Jeffrey Archer’s “gift for inaccurate precis”, as Lady Archer puts it, has earned him a deal of ridicule — such as a BBC film in 2002 that portrayed him as a sort of Baron Munchausen — and, notably, a spell in HM Prison Belmarsh. How that tendency relates to his literary gift is unclear, but, whatever his problems with getting his story straight in real life, his instinctive understanding of fiction on the page is strong.

Archer’s latest novel is based on the life of George Mallory, the mountaineer who vanished on Everest in 1924, last seen “going strongly for the summit”. Archer, you’d think, cannot possibly keep us turning the pages in the hope of some merely hypothetical revelation as to whether Mallory did reach the top, all those years before Hillary and Tenzing — yet that is exactly what the book achieves. We have to reach that final revelation, as Mallory had to scale the peak, “because it is there”.

Like any Archer hero, Mallory is liable to get into scrapes. As a schoolboy he tries to climb the Eiffel Tower, but the flics take the lift and arrest him 100ft from the top. Absent-mindedly late for his Cambridge college interview, he finds the gate locked, so he climbs the wall, but the Master’s garden lies on the other side and the Master is inspecting the flowerbeds. Much later, in New York, on a lecture tour, the happily married Mallory has to escape the attentions of an amorous heiress, and the only way out is via a high window.

Archer can do you a heart-stopping moment with the best of them. Climbing in the Alps, Mallory sees his two companions suddenly tumble past him; he has only that one moment to turn the rope round his planted axe and get ready to take the strain when the rope jerks taut. The plain telling is unimprovable.

When Mallory catches his first, distant sight of Everest, Archer mentions the mountain’s “nitid summit”. The unusual word, meaning glistening, brings us up short, so we share Mallory’s startlement. The climbing scenes never become repetitious and, although Archer seems to have mastered the technicalities, he mostly and wisely leaves them out. The portrait of Mallory’s marriage is perhaps idealised, but it makes the story moving and it provides a lifelike, paradoxical motive: Mallory only goes to the roof of the world so that he can go home to his wife afterwards, the itch scratched.

There are some slips. George’s clergyman father is always called “the Reverend Mallory”, a handle that, like “the Honourable”, cannot attach to the surname alone. When Mallory does his war service in the artillery, his men are all privates and corporals, when it should be gunners and bombardiers. These things are minor, however. Despite the odd corny moment, Paths of Glory is persuasive and effective. Archer himself disclaims the title of “writer”, preferring “storyteller”. But few literary writers could do his job better.

Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer
Macmillan £18.99 pp404

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