Long, Jeff: The Wall

Atria Books © 2006, 296 pages [amazon]

Hugh Glass and Lewis Cole have returned in their fifties to chase their youth up the sheer granite walls of El Capitan, a mountain they'd met and conquered already thirty-five years earlier. Hugh is in fact something of a legend among climbers, having blazed the Ansazi trail up El Cap in 1968. The two friends mean to follow the Ansazi to the summit once again, leaving their demons behind them--or so they think--but their climb is plagued by bad luck, bad weather, and worse portents. Immediately before their departure a young woman, one of three attempting to carve a new trail up the mountain, had plunged to her death from a half mile up. Her accident and the rescue mission mounted to find her climbing partners will turn out to embroil Hugh and Lewis in situations that threaten their lives and sanity.

The two friends mean to follow the Ansazi to the summit once again, leaving their demons behind them--or so they think--but their climb is plagued by bad luck, bad weather, and worse portents.Jeff Long, the author of The Wall, is himself a veteran climber, and his expertise is apparent on the page. His discussions of the gadgetry and ethos of climbing ring true. The passages in which Long describes Hugh and Lewis's ascent of the rock are crisp in their detail, though readers who are unfamiliar with the sport may be bewildered by the climbing jargon which punctuates the text, and which Long mostly leaves unexplained.

Long serves up his characters' back story--highly relevant, as it turns out--in small doses. Both Hugh and Lewis had met their wives at El Cap. Hugh had lost his to Alzheimer's and an incident in the deserts of Saudi Arabia; Lewis was about to lose his to divorce. But most of the story is given over to the climb, to very specific descriptions of their progress up the wall, and to the physical and mental tolls exacted on them by El Cap. Long manages to make the climb interesting enough to sustain the read, but The Wall is not really a "thriller," as the book is touted, until its last hundred or so  pages. Then the demons, real or imagined, that have been pursuing the men during the climb catch up to them. Readers will be surprised by the book's denouement, and will leave The Wall wondering how much of what happened was in the protagonists' minds and how much was real.

Climbing enthusiasts in particular will enjoy Long's account of Hugh and Lewis's passage up El Capitan, but armchair adventurers of all stripes will want to give The Wall a look.

Tags: book reviews, books, El Capitan, Jeff Long

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