This tale of a bloke with a penchant for finding large geological constructions to fall off is intense in the extreme. He came in the Broadfield one day plastered up all over the shop. He knew how lucky he was when he met me, apparently, given he'd cracked it as a writer and I'd hacked away at it and got nowhere. Later, he told me I'd got an unnamed-check in his autobiography. 'I think I'm a bit too freaked out right now to even talk about it.' I meant it. Conversation had come easily with him previously. The next time I went to the Broadfield I found myself, once again, playing pool with the bloke. He seemed like an interesting bloke, intelligent, given to philosophising, had seen a bit of the world as a mountain climber, so I thought I'd give it a shot - as much out of politeness as anything. I used to play another bloke regularly, nice guy - if a bit irascible at times - and, one day, he asked me what I did. Long, long ago, I used to play pool in the Broadfield pub in Sheffield. However, there were times when I was ploughing through this book when I would have much preferred to be dragging a broken leg across the 'scree' at the bottom of a mountain and pissing my pants. After that, there's a postscript, an epilogue and every other excuse possible to drag the book out.ĭon't get me wrong, Joe Simpson completed a fantastic journey and survived against all of the odds. Finally you get another hundred pages of the one fella crawling back with a broken leg - every fall, every boulder, every bout of incontinence is painted in absolute detail. You then get fifty pages of one chap lowering another down a couple of cliffs - in very full detail. Then on the way down, there's a bit of a cock up and one fella breaks his leg.

To enjoy the book, you may need to really know what a 'col' is, what a 'moraine' is and the dangers and qualities of three types of snow and countless types of ice.Įssentially, it's one hundred pages of very, very detailed descriptions of climbing up a mountain - who belayed when is covered in full detail, as is when they stopped to make a brew. Sadly, reading about it is a far less remarkable experience.

Joe Simpson had a remarkable experience - totally of his whole making, but nevertheless the way he survived was pretty amazing.

Touching the Void by Joe Simpson