"Coronation Everest" by Jan Morris

Jan Morris (when he was James) was the Times Correspondent assigned to the 1952 Commonwealth Everest Expedition led by James Hunt which succeeded in being the first to conquer Everest, placing Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay on the top of the world. Morris managed to get the news to England (in the days before ubiquitous communications he used runners to take coded dispatches to the nearest radio transmitting station) just in time for the Coronation of Elizabeth Windsor as Queen of the UK.

What makes this book stand out is the quality of the prose. When Morris describes the mountain or the Sherpas or Nepal or anything he writes simply yet clearly and always uses the perfect word so that the images he conjures up are crystal clear. And he is original too. The classic mountaineer's biography might emphasize the perils and the hardships but Morris tells you of his discomforts and his difficulties so the reader is left in no doubt that the climb is arduous and that many aspects are thoroughly unpleasant. He is refreshingly realistic about the people he encounters too, and their customs and their foibles, and the disgusting food and drink he samples. This is no wonder-eyed traveller's tale but real life in all its shabby glory.

Selected quotes

• "He believed wholeheartedly in living off the country, and was an authority on chang, the glutinous substance used by the Nepalese for beer, and on rakhsi, the methylated spirits with which they foster the wild illusion that they are drinking gin." (C 3)
• "The valley of Katmandu was full of splendid medieval monuments, but there was nowhere quite so remarkable as Bhatgaon, which lies about twelve miles to the east of the capital. It was a town of dark and glowering appearance, instinct with the spirit of the Middle Ages. Its streets were narrow and tortuous, and in them you might well expect to meet the funeral procession of a plague, or mingle with branded slaves, or come across some defiant heretic blazing at the stake." (C 3)
• "While I had always admired Mallory’s famous reason for wanting to climb Everest, I was convinced that it would still be there next week." (C 5)
• "Here and there the valley was dotted with the statuesque figures of the yaks, who seemed to enjoy standing all alone in the wilderness gazing into eternity." (C 5)
• "As a doer of duty he seemed to me invincible; whatever job he was given, the building of a chicken coop or the translation of an Aramaic testament, he would first clothe the task in garments of unapproachable significance, and then proceed to complete it." (C 5)
• "Mallory said it was like a prodigious fang excrescent from the jaw of the earth; so sulky and brooding did it look that morning that I thought it must have a toothache. Great mountains surrounded it on every side, but it looked recognizably the greatest (and nastiest) of them all." (C 5)
• "The icefall of Everest rises two thousand feet or more and is about two miles long. It is an indescribable mess of confused ice-blocks, some as big as houses, some fantastically fashioned, like minarets, obelisks, or the stone figures on Easter Island." (C 6)
• "Sweet thick tea follows, tasting faintly of methylated spirits and strongly of the melted snow which provided the water – a taste, I used to think, desperately compounded of winds and desolation, for a raindrop frozen on the slopes of Everest must be a lonely sort of thing." (C 6)
• "Privacy was an abstract totally beyond their conception, and anyone might walk freely into anyone else’s house." (C 7)
• "During the Abyssinian War the Christian Science Monitor was presented by its correspondent in Ethiopia with a bill for two slaves." (C 8)
• "I do not normally behave in this autocratic way, except at the breakfast table." (C 8)
• "Who could have supposed that I would ever find myself in quite so historically romantic a situation, dashing down the flanks of the greatest of mountains to deliver a message for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II? It was all perfectly – oops, steady, nasty slippery bit! – all perfectly ridiculous." (C 11)

A splendidly original take on heroism.

Other books by James/Jan Morris reviewed in this blog:

• Venice
• Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

October 2011

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God