Paperback of the week

Into the SilenceWade Davis, Vintage, £12.99

If you were going to write a book about climbing Mount Everest, you wouldn’t start with the carnage of the Somme – would you? But that’s what Davis does in this book, subtitled The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest. Chapter one takes us, counterintuitively, downwards into the trenches, kneedeep in mud, fear and rotting body parts. Then the scene switches to India and the mathematical elegance that allowed the surveyors of the Raj to compute the height of the Himalayas. By chapter five Davis has danced into prewar gay high society at Cambridge University, into which, in 1905, the young, handsome George Mallory exploded like a supernova.

This is much more than a Boy’s Own yarn of men struggling through the snow, though it has its share of that, too. In these pages you’ll find the bitter Russo-British rivalry known as the Great Game; Tibetan philosophy; and a surprising amount of detail about plants. The book runs to 655 pages, which allows Davis to produce character after fascinating character: the climbers, their families, the holy men of Tibet. The miracle is that there isn’t a dull page. As it moves towards its deadly climax, the story hangs together as tightly as a thriller. Into the Silence is as monumental as the mountain that soars above it; small wonder that it won the 2012 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.

Once you start wandering the snowy passes with Mallory and the lads, you won’t want to come down again. There can be no better way, surely, to spend a week in winter.