Trango: The Nameless Tower, by Jim Curran. Sheffield, England: Dark Peak, 1978. 175 pages, 42 pages of black-and-white photos; 16 color plates. £6.95.

Here is a climb that deserved a better book.

The climb was the first ascent in 1976 of the “Nameless Tower” in the Trango Towers of the Baltoro, arguably the “steepest of all Himalayan peaks.” It involved 2500 feet of hard rock work on excellent granite at high altitudes (the summit is 20,500 feet). The party, a powerful one—Martin Boysen, Mo Anthoine, Malcolm Howells and Joe Brown— just did succeed in reaching the summit. Though the climb went relatively smoothly, there are at least two stories within it begging to be told well: Boysen’s near-fatal epic on the attempt the year before when his knee got stuck in a jam crack, and Brown’s triumph at 46 on the peak he had first fancied (on the way in to the Mustagh Tower) twenty years before.

Unfortunately, Jim Curran seems not to have been the best choice to write the book. As one of a two-man film crew, he occupied (in climbing terms) a peripheral role—far more subsidiary even than the other filmmaker, Tony Riley, who got within 200 feet of the top. Such a role could have been a virtue in disguise, had it lent balance and objectivity to the telling. But all too often Curran’s own battles with load-hauling and jümaring occupy the foreground of the narrative, eclipsing the far more important doings higher on the peak. Self-consciously, the author affects the degenerate self-mockery that is the special vein of British hard men; but he sounds too calculating, a pub-worshipper on the fringe of the inner circle. The self-consciousness gets in the way of character, too. We are told time and again how funny Anthoine is, but given a first-hand taste only once or twice (“As Mo remarked, in Nepal there is a large Joe Brown impersonation society, called sherpas”). The one incident that is really well-told is Curran’s own near-death in a cascade of falling rocks. He seems to lack the empathy or sense of proportion, however, to do justice to the others’ experience: the description of a spaghetti glop occupies as much space as does reaching the summit.

Curran’s prose exhibits an addiction to dangling participles, run-on sentences and feverish fragments. As if that were not obstacle enough, alas, this is the most wretchedly proof-read book I can remember seeing in print. The average daily newspaper has fewer typos.

David Roberts