The Fall
Page 1
Copyright © 2003 by Simon Mawer
Reading group guide copyright © 2004 by Simon Mawer and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, January 2003
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-0-316-07379-0
Hachette Book Group,
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.
Contents
Copyright Page
EXTRAORDINARY INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
The Fall
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two: North Wales 1940
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Four: London 1940
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Five
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Six: London 1945
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Seven
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Real Fall
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
ALSO BY SIMON MAWER
EXTRAORDINARY INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
SIMON MAWER’S
The Fall
“Utterly convincing, one of the most credible accounts I’ve ever read of two people falling in love…. By combining the adrenaline-filled appeal of a mountaineering adventure with the emotional clout of a love story, Simon Mawer has created an exemplary model of that quaint old relic—the satisfying read.”
—Gary Krist, New York Times Book Review
“The Fall is an amazing novel…. The descriptions of London during the Blitz are masterful and horrible. The descriptions of mountain climbing are breathtaking and terrifying. The entanglements of the lives and loves of the characters are spellbinding.”
—Margaret Grayson, Roanoke Times
“The Fall is about physical strength, moral weakness, and the enduring, tenuous, and even treacherous connections of the heart. It’s an uplifting, disturbing, and sumptuously entertaining book by a writer at the top—make that the peak—of his game.”
—Kevin Riordan, Courier-Post
“An engrossing story…. A very good novel…. The climbing scenes are stunningly well executed. Authentic in their detail, vivid in their description, gripping in their portrayal of the emotional and physical drama, they are—most importantly—not just for action’s sake, but germane to the human stories Mawer unfolds. Just as involving, though, are the relationships at the novel’s core: in their own, subtle way Diana and Guy’s doomed love and Rob and Jamie’s doomed friendship are every bit as heart-stopping as the thrills and spills of the climbs.”
—Martyn Bedford, Literary Review
“A story beautifully woven against a backdrop of stunning scenery.”
—Lauren Gold, Chicago Tribune
“Mawer’s ability to thread narrative through his various conceits can prove exhilarating…. The Fall’s stark opening hardly prepares the reader for the gaping valleys and dizzying peaks of Mawer’s latest work. The book’s plot simmers with abandoned youthful friendship and slightly sordid love affairs…. When Rob, Jamie, and their mothers and lovers start to climb, Mawer uses the occasion to craft mini-essays on mountaineering and paints gorgeous landscapes. At those moments, the novel ripples with energy and verve…. When Mawer essays the glories of conquered peaks and the supplicant landscapes below them, his words even evoke comparison with those capital-R Romantics…. Yes, we’ve heard this language before, but Mawer freshens it beyond immediate recognition into an active presence.”
—Richard Byrne, Washington Post
“The Fall is at its considerable best in its depiction of human extremes. Diana’s career as a nurse accompanying ambulances in the Blitz; her humiliation at the hands of a backstreet abortionist; the boys, precipice encurled, exulting on the mountainside—all this is written up with almost effortless fluency.”
—D.J. Taylor, Guardian
“A powerful and constantly surprising literary thriller. The Fall scales the heights of fiction and leaves the reader gasping for air at the summit, admiring the spectacular view behind.”
—Mike Cooper, Waterstone’s Books Quarterly
“A haunting tale about complex human relationships…. A truly good novel.”
—Sheila Hamilton, Glasgow Evening Times
“Sons and mothers, husbands and wives, friends and lovers: in Mawer’s masterful hands, none of these relationships is what it seems. Intricately weaving time and place, from the bombed-out ruins of World War II London to isolated Alpine mountain peaks, Mawer crafts a sinuously devastating tale of forbidden love and faithless betrayal. A haunting and mesmerizing novel from an expert storyteller.”
—Carol Haggas, Booklist
“Gripping…. A well-crafted page-turner…. Mawer’s descriptions of climbing really are so powerful that they lift you—willingly or otherwise—up into the gut-wrenching heaven and hell that lie beyond the clouds, along paths human feet were never meant to tread…. And those immutable mountains provide the perfect backdrop for a novel about human strength and frailty.”
—Susan Flockhart, Glasgow Sunday Herald
“Rock-climbing and mountaineering do not interest me at all, but I found Simon Mawer’s novel The Fall a riveting read…. A wonderfully constructed story…. A book which maintains a tense edginess from start to finish.”
—Gwyn Griffiths, Morning Star
“Delightfully readable…. The story is dazzling throughout.”
—Tom O’Dea, Irish Independent
“In less talented hands, the writer’s quest to capture the intense, elusive allure of the mountains might well overwhelm a quiet novel. But Mr. Mawer is well aware of the metaphorical significance of struggle. His settings are finely painted with the colors of time: neon today, gravy-brown for 1950s Britain. His men are boyish, competitive; his women on the wary side of dishonest. And his narrative surges with an energy that thrusts the story forward to the very last page, from which a startling new light shines on all that has gone before.”
—Economist
“The Fall is a compulsive read. Once you start you won’t want to stop, and it finishes, appropriately, with a cliffhanger that will probably have your jaw dropping.”
—Victoria Murchie, Aberdeen Press & Journal
“A densely plotted novel…. With almost geometric precision, patterns of inheritance and affection emerge. The geometry of genetics and love, while carefully plotted, does not feel arbitrary. On the contrary, the coordinates of affection and affinity make The Fall all the more moving.”
—Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe
“Compelling drama…. Rob and Jamie’s ill-fated ascent of th
e Eiger is as visceral and disciplined a piece of writing as the climb itself and, as mountaineering accounts go, is as gripping as Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air.”
—Russell Celyn Jones, The Times (London)
“Powerful…. Mawer has a knack for creating a memorable story of sentiment then turning it into something rich and strange…. In addition to his other virtues—the precision and eloquence of his prose, his uncanny way with interlocking plots—Mawer may be said to not repeat himself…. The Fall is not only riveting but deeply satisfying, a novel that approaches pure thought.”
—Thomas D’Evelyn, Providence Journal
“Simon Mawer’s work is rich with a desire to see through to the core of things…. The struggle of Rob and Jamie’s ascent is felt in the pit of the stomach, even if you don’t know a bivouac from a crampon.”
—Zoë Green, Observer (London)
“One of the most beautifully written books to have emerged in recent years.”
—Dean Powell, Western Mail
Also by Simon Mawer
FICTION
The Gospel of Judas
Mendel’s Dwarf
A Jealous God
The Bitter Cross
Chimera
NONFICTION
A Place in Italy
FOR GILLY
The Fall
THE WEATHER WAS GOOD for the Snowdon area. The rain had held off all day, and there was enough of a breeze to keep the rock dry. Damp could not have been a contributory factor. There was even the occasional shaft of sunlight cutting down through the varied cloud to brighten up the cwm, but no direct sunlight on the fluted walls and boilerplate slabs of the crag itself. This is a north face.
Someone shouted: “Hey, look!” It was one of the group of walkers. Climbers would not have made a noise about it. Someone shouted and stood up and pointed toward the East Buttress. “Hey, look at him!”
There was a lone figure climbing. He was about twenty feet off the ground. The man who shouted had been watching for a little while, but at first it had not been clear that the figure was truly alone until he, the climber, had reached twenty feet up the great, blank central wall of the East Buttress. The wall is a smooth, slightly curving sheet of rhyolite, a beaten metallic shield that, to inexpert eyes, appears unclimbable.
“Look at ’im. Bloody idiot or what?”
“Isn’t he doing Great Wall?”
“No ropes, nothing. He’s bloody soloing.”
The solo climber on the Great Wall moved quite smoothly up the shallow groove that gives the line of the route. He bridged easily, his feet braced outward to make an arrowhead of his body. You could see his hands going up on the rock above him, imagine his fingers touching the rock and finding the flakes and nicks that are what pass for holds on that kind of route. Mere uneven-ness. What the climbers of the past would have called rugosities. They all seemed to have had the benefit of a classical education. Not the present breed. “Thin,” the modern climber might say. Not much else.
“He seems to know what he’s doing,” the walker called to his companions.
“He’s not wearing a helmet,” one of the others remarked. The walkers were all watching now, some of them standing, others sitting on rocks—the grass was still damp—with their heads craned back to see.
The climber moved up. There was a catlike grace about his movements, a certain slickness, a feeling that, perched as he was above nothing at all and holding nothing at all, he was secure in what he did. He was now flylike, plastered across the center of the gray blankness, laying away on a rib that he had discovered, reaching up for a farther hold, bridging wide and stretching up with his right arm. He was actually feeling for a piton that had been there for the last thirty-seven years, one of those bits of climbing archaeology that you find in the mountains: a peg, placed there from a rappel one wet and windy day in the spring of 1962. The peg is oxidized, but smoothed by the numerous (not too numerous) hands that have grabbed it thankfully over the years. It will be there for many years yet, but not forever. Not even the cliff is forever.
“Look!” A gasp from the watchers, a movement up on the cliff face as the lone climber made a smooth succession of moves and reached the peg and made height above it.
“What happens if he slips?” one of the walkers, a young girl, asked.
A man’s voice spoke: “He’s dead.” It brought a hush to the party. They had been watching the thing as entertainment; abruptly it had been presented to them as a matter of life and death.
“Who is he?” another of the party asked. There was a clear sense that this unknown climber, this figure of flesh and bone and blood and brain, must be someone.
“A bloody idiot.”
After a pause—resting? Was it possible to be resting on that vertical and hostile face?—the man had begun to move once more. The remainder of the wall soared up above him to where safety was represented by a thin diagonal terrace. There was a hint of grass up there, a faint green mustache to break the monotony of gray. It was still far above him, but it seemed to signify safety. His body swayed and moved up, his feet touching rock with something of the assurance, something of the habitual skill and poise of a dancer. You could see that he had fair hair. Not much else about him. An anonymous performer on a Welsh crag, sometime after noon on a dry and blustery day. Who was he?
And then he fell.
There was some argument later whether it was he who shouted. Someone certainly shouted. It may have been one of the walking party; it may have been one of the pair on White Slab, looking across from the first stance right out in space, way over to the right on the other buttress. There were no specific words —just a cry of surprise.
He fell and there was something leaden and inevitable about the fall. After the grace and agility of the ascent, the dull fact of gravity and weight. A sudden sharp acceleration. Thirty-two feet per second faster every second. About three seconds. And then he hit the broken slope at the foot of the wall, rolled a bit, and stopped.
People got to their feet and ran, scrambled, slithered up the slopes. A pair of climbers on another part of the crag began to fix a rappel rope. One of the girls in the walking party had begun to weep. Despite the hurry, no one really wanted to get there. Of course they didn’t. But when they did, quite absurdly they found that he was still alive, unconscious but alive. And they were surprised to discover that he wasn’t some reckless youth, the kind that has no respect for the traditions of the place, the kind that doesn’t care a damn about doing anything so bloody stupid as soloing a route as hard as the Great Wall—he was middle-aged. Lean, tough, weather-beaten complexion (bruised horrendously, his jaw displaced raggedly to one side), middle-aged. Bleeding from his mouth and one ear. His limbs were arranged anyhow, like those of a rag doll tossed casually out of a window to land on the grass below.
Someone crouched over him and felt for a pulse in his broken neck. One of the walkers was on his mobile phone calling the police. Others just stood by helplessly. The pulse was there for a moment beneath the middle finger of the would-be rescuer, and then it faded away. He died as they stood and watched.
1
I WAS DRIVING HOME when I heard the news. I was somewhere on that winding nightmare of motorway and expressway and overpass that crosses and recrosses the city of Birmingham: ribbons of lights stretching away into the gathering dusk, the long necklaces of housing estates, the pendant jewels of factories and warehouses. Design without intention; a strange sort of beauty without any aesthetic to support it. Over it all, the traffic moved in columns toward Liverpool and Manchester, toward London and the southeast.
The radio was on, and the story was big enough to make the national news on a day when the news wasn’t special, the murders a mere one or two, the rapes only half a dozen and date rapes at that, the peace negotiations stalled, the elections indecisive, misery and poverty quotidian. Noted climber killed in fall, said a disembodied and indifferent voice from the radio, and I knew at once who it was even before
I heard the name. Curious, that. I knew it would be him.
Jim Matthewson, who lived in North Wales, had spent a lifetime tackling the highest and hardest climbs in the world but died after falling from a local crag where he had first cut his teeth over thirty years ago…
I decelerated and pulled into the slow lane behind an articulated truck. LIKE MY DRIVING? a sign on the tailgate asked; it gave a phone number, just in case you didn’t. The next exit was for the A5 and North Wales, and I let the car slow down and drift leftward down the slip road. The newsman was talking about helicopters and multiple fractures and dead on arrival. I hadn’t really made a decision, no conscious decision anyway, but that was just like it had been with climbing — movement being everything, movement being a kind of thought, body and mind fused into one, the mind reduced perhaps, but the body exalted surely. Nowadays in the ordinary round of life there was separation of mind and body: but in those days it had been different.
As I dialed home, the radio news had become a broken oil pipeline in West Africa. Villagers had sabotaged the thing in order to collect the crude oil that spilled out. The phone rang in the hallway of my house while West African villagers ranted on about the corruption of the government and the high prices they were forced to pay for what was flowing for free through the metal tube just outside their village. You had to see their point of view.
I’d hoped to get one of the girls, but of course it was Eve’s voice that answered: “Hello?”
“It’s me.”
“Where on earth are you?” The overemphasis in her voice.
“Have you heard the news?”
“What news?”
“On the radio. Jamie. He’s dead.”
An eloquent silence. How can silence on the end of a telephone line be eloquent? But it was. “How?”
“No idea. A fall, that’s what it said. Look, I’m somewhere around Wolverhampton. I’m going.”