Mountains of the Mind: A History of A Fascination by Robert McFarlane

A wonderful read that is not just for those who feel the need to climb higher and go further than others have gone before, but also for those like me who are content to learn about the seemingly contradictory addictive drive for glory and zen like pursuit of inner enlightenment that makes up that drive.  This is not just a well written book about mountains, it is about how Western society has changed its attitudes towards mountains through history.  McFarlane speaks of the early accounts of travellers and revelations of Romanticism with its reverence for the sublime and wild, high and remote places.  He speaks of our changing in understanding, from mountains as an antediluvian remnant to the current understanding of deep time and the enormous geological processes that have thrust mountain ranges up and the glacial processes that have worn them down.  This is a truly wonderful book that, as with all of McFarlane's, pivots around the life of a man, in this case Mallory, the man who died on his third attempt to climb Everest, and his internal struggle between beloved wife and the drive to reach the summit.

The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane

MacFarlane completes his trilogy of nature writing with a meditation on walking. It can be read seperately but dovetails beautifully with its companions. MacFarlane's first book, Mountains of the Mind, was an exploration of how the cultural concept of mountains has changed over time. The second, The Wild Places, of the concept of wilderness and our need to reach for it. This third book, The Old Ways, speaks of the lost pathways that were used by our ancestors and are almost, but not quite, forgotten, like lost plague villages visible from the air as marks in a field. 

The book is divided into four parts, each covering a different geographical set of wanderings. 

The first section is of MacFarlane's journeys in England, as he traces the Icknield Way from his home outside Cambridge to the Downs and walks the 'most dangerous path in Britain': the Broomway tidal road across the Maplin Sands alongside Foulness Island, traversing holloways, chalk paths and a Roman Road, sleeping out to be woken by skylarks, crunching in the snow and striding toe to toe with his own reflection across wet sands.

Next he goes north to his beloved Scotland, exploring the trackless motorway of the sea road through the Minches to the Shiants, Rona and Sula Sgeir and across peat and granite moors, reflecting on a post glacial landscape ground out by the ice and bearing the signs of early human occupation. 

In the third part MacFarlane travels abroad to walk in Palestine, to follow part of the Camino pilgrim road in Spain and the pilgrim route around the feet of Minya Konka in Western Tibet, the most sacred mountain in Buddhism. In these less familiar landscapes his writing takes on a tone of wonder at new fauna, flora, weather, people and political strictures.

Finally he homes and returns to following the Ridgeway across Marlborough Downs, the South Downs to Eastbourne, circling in a gyre around a subject that McFarlane touches on again and again before focusing on it in the closing chapters. The life of Edward Thomas, killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917, poet, depressive and compulsive walker is addressed directly in 'Ghost', an account of Thomas' life with his wife Helen and his use of walking as a curative for his raging depressions. In the very last chapter MacFarlane opens out again and shows us the evanescent prints of early humans walking across a mud flat, now revealed by the tides. 

MacFarlane's book is not easy to categorise, it mediates on many aspects, some connected with walking such as the drive of wanderlust and the push of the curious mind, some with the wandering trails the mind takes on such a journey, of geology, deep time, human history, companionship, solitude and spirituality. Another wonderful book by an author I turn to with delight.

The Eyes of Darkness by Dean R Koontz

Tina Evans is an ex Vegas showgirl opening her first major show on the Strip and slowly coming to terms with the death a year earlier of her 12 year old son in a terrible crash with his scout troop in the high Sierra mountains, a crash that left his body so mangled she and her husband were advised to have a closed coffin ceremony.  Tina is now living alone, Danny's room remains unchanged and one night she hears a heavy thump from his room.  She finds Danny's blackboard overturned, on it are written two words: Not Dead.  Initially Tina believes it's a sick joke perpetrated by her ex-husband, but as the incidents increase in intensity and complexity, always saying that Danny is not dead, is in pain and needs her, she finally becomes convinced Danny is indeed not dead.  With attorney she heads for the mountains and, as often with Koontz, the answer lies underground in a secret lab where decisions are made by evil men for the 'good of the nation'.   Although this is an early Koontz novel familiar themes of a hostile government, the propensity of evil to thrive in secrecy and the benevolence of mysterious forces are already here.

Night Chills by Dean R Koontz

Koontz opens his book with two strange dangerous looking men emptying some kind of chemical into a reservoir in the isolated logging town of Black River, they return to their motel, one drives off, one stays in the motel, both receive odd phone calls about locks and keys.  One drives himself into a wall at 100 mph, the other opens his femoral and ulnar arteries with a razor and bleeds out in the motel bath.  All over Black River people experience night terrors, and then to the town comes the sinister Ogden Salsbury, a pathological misogynist genius with a terrible hold over the people of the town.  Widowed Paul Annendale comes to the town to camp with his two children Rya and Mark and is connected, too coincidentally, with the only two people not to suffer night terrors, his girlfriend Jenny and her father Sam, the only person who can decipher the events unfolding in Black River.  A cracking start to a good story by Koontz, but it does creak a bit in places and the bad guys are too simply drawn.