The Fall by Simon Mawer

Why peak practice means high drama

The stuff of mountaineering – climbers held together by ropes, lives literally dependant on trust, unpredictable dangers, revelations of beauty – is so rich in metaphor, it's a wonder more novelists don't make use of it. Apart from Christopher Burns's The Condition of Ice there have been few notable examples in English recently. Perhaps the metaphor frightens writers, the worry that a narrative about death-defying climbers would be assumed to aspire to Wagnerian significance?

Simon Mawer is as fearless as his climbers and has boldly produced a novel that is at once a ripping yarn and something more meditative. He lets his subject invoke big themes but also pegs his writing with enough technical detail for plenty of passages to be about mountaineering, and nothing but. Rob Dewar, a middle-aged art dealer, feels compelled to drop out of his life, abandoning wife and children for a few days to attend the funeral and inquest of a famous climber, James Matthewson, and to support his artist widow, Ruth. Matthewson fell to his death while climbing a near-vertical face single-handed and, as Dewar's memories unfold, we begin to wonder if the coroner's verdict will be suicide or even murder.

Dewar and Matthewson were boyhood friends, drawn together by the last gasps of an old friendship between their widowed mothers: a genteel, upright hotelier and a fast-living blonde. Matthewson's dead father was a mountaineering hero. A graceful, natural climber, James wants to follow in his footsteps, electing Dewar as his adoring second on many climbs. They are close as any married couple. Small wonder that when they try to share the same woman, a free-thinking artist (and natural climber) and when one discovers his mother has slept with the other, the outcome, on the Eigerwand, proves nearly fatal.

So far, so Lawrentian. But alongside the camper-van troilism and stifled homoerotics, Mawer tells the less predictable stories of the mothers and their grim emotional legacy. Diana is a nice, well-read girl who joins a walking party in Wales in 1940. Fascinated, she abandons her friends to go up a mountain with Guy Matthewson. She's brave, strong, and as modest as the narrator of Rebecca, so they fall in love and tumble into her narrow hotel bed.

Their affair is stifled by the pressures of the Blitz. He is a conscientious objector facing nothing scarier than a tribunal, she an auxiliary nurse coping with atrocities in bombed-out London – and the fact that he has a German wife and child. Later in the war he meets Meg, who has had a crush on him for years but is not a natural climber. Despite her plucky exterior she's a sad, driven creature, who jumps at the chance of fulfilment his brooding heroics (and shoe factory) seem to offer.

The Fall is a memory novel, with strands set in the present, the Forties, Sixties, Seventies and Eighties – narratives whose significance deepens the more they intertwine. Patterns recur: there are two romantic triangles, two scenes in which a woman is shown how to climb, two moments at which the wounds to a lover's heart seem writ large as medical crisis. But as to who becomes whose mother, you must find out for yourself.

Patrick Gale's 'A Sweet Obscurity' is published next month by Flamingo