Venables’s memoir of a mountaineering life reads at times more like a latterday Pilgrim’s Progress than an adventure story. He cuts a painfully maladroit and sensitive figure while at Oxford and in a succession of deadend teaching jobs, but is given new energy by the example of Reinhold Messner, who with Peter Habeler embarked on a succession of uncompromising oxygen-free ascents of the world’s 8,000m peaks from the mid1970s. Training hard, travelling light and shunning technical aids, Venables tried, and at first failed, to climb the hard way in a series of near-misses thwarted either by atrocious weather or injury. But in 1988, invited onto an American expedition tackling the unclimbed Kangshung face of Everest, he seized the moment and reached the summit without oxygen. The story of his descent after a night spent near the top, is, although he has told it before, both harrowing and deeply moving.

HIGHER THAN THE EAGLE SOARS: A Path to Everest by Stephen Venables
Hutchinson £18.99 pp230

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