Customer Reviews

The Wall

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jeff Long takes an already terrifying scenario of climbing the notorious "El Capitan" in Yosemite Valley, CA and mixes in an even more terrifying storyline involving falling bodies, stolen corpses, violent storms and not to mention emotional angst.

It's part "Sideways" (the movie) as two buddies relive the past as they're both about to embark on a life changes and part "The Shining" with a heaping table spoon of "Touching the Void".

Long puts you on that rock and makes you feel that you're right there--and "there" is one VERY scary place to be!

Thirty-five years ago buddies Hugh Glass and Lewis Cole climbed Yosemite's El Cap Mountain where they also met their future wives. However, now Hugh's wife is gone and Lewis' spouse is divorcing him. Yearning for a repeat of their greatest triumph, the two friends agree to climb El Cap again though they do not expect to find the respective highlight film of their lives when they met their beloveds.

Hugh and Lewis are lonely, missing their wives, as they begin the ascent. However, they soon find a corpse of an apparent person who fell off the cliff. Shocked already, a wild caveman Joshua attacks the two climbers and abducts the body they found. They continue their trek when they run into a search and rescue guide Augustine who hunts for his missing fiancée. Lewis abruptly leaves the climb while Hugh joins the SAR guide on his quest to find lost climbers even as a nasty storm is coming and Joshua stalks the two men.

The key element to this exciting thriller is the treatment of THE WALL; the mountain side seems like the prime protagonist with Hugh and Lewis acting more like major support players. For instance the description of the impact of gravity on a woman falling off the wall will shake the audience. The tension picks up as Hugh helps the SAR guide while Lewis leaves and never slows down through a shocking final twist that will leave the audience longing more natural thrillers like this tense tale.

Harriet Klausner

Best friends since childhood, Hugh Glass and Lewis Cole share a love of mountain climbing that borders on obsession. They return to Yosemite's El Cap, the wall they christened more than thirty years ago. Their wives, whom they met at the base of the mountain, are lost to them now. One leaving. The other dead. Each man has his own reason for attacking El Cap again.

As Hugh readies their supplies, he discovers the dead body of a beautiful, fallen climber. A crazed, raving caveman appears but serves only to delay Hugh's efforts to tell rangers about the apparent accident. Once Lewis leaves him at the lodge's bar later, Hugh finds himself tempted by his buddy's estranged wife.

Something about their climb doesn't feel right. Doubt looms between them and even their old rituals and scripted utterances don't heal the rupture. Something is beckoning Hugh upward while warning Lewis to abort. In the meantime, the lunatic caveman who has stolen the dead woman's body, reappears.

Things are further complicated when they are joined by Augustine, a young, showy member of the rescue crew who is determined to locate the surviving two members of the ill-fated but gutsy three-member climb. Without adequate sleep or nourishment, Augustine is a danger to himself and to his spooked partner who abandons him and descends with Lewis.

Hugh, still lured by sirens, joins Augustine for a more dangerous mission than he imagines. The demons that frightened Lewis back down the mountain begin to emerge. Voices, shadows, rain, fire and ice threaten to send them flying into the abyss. Just about five-hundred feet from the summit, the ropes that have held them together begin to unravel.

The Wall is a flawlessly written story of man versus nature, his fellow man and himself. The action is intense. The characters hang on the edge of life and death, always fighting the urge to look directly into the bright light of uncertainty. When the story is finished, all of the expertly inserted clues come to the fore.

Jeff Long is one of my favorite writers and he is, in my opinion one of the few "Masters" writing today. His words are poetic in their imagery and produce incredible visual art. Reading "The Wall" was like viewing unbelievably clear pictures of what rock climbing is all about. This is indeed a can't-put down-read that hooks and holds you very early on. However, then comes the ending and my five stars sink to three. Jeez! While I realize all story endings can't be "good", I have to think that Jeff Long must have been having one hell of a bad day (or week) when he wrote this ending. It was like taking a story that soars throughout its pages and then ending it with a huge crash that snuffs out every good and decent concept that you've been given to believe while reading it. The only way to kill more characters would have been to have El Cap fall on the base camp during the night. And, a shot to the head would have been a lot kinder death for the love of one's life than dehydration and heat stroke. I guess this story is intended to prove the old addage about what goes around comes around but instead it also seems to turn the characters into incredibly unfeeling, self-centered jerks. In brief, great writing, great story, really troublesome ending.

Hugh Glass and Lewis Cole were legendary climbers back in the late 1960s. "They came from a bygone era. Vietnam, Camelot and Apollo had all been parts of their vocabulary." Together they made the 3,000-foot vertical climb to "El Cap," the largest rock face in the US and forged a new route in doing so. They were the fathers of the Anasazi Wall. Now, thirty-five years later, the two men have reunited to make the climb again - their climbing swan song, so to speak.

The two friends paths have diverged greatly. Hugh, a geologist, had taken a job with British Petroleum and has spent the last decades in the deserts of Arabia. He lost his love, his wife Annie, who had been his very own climbing groupie, when she wandered off in one of those deserts never to be heard from again. Lewis, ever the poet, stayed behind in Colorado and got his graduate degree in English lit.. He too married his hippie love, Rachel, although their relationship has waned considerably and they are now on the verge of divorce.

Before the guys get started, they find out a trio of women climbers looking to pioneer a new route has had a fatal accident. On day one, before hooking-up with Lewis, Hugh discovered the body of one of the women on the forest floor, where she had fallen no more than an hour or so before. He also met and was attacked by a seemingly psychotic hermit, Joshua, who dwelled in the caves of Yosemite. Joshua had apparently been struck by lightening and survived, only to haunt the forest thereafter. He stole the woman's corpse, calling back to Hugh, "Now all hell's loose because of you." And all hell is just about ready to break lose although our hapless climbers don't know it yet. They do feel jinxed by the bad omens, however.

There are still, hopefully, two surviving women on "the Captain," often hailed as the "American Everest" and "the last Eiger." And like Everest and Eiger, this rock has taken its toll in fatalities. Augustine, a park fire fighter and rescue worker, joins the two friends in a local bar the night before their climb. His fiancée is one of the stranded climbers and he is determined to get her off the rock alive - if she is still alive. Augustine and Hugh have something in common. They are both pursued by ghosts, demons who will haunt them throughout. There is much more baggage ascending "the Cap" than what is contained in the haul bags.

As Hugh and Lewis move into their third day on the wall, Augustine and Joe, his climbing partner, overtake them, climbing at an extraordinary speed. They were moving at a "near vertical run." Determined to save his lost love, Augustine persuades Hugh to join the rescue mission. Lewis decides to pack-it-in and descend.

What follows is a compelling, hair raising mix of the surreal, almost supernatural at times, along with a terrific action adventure and taut psychological thriller. The ending is a real shocker - most unsettling, to say the least.

I know nothing about climbing, but found myself enthralled by Jeff Long's descriptions. The author is a veteran climber who has traveled to Mount Everest. This is his seventh novel. He has also has written two nonfiction works.

A real page turner - highly recommended!

JANA

Hugh Glass and Lewis Cole, two old friends and expert rock climbers, reunite at Yosemite's El Capitan to relive their glory days by making one last climb of its treacherous Anasazi wall. Well into middle age and fleeing their personal problems, they want to prove that they still have what it takes to reach the summit. From the time they set out to tackle the big wall, they are dogged by problems. First Hugh discovers the body of a woman climber who plunged off the wall to her death when disaster befell her climbing party. A madman then attacks Hugh and makes off with the body. During their climb, Hugh and Lewis meet a park service employee who is desperately searching for his lover, another of the women in the climbing party. Hugh is persuaded to join in the search. As they ascend the wall, it seems that they are laboring under a curse and are being lured to their deaths. Through fire and ice, madness and magic, storms and nightmares, the men have to struggle to keep El Cap from claiming their lives.

Author Jeff Long, a veteran climber himself, includes many details about the mechanics and equipment of rock climbing, as well as the hazards, both physical and mental, that can endanger a climber. The book begins with the frighteningly realistic fall of a climber, and it never lets up its suspenseful pace and ominous tone from that point onward. Interwoven throughout the action are supernatural and spiritual elements as well as human doubts and fears that enhance the story. The wall itself is imbued with a menacing persona that adds to the feeling of doom. There is a surprising twist to the ending that had me revisiting parts of the story to reinterpret some of the dialogue. This is a powerful and harrowing thriller that will keep the reader turning pages.

Eileen Rieback

One thing Jeff Long knows how to do is develop a setting by creating a chilling atmosphere even before anything really strange happens. He does this well in The Wall as well as in his previous novel The Reckoning. Through the story you have this feeling of foreboding and you know something sinister is going to happen. Strange things happen throughout, but it does not really hit you until near the end when all is revealed.

Another thing I liked is how Long handled the details of Climbing. He did not go into long tutorials on the tools and methods mentioned in the story. But for those not familiar with climbing (like me) it will take some imagination or investigation to understand some of the concepts put forth but that is fine. It promotes interest in a new topic for some but does not bog down readers who are familiar with the topics presented while letting the story flow uninterrupted.

THE WALL by Jeff Long is a travel adventure book I simply couldn't put down! Although I am not a rock climber, I was fascinated with the details described as the narrator, a man in his mid-life, prepares to climb the face of El Cap in Yosemite National Park with his best friend from his carefree early twenties. One friend has lived and travelled all over the world and suffered the death of his wife while the other married his first love and is now in marital problems. The men set their thirty-year reunion at El Cap to re-live their youthful adventures one more time, but the climb is doomed from the start, but the men ignore the mystical or mysterious signs to abandon their plan. The perils they face in this excruciating climb are as fascinating as they are unbelievable, or, the non-climber wonders, does this really happen? A terrific read!

Many of the other reviews here go into details about Hugh Glass and his friend, Lewis Cole. The two men approach a mountain after thirty years. People die. Love is lost. Tragedy strikes. What I wanted to say is that this is one of the best novels I've read in a long, long time. From page one, I was drawn in and wanted to read non-stop. If not for the kids and housework and stuff, I would have reclined and read in a day. This book is HIGHLY recommended. Jeff Long has talent.

Yes, take your time on this book; you'll want to rip through it but make it last since books this great are far and few.

I've read all of Jeff Long's fiction and if you can find his first 2 books they are truly jawdropping as well.

For some reason his last effort "the Reckoning" didn't connect with me but this one more than made up for it!!!

amazing to me that 90% of this suspenseful story happens while on the side of a rock wall thousands of feet up...