Nineteen in '19: Thin Air

I've read far less in recent years than I would like. To help remedy this, I've set myself the modest target of reading nineteen books in 2019. When I finish one, a thumbnail review here will follow.

10/19: Thin Air by Michelle Paver

The blurb: The Himalayas, 1935.

Kangchenjunga. The sacred mountain. Biggest killer of them all.

Five Englishmen set out to conquer it. But courage can only take them so far. And the higher they climb, the darker it gets.

The review: make no mistake, Thin Air is, as the front cover proclaims, a ghost story. But there's a broad spectrum of such tales, with obvious jump scares and physical horror at one end, and unsettling, psychological horror at the other. Paver's book is definitely at the latter end of this scale, with genuine chills rooted in the psychological. Like her previous (tremendous) book, Dark Matter, there are lots of reasons for creeping unease, sprinkled liberally throughout Thin Air: the unknown, unnatural and uncanny; isolation; physical and environmental extremes; sleep and sensory deprivation; the juxtaposition of the rational - our protagonist, Stephen, is a doctor, grounded in logic and process - and the irrational - we feel Stephen's disbelief and disquiet as he comes to realise that maybe not everything in life is ordered and explicable; and more, so much more.

Also of note is the skill with which Paver uses setting as a character - Kangchenjunga, the untrodden peak, is the third highest mountain in the world, and stands apart from surrounding peaks in the range. It looms over this tale from start to finish, a malevolent, brooding presence, unseen but intimated in the early chapters, but revealed, increasingly, as the story progresses. I find the whole "setting as character" thing fascinating; the physical aspects are more obvious, with the mountain's rocky presence, glaciers and crevasses increasingly dominating our hero as time go by. But beyond the physical, the mountain is given an actual character, both from fictionalised accounts of previous summit attempts, local superstitions and reverence, bordering on fear, from the expedition's Sherpa guides. This is brilliantly done, in my view. That time in the future when I finally get around to doing my creative writing PhD on the use of place as character - I'll be using this as one of my examples.

There is also a nice sub-plot about sibling rivalry here too - Stephen's older brother (and charmed-life-leading golden boy) Kits also features. Again, Paver treads a delicate line here, illustrating the tensions between the siblings well, from our narrator's perspective, and keeping it plausible without making Kits explicitly unlikeable - no mean feat.

Finally, a lot of research has gone into this book - not just about the mountain and surrounding area, but of mountaineering in the first third of the twentieth century. Like all research, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and Thin Air feels entirely credible throughout.

The bottom line: if old-school ghost stories and/or unsettling, psychological horror are your thing, you will love Thin Air. I certainly did, and expect it to stay with me for some time.

Since everything online is rated these days: ★★★★★★