Mountaineer Joe Simpson has had many narrow escapes, including being left for dead. But he still goes back. 'Climbing makes you feel alive in a way that nothing else does,' the author of 'explornography' page-turners tells Arminta Wallace.
Now this is tricky. Very tricky. I mean, how do you admit to a man who is famous for a) having extricated himself from a crevasse in the Peruvian Andes, b) crawling six miles to get help, broken leg trailing behind him, and c) describing the experience in a mega-bestselling book which has been hailed (by George Steiner, no less) as a classic of its kind, that despite repeated re-readings and a lot of head-shaking and even an attempt to draw yourself a diagram, you just can't figure out how he got out of the damned hole?
Joe Simpson looks mildly stunned. Then he leaps to his feet. "Right," he says - and proceeds to re-enact, right there on the mezzanine floor of the Shelbourne Hotel, in Dublin, the most terrifying chapters of his 1988 page-turner, Touching the Void. A passing alien might take it for some sort of exotic rain dance: hop, stop, clench thighs, check to make sure you haven't inadvertently fallen into a bottomless pit, hop again. When this is happening on the printed page, it's easy to get carried away by the existential glamour of it all, but with the author hopping around just two feet from your elbow and talking 90 to the dozen about having a fractured knee bashed with a hammer every five-and-a-half-minutes for three days, what suddenly becomes sickeningly, viscerally clear is how much it must have hurt.
Simpson sits down again, picks up his pint and nods. "However bad you thought it might have been when you read the book, it was a lot worse than that," he says.
In his latest book, The Beckoning Silence, Simpson tackles another fistful of hair-raising climbs, including the 400-foot-high frozen waterfall known to ice climbers as the Bridalveil, in Telluride, Colorado. He writes vividly about the thrills and spills of the sport, but widens his scope beyond a simple litany of footholds and handholds and belays.
The writing is irreverent, provocative, and occasionally - as in his account of an encounter with a Bolivian Indian on the high pampas in the summer of 1998 - hilarious.
He grins at the memory. "There I was, completely alone in the middle of nowhere, and the one looney in the whole area is walking towards me - and he walked at least half a mile out of his way, waving his arms and pointing at his head."
As Simpson gripped his ski poles tighter and readied himself for an attack, the man swept his poncho aside, raised a tiny transistor radio to the sky, and declared: "France two, Brazil nil, heh, heh . . .", and strode off without another word.
A leitmotif of rather more sombre hue is Simpson's realisation that a disproportionate number of his friends have been swept away and that he - having already survived a number of accidents which should really have been fatal - could well be next.
Even to someone whose idea of a close encounter with a mountain is to squint uneasily at the Sugar Loaf from the DART, the book manages to convey the powerful mixture of fear and fascination that climbing represents.
But can Simpson explain why he keeps going back?
"Non-climbers think climbers have a death wish," he says. "Which is absolute rubbish, because if we did, we'd all be dead. It's pretty easy to die up there, if you wanted to. But climbing makes you feel alive in a way that nothing else does. You walk along that edge between life and death, and you get a very clear perspective on how wonderful and important it is simply to be alive. Of course, that perspective fades a bit when you come down - so I think that's why you go back."
Tradition has it that those who can, do. Those who can't, write about it. Simpson, the Sheffield-born son of an Irish mother and a British army father, is an unusual mix of action man and thinker - and he admits to being fascinated by the place where climbing and literature meet. He was introduced to rock-climbing in the boy scouts at the age of 14, and knew instantly that he had found his forte. The doubts came later - and gradually. "You don't philosophise your way up frozen waterfalls," he says.
"When you're climbing, you're just climbing. But as a sport it has spawned an amazing amount of very good writing - which actually says something about it, I think. It's not just about getting yourself to the top of the hill. There's an awful lot more to it than that. It deals with death and loneliness and fear and pain and trust and betrayal. You don't get much of those in golf manuals."
Which may explain why the genre known in the trade as "cold adventure writing" has moved out of the cult corner and into the bestseller business?
"Yeah. Somebody called it 'explornography', which I thought was quite good. There certainly has been an upsurge of interest; whether it's frozen beards struggling across the Antarctic or climbers staggering up Everest, there's a lot of it about," he says, with another grin.
Eight per cent of the half-million people who bought Touching the Void would be hard put to climb out of their armchairs - but that, he says, is precisely the point. "There were lots of books that I read that inspired me to go climbing - and I find it ironic that people have put Void in that league. I would imagine that most of my books would put people off. But in a way, Void escapes the genre of climbing.
"People read it and think, 'I wonder what I'd do if I was in that situation?' And people who are having a bad time read it and think, 'Well, if he can get through that, I can get through this'."
The book was originally aimed at a climbing world which had been highly critical of the behaviour of Simpson's partner on the Andean adventure, Simon Yates. At considerable risk to his own safety, Yates had lowered the injured Simpson down the sheer face of a storm-ravaged mountain. Then, in the dark, he lowered him over an ice cliff. Simpson was swinging free; Yates couldn't hold him; after an increasingly desperate struggle the frostbitten Yates cut the rope, and returned to base camp, convinced his partner was dead.
Simpson's unflinching examination of this most elemental of moral dilemmas is the real stuff of the story and, ultimately, the central theme of his writing.
"I wrote Dark Shadows Falling about leaving people to die on Everest because I think it's an important ethical question," he says. "There's this attitude of, well, I've paid to have this adventure and this other person's tragedy is not what I've paid for, so I can abdicate any responsibility for it."
The final chapters of The Beckoning Silence bring the dilemma back home, as Simpson finds himself trying to find the courage to go up a lethal ice field in search of two missing climbers whose names he doesn't even know. Writing about these experiences has, he insists, affected him as much as the experiences themselves.
"It has made me analyse and think and philosophise about climbing in a way I never did before," he says. "In a way, I've opened up a Pandora's box of fears - and I can't get the damn thing shut now. I've fallen out of love with climbing mountains, which I thought I'd never do. I've had enough of it. Too many people killed. Many of the friends I've lost have been killed by avalanches; and it doesn't matter how skilled you are or how talented you are, if a hotel-sized lump of ice falls on you, you just disappear."
And so Joe Simpson is going to hang up his climbing boots. Not that he's going to take up gardening. He has already written one novel and plans to write another; he may go to Burma to re-trace the journey made by his father, who fought behind Japanese enemy lines as a teenager; he'd like to write children's books. But first, he's going to climb the north face of the Eiger. Excuse me? He has the grace to look sheepish.
He starts to talk about plans for the trip wild horses wouldn't keep him from - one last attempt on Europe's most murderous mountain. "It's an extraordinary thing. I mean, it comes straight out of a meadow. That's what I was trying to describe, in the phrase 'the beckoning silence of great height' - what the Eiger looks like. Normally you walk up a glacier and round a corner and you gradually adjust yourself to mountain scenery. But this . . . you get out of the train and you go, 'Bloody hell'. It goes straight up, you know?"
It wouldn't make a bad title for his next book.
The Beckoning Silence is published by Jonathan Cape (£17.99 sterling). Touching the Void is published by Vintage (£7.99 sterling)