Their attitudes inevitably set my teeth on edge, however accurate the pastiches. Their companions are the sort of bluff upper-class colonials you would expect for the period: jolly good, stiff upper lip and don’t rock the boat old chap, looking down on their Sherpa companions and keen to beat the blasted Germans to the peak. Their bitter assessments of one another are driven by spite and inferiority – and yet often accurate.
The Pearce brothers have a fractious relationship at best, not so much carrying chips on their shoulders as whole trees. Stephen is a last-minute replacement for an injured climber, invited by virtue of being the expedition leader’s younger brother.
Once up the mountain, Paver evokes the isolation and the terrifying conditions by the time they shelter in an ice cave with a crack into a crevasse in the back wall, the environmental horror was off the scale (I’m really bad with heights I was actively working not to imagine a great deal). The expedition is overshadowed by the awful histories of those who went before them, driven by ambition and defined by little cruelties. A visit to the house of a survivor of Lyell’s doomed attempt is harrowing the trinkets in his study eerily suggestive. Michelle Paver is a solid craftswoman who gets right to work on atmosphere: the narrative is seeded with ominous hints from the start. Still: there’s no denying that Thin Air is a well-constructed, chilling tale. On the other hand, October’s circumstances didn’t reduce my pleasure in The Poison Song or Hunger Makes The Wolf, so… perhaps not. Sometimes, that’s the perfect state for losing yourself to a good read – this year, I might have been better off sticking to the greater comfort and lower demands of rereads.Īll of which is a polite way of saying I found Thin Air average at best, but as I was hauling almost as much baggage as its characters, your mileage may vary. I was exhausted, stressed and unsure whether the light I could see ahead was the end of my tunnel or an onrushing train. It’s also fair to say that October was an unsettled reading month for me. It’s fair to say the bar was set quite high. Billed as ‘the most chilling and compelling ghost story of the year’, it comes from the pen of Michelle Paver who in the past thoroughly creeped me out with her Arctic ghosts in Dark Matter. I read Thin Air as one of last year’s Spooktastic Reads, although sadly I was far too busy to get a review written at the time. But Kanchenjunga has the reputation of a killer, and Stephen will face its deadly secrets alone… For Dr Stephen Pearce, it’s a boyhood dream come true: he’s joining an expedition attempting to scale one of the world’s unconquered peaks.
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