BOOK REVIEW / Frail ropes from the cradle to an early grave: This game of ghosts - Joe Simpson: Jonathan Cape, pounds 16.99

THE TINY figure dangled in an unbelievable void, plucked by a rescue helicopter from the all but vertical flank of the Dru, the most spectacular of the peaks above Chamonix. In the distance the solid whiteness of Mont Blanc sat obesely like a benign Buddha. The helicopter hovered a thousand or so feet above the glacier while it drew its fragile cargo inside. Then it swooped back towards the mountainside and reappeared with another rag-doll on a long, terrifyingly slender wire. This time my camera was ready. A chance meeting, many years later, led me to realise that I had by luck recorded the rescue of one of the greatest British mountaineering writers, Joe Simpson, author of Touching the Void - the story of the man who cut the rope written by the man who was on the other end and, by a miracle, survived.

This Game of Ghosts outlines Joe's life from the cradle to the early graves of so many of his friends. The central incident of Touching the Void is mentioned only in passing and the book is described as a sequel, though most of it predates the infamous events on Siula Grande. The classic mountaineering cliche, so well satirised by Tom Patey in his essay 'The Professionals' ('From my very earliest days, I was aware of an irresistible urge to climb out of my cot. . . .') is given a new twist in this book. We are treated to a juvenile Joe failing off his bicycle, battling with a snake, skiing into a wall - just a few of numerous accidents which clearly portend that this fellow is destined for greater thing. And so he is. A long fall from an out of condition ice route in Glencoe, an unbelievable 2,000ft descent in an avalanche off the Courtes, the collapsing bivouac ledge on the Dru (and the subsequent rescue described above), and most recently another horrendous accident in Nepal, caused by his partner's faulty crampon. Despite qualms that 'renown should arise from deeds, not screw-ups', Simpson seems to have accepted his role as a mountaineer more famous for surviving than climbing. He need not worry. His fame is not due to the incidents themselves so much as the brilliant way he writes about them.

Climbing big mountains is akin to trench warfare in the youth of its participants, their short life expectancy and determined high morale in the face of its incessant grim harvest (I am not alone in thinking so - the title is a phrase from Siegfied Sassoon). Joe describes it all with such clarity that one immediately feels part of the strange, Sheffield-based scene that seemingly exists only to draw dole cheques, party like there was no tomorrow and climb the most difficult mountains in the world by their most dangerous routes. Never mind the warts - you can see every blackhead on their pimply faces.

I admit I have trouble understanding parts of the Simpson philosphy: his attitude to other people's property, for instance. Shoplifting is OK (in France anyway, sanctioned - in the minds of his friends at least - by some obscure revolutionary law), but a hoodlum who tries to steal his wallet at knifepoint is a 'mindless, violent, thieving, vicious bastard' (which indeed he is). Even Simpson doesn't try to reconcile these opposing viewpoints and they are left simply to stand, mute testimony that few of us when young treat others as kindly as we might wish to be treated ourselves. But Joe must have known that such attitudes were unlikely to endear him or his coterie to the majority of his readers. It is to his credit that he neither uses the whitewash approach of the old school nor descends into the bitchiness of the modern. He describes his world exactly as it exists and does it in the plain and simple English of Sir Ernest Gowers. The result leaves an overall impression of total honesty and lets the intense excitement of the stories speak for themselves. And these stories, although almost totally concerned with mountaineering and its consequences, are virtually devoid of jargon and hardly refer to the humdrum day to day business of climbing mountains. Far greater effort is devoted to considerations of life, death and our fear of both. These are questions that occur to all of us, whether we climb or not, and thus the appeal of this book should be equal to the layman and expert alike.

In This Game of Ghosts British mountaineering has found a peer in simplicity and excitement to Lionel Terray's Sixties masterpiece, Conquistadors of the Useless. There can be no higher praise.