in devoting your life to adventure, and one of them being cursed with a ruthless selfishness, yet in the end these almost psychedelic memoirs are a tribute to other people. It's not all about him. I also enjoyed the pacy, very tight and clever re-telling of Scott's last journey and Shackleton's wild times, as well some fascinating comparisons with other modern polar journeys that went to hell. And i love the fact that the opening two sentences make a limerick!

This is a great book, an almost old-school, eye-on-the-heroic epic. It has the confessional intimacy of two men hunched together close over whisky while they dissect a life. One is the narrator, the other the translator. The writing is splendid. Elder piles word upon word in an unrelenting literary trek that parallels Hillary's own Herculean efforts. The tension builds until he lobs another firecracker of foolhardiness in your direction.
The unrelenting white of Antarctica sucks the life story out of Peter Hillary's lonely skull. Ultimately, it shows a man who wasn't trying to climb out of the shadow of a famous father, but answering the Siren-song that hummed through his own veins. I read it in one sitting - excellent!

On this strange and affecting adventure story that goes to the bottom of the world, Peter Hillary uses the iron will that got him to the top of the world and other tough places to hunker down from the confronting fact that his two team mates have little time for him. They just want to the get to the South Pole, and go about it with a very business like attitude while Hillary wants companionship. He tries to get a social club going in the tent at night, and when they show no interest he increasingly retreats into memory and takes one of the biggest journeys of his life, a rich and harrowing journey into the mind. For a very driven man it's interesting and inspiring that he's more interested in how he makes the journey than bagging the trophy. He's been very generous with this book in the way he's put himself out there.

There was another book around for a very short while about this same expedition: it was basically a personal attack on Peter Hillary that took swipes at the famous explorer on just about every page. The attacks continued in the British and Australian press for two years. To his credit, Hillary (with co-author Elder) have not gone the same nasty route. Rather, by cleverly comparing the insanity that infected his own expedition with previous polar trips -- both contemporary and legendary ones --the reader is treated to a whole new range of insights of what happens to a human being when travelling through a blank landscape and subzero temperatures. For Hillary, it was a case of the environment sucking a lifetime of both tragic and extraordinary memories from his head and playing them in front of him like a movie. The cold almost schoolboyish behaviour of his team mates is described and reflected on but not wielded like a club. Apparently, the other two were invited to take part in the book, in an attempt to make peace and so each of them might have found a greater understanding of what happened down in Antarctica. They refused, which is a shame. Hillary is to be applauded for his generosity of spirit -- and doubly applauded for a fine page-turner that tells us a great deal about the exploring world, and about the workings of the human mind when the weight of bitter experience is laid bare by brutal social and environmental pressures.

An interesting by-product of this book: it raises the quyestion, did Scott of the Antarctic go insane on the ice? That's what his critics have suggested for years. Hillary's experience gives strong evidence that the tragic legend did go loopy -- along with many others who have dared to venture south. Much good food for many thoughts.

Very interesting approach. I'm a huge fan of Into Thin Air and have read a few other books from the genre, but this one is very different. I'm not sure it strictly fits into the mould, although it is based on an expedition and it contains a lot of stories from the mountains. Personally, it was more an exploration of a shattered mind as a consequence of too much grief from adventures gone wrong. I think this is an important book.

What does my head in is the understated way the tension is drawn between Hillary and his mute team mates. So much goes unspoken, and this keeps the reader rooted while Hillary finds better companionship with the campfire he conjures up from the chuffing blue flame of the stove, and the ghosts who come to sit nearby. The other thing that keeps you hooked is how the writing starts out brisk and very engaging in the first chapters, ruled by a bleakly bemused tone, and then as the journey progresses it gets a little stranger, taking on a neat poetic shorthand that works to build the mood of a dream. Its always very affecting, because the hyper-reality of the dream state never falters

Hillary has certainly blown the heroic mystique of the mountain-climber fraternity. Who says tough guys don't cry? This is a very sad book that also makes you laugh a lot of the time. I got the same complex emotional buzz from In The Ghost Country as I got from The Lovely Bones, Angela's Ashes, the end chapters of Into Thin Air, and the fairy tales and myths that I read and loved as a child. Not for the flint-hearted.

I'm the type of traveler who prefers a cabana on the beach to an icy plain hundreds of miles wide, but I have always loved adventure books' potential for exploring the metaphysical extremes of life.
This book does a brilliant job of communicating why some people feel compelled to leave family and friends behind to spend weeks or months in an extreme environment with nothing but an uneasy conscience for company. The language is vivid and provocative, whether describing the eerie landscape through which Hillary treks or evoking the tragedy and comedy inherent in having to pitch an adventure to potential corporate sponsors and in grappling with a famous father's legacy. Best are the passages in which Hillary is left by his companions to cross the ice alone, and is visited by the many ghosts who didn't survive their own treks across the ice or climbs up the mountain. The frequent cuts from Elder's evocative prose to Hillary's matter-of-fact reportage to excerpts from an explorers' guidebook to bits of Sartre provide a multi-dimensional experience that must resemble the actual experience of exploration more closely than most tales of adventure.
I finished this book a couple of months ago, but it still lingers in my imagination. I was so moved by it that I sent copies to several friends. Now all I can do is wait and hope for another book by this duo.