What is bestseller writer Jeffrey Archer doing exploring the controversy around George Mallory's attempt to be the first man atop Everest, wonders Kishore Singh
Young, ambitious and wanting to make some money, the printer’s son and member of the British parliament found himself parking his savings in a Canadian company on the advice of his bankers. The company went into liquidation, its three directors were imprisoned for fraud, and the bankrupt investor sat down to write what would become Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, giving rise to the legend of Jeffrey Archer. That was in 1976.
Now the Baron Archer Weston-super-Mare in Somerset, Archer’s life isn’t unlike the ruthlessly ambitious characters of his potboilers, including perjury that saw him do time in jail, but at almost 70, Archer is far from retiring, flush with his enduring success, even though the thriller genre now finds fewer readers. With sales of his books floundering in the UK, Archer has sought to extend himself to newer territories, his second India tour to promote the recent and unlikely Paths of Glory described by him on his blog as a huge success. He writes of “the audience flowing into the corridor” in Chennai, “a packed-out audience” in Pune, and the final event in Bangalore “so crowded that they had to stop the escalators so people could stand on them and hear the speech via speakers”. In interviews, his bombast included his popularity among Indian readers to the extent that millions of pirated editions of his bestseller Kane and Abel had been sold in the country, even a fraction of which number Paths will unlikely hit in either legit or pirated editions.
Archer’s particular ability as a bestseller writer lay in plucking stories from the world of politics and powerful men, whether it was the assassination attempt on Edward Kennedy (Shall We Tell the President?), the bid for the Prime Minister’s office (First Among Equals), or the battle for headlines between media barons Robert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell (The Fourth Estate). But following his stint in prison and A Prison Diary, Archer seems to have chosen fact rather than fiction as his mainstay — though several will no doubt say that there’s more fiction than fact in Paths of Glory — with a narrative style that is documentary, even though its promotion is cleverly disguised in line with previous Archer thrillers. “This is the story of a man who loved two women, and one of them killed him,” reads the publicity blurb for Paths on Archer’s home page, artfully aimed at the reader seeking thrills to be instead delivered a story, insipidly told, of mountaineer George Mallory’s attempt to be the first man to climb the Everest, whom he refers to by the Tibetan name Chomolungma, “goddess mother of the earth”, the mistress who manages to lure him away from his wife and great passion, Ruth, in a manner that Estelle Harrington doesn’t despite a revealing negligee and a bountiful cheque for $10,000, both of which were offered to him on his otherwise uninspiring lecture tour across America.
For those who came in late: George Mallory, teacher and member of the Royal Geographical Society, began his climbing adventures when very young, scaling the wall of Magdalene College, Cambridge for his appointment with the senior tutor there when the gates closed promptly at 3.00pm, then the bell tower of a 325-ft high basilica in Venice because if “a more direct route does present itself, you should always be prepared to consider it” he said to Ruth Turner, whom he hoped would soon be Ruth Mallory.
Mallory was nominated expedition leader when the RGS wanted to place an Englishman atop the Everest, and he led two assaults to the peak, the first unsuccessfully, the second something mountaineers still debate fiercely over 85 years later. Six hundred feet short of the summit, Mallory and his climbing partner Sandy Irvine were spotted by team member Noel Odell “as he watched them stride into a cloud of mist, and disappear from sight”. No one knows for sure if they reached the summit in 1924, though Mallory’s body was recovered in 1999 (Irvine’s has never been found) but without the camera which possibly might have led to the truth. “To this day, the climbing fraternity are divided as to whether he was the first person to conquer Everest,” notes Archer. “Few doubt that he was capable of doing so.”
Archer plays up the manipulations within the Society and Mallory’s heroic support for his fellow-climbers, including the caddish George Finch who is his most likely rival for the trophy. His dependence on Finch is understandable, for as fellow climber George Young says, “Once you’ve stared death in the face, nothing is ever the same again. It places you apart from other men.” Later, at Mallory’s funeral, Ruth will tell Finch, “If it was you who had been climbing with George, he might still be alive today.” Though he succeeds in including Finch on the first expedition, Mallory finds himself being complicitly steamrolled into leading the second expedition without his company by none other than the Prince of Wales.
Whether Mallory was the first Everester or, as is more popularly believed, Edmund Hillary in 1953, remains open to debate — though Archer’s view comes through somewhat more definitively — but where the book dwells in greater length is on the relationship between Mallory and Ruth based on their extensive (and daily) love letters written to each other, rather than on the challenges of the Himalayan climb. In that it remains Archer’s little sleight-of-hand, a book his regulars will pick up for their junk feed, only perhaps to put it down disappointed.
PATHS OF GLORY
Author: Jeffrey Archer
Publisher: Macmillan
Pages: 467
Price: Rs 470
