William Blake said “Great things are done when Men and Mountains meet”, and the capitalisation seems telling; while there are female mountaineers, there is something hyper-masculine about the idea of conquering mountains. In his classic memoir, Touching the Void, Joe Simpson talks candidly of his addiction to the thrill of mountain climbing, and the strange pull towards danger that comes from “too much testosterone and too little imagination”.
The book became famous when it was published in 1988, and then the docudrama that came in 2003 made Simpson and his fellow climber Simon Yates even more famous. Certainly, it was an extraordinary tale of grit and survival; two climbers in impossible danger, a shattered leg, a drop, a body hanging from a rope. That rope became a kind of talismanic representation of human connection, and the decision to cut it – ostensibly sending a fellow climber to his death – chillingly underlined its limits.
