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Review of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin
Air
by dean roberts
After spending three days in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, I almost want to climb Mount Everest. Never mind the hypoxia, hypothermia, dysentery, frozen corpses, $65,000 price tag, or for that matter, the 25% chance that I'd either disappear down the face of a 10,000 foot precipice or freeze to the consistency of a porcelain doll.
Krakauer's story is gripping to be sure, and there are times when the reader is practically lulled into an oxygen-starved determination to trudge up the mountain with him. It's definitely a page-turner, but for the reasons that attract folks to blood-and-gore flicks; somebody's going to die, and you just have to peek through your fingers to see how and when it happens. And this kind of casual regard for life is precisely what is so creepy about Into Thin Air.
Krakauer, a long time contributer to Outside magazine, chronicles the disaster of May 1996, in which twelve climbers, some of them the best in the world, perished in a storm atop the world's highest point. An avid climber, Krakauer's subterfuge for joining the Everest expedition was to document the commercialization of the sport, on Everest in particular.
There were some forty climbers on the slope in May '96 alone. In reading Outside over the years, I've often noticed a sort of blase acceptance of the horrors of life on the extreme. One of Krakauer's colleagues at Outside picked up a nasty case of malaria on a jungle adventure in New Guinea. The writer described his daily bouts of chills and fever ("I'm having my malaria now.") with the casualness of someone retiring for an afternoon nap. So, I wasn't particularly suprised by Krakauer's nonchalant tone.
Although the author admits to grappling with some rather confusing emotions and delayed-reaction grief (there is a poignant scene where Krakauer describes himself weeping uncontrollably, buck-naked in a hotel room in Kathmandu shortly after safely descending the mountain). Despite this, the account of the Everest debacle is tinged with vainglory. Krakauer, to his credit, includes angry letters from families of the deceased as well as a fiery interchange between he and his wife prior to making the dangerous trip. These do little to wash the nasty taste out of the reader's mouth.
We're left to wonder how anyone could be so selfish as to purposefully take a chance at leaving behind orphans and widows. There's no glorious cause, no honor at stake -- it's just something they've gotta do. Pop psychology aside, there's little doubt the climbers, through their sport, are all filling some deep void within them ( I find it in poor taste that Krakauer lists the climbers on the mountain that month in a "Dramatis Personae" at the beginning of the book, as if they were actors in a tale of make-believe). If the tone were merely isolated in this book, I would probably cut Krakauer some slack. He's a wonderfully interesting and talented writer. Unfortunately, he's paid homage to stupidity before: the real-life tragedy of Christopher McCandless in his Into the Wild was told with a kind of awed reverence for a boy-hero; McCandless's true story of slow starvation in the Alaskan wilderness is chilling, lonely and tragic to the core. Go ahead and read Into Thin Air. It is a gripping, if not disturbing, peek into the psyches of men and women with not much left to pursue except death.