In the Ghost Country: A Lifetime Spent on the Edge

From Publishers Weekly
In 1998, explorer-adventurer Hillary (son of Sir Edmund) set off on skis with two ill-chosen companions to retrace the South Pole route that killed Robert Falcon Scott in 1912. Like Scott, Hillary and company hit horrendous barriers. The cold chewed up equipment and ravaged fingers and toes. Storms pinned the team in its tiny, fetid tent. They slowly starved, as the brutal march burned more calories than their bodies could absorb, and Hillary nearly ruptured himself dragging his 400-pound sled of supplies. But the worst torture was mental. The unending white landscape gave everyone a bad case of expeditionary madness, and Hillary got the brunt of it. His teammates began blaming him for their setbacks, and soon excluded him from the smallest social interactions. Alone in a frigid sensory-deprivation tank, Hillary began to hallucinate. Dead friends and relatives tramped with him through imagined landscapes and, with him, revisited the adventures and tragedies of his past. The miserable journey makes a terrific book, as Hillary's visions frame frequent flashbacks to other expeditions and to his New Zealand childhood. The main narrative, written in the third person by journalist Elder, is larded throughout with first-person commentary by Hillary, who is a fine, frank writer. This unusual structure solves the problem of the toneless voice that "as told to" accounts can have, while retaining a sense of intimacy and authenticity. The result is moving and insightful, scraping away the hubris of the adventure-book genre to examine the forces that propel explorers through godforsaken places. Photos.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Review
David Breashears leader and codirector, Everest IMAX Filming Expedition Peter Hillary's harrowing account of his attempt with two companions to complete Captain Robert Falcon Scott's doomed journey to the South Pole makes for powerful reading. A masterful story of an expedition's precipitous collapse and a study of a life lived on the brink, this is a vivid tale of physical endurance, heartbreaking loneliness, and ultimately the triumph of a man over the cruelty of the Antarctic wasteland and the ghosts of his own past.


Book Description
A memoir of extraordinary depth and searing honesty, In the Ghost Country is the story of Peter Hillary's physical and emotional journey across the icy wastes of Antarctica. A place where the thoughts and memories of a lifetime were called forth by the blank slate of the Antarctic snows -- so real that the ghosts of lost friends and loved ones walked with him in the white maelstrom. In the Antarctic summer of 1998-99, Peter Hillary and two companions skied to the South Pole -- each man pulling a 440-pound sled 900 miles across some of the most forbidding country on earth. The plan was to complete the tragic journey of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to the Pole and back. But under the pressure of a relentless media spotlight, fatal team chemistry, and food and fuel stores, the expedition fragmented into hostile isolation. Instead of completing Scott's journey, they found they were repeating it. For Peter Hillary, this was the loneliest trek of his life. Estranged from his companions, tortured by the sensory deprivation of "the great white everywhere," Hillary's journey became a hallucinogenic pilgrimage through a country where "he could see the dead and the places of the dead": the ghosts of too many friends who had perished at his side in the mountains; and most powerfully, the ghost of his beloved mother, who it seemed "had turned up on the ice to keep me company." In the Ghost Country is the story of that trip, a chronicle of profound isolation, grief, and loneliness. It is a meditation on a lifetime spent on the edge. Told here are the tragedies: on Ama Dablam in Nepal, a near perfect climb until its shocking finish with an unexpected death; on Makalu where half the party was wiped out; on Everest where two more were lost, including a great friend; and later on K2, in 1995, where Hillary barely survived the storm that killed seven people. But here also are the "marvelous times": Growing up in New Zealand, where the family's holiday adventures were turned into documentaries; first seeing Everest at seven years of age; the near-fatal teenage adventures; working on the schools and hospitals that Sir Edmund built for the Nepalese people; traveling with his father and Neil Armstrong to the North Pole; summiting Everest twice. Informed by a strong literary sensibility, In the Ghost Country is compelling contemplation of adventure and a joyful tribute to "the rapture" of getting "out there" on the edge.


About the Author
When Peter Hillary climbed Mt. Everest in 1990, thirty seven years after his father's historic first ascent in 1953, they became the first father and son to reach the top of the world. It was just one of more than thirty major expeditions to the Himalayas, the Andes, the Karakoram, the Arctic, and the Antarctic. Peter Hillary works as a speaker, a writer, and an adventure travel operator. He is married and has four children.


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A mind-bending yet somberly reflective chronicle of mountaineer Hillary￯﾿ﾽs otherworldly journey with two mates tracing Scott￯﾿ﾽs route to the South Pole. The narrative is structured as a duet, with Hillary￯﾿ﾽs personal material in bold face, while Australian journalist Elder fleshes out the story in long segments of plain type. His coauthor￯﾿ﾽs distinctively sharp prose contrasts with Hillary￯﾿ﾽs digressive account, which often has the feel of fireside remembrances, though certainly not soothing ones. Much of the text covers his hellacious trip with Eric Philips and Jon Muir, on foot and via kite-pulled sledge, from the Ross Ice Shelf to the South Pole. The trio confronted all the "cruel quirks and torments" of travel at the ends of the earth, including personal conflicts and "the jaded fugue of living under cloud." Hillary vividly evokes that "monochrome of misery . . . strong winds, drifting snow, a fog of spindrift, intensely cold conditions, no sky, no horizon, white on white on violent white." When in extremis, which was much of the time, the mountaineer was also troubled by the voices and the ghosts of his deceased mother and lost climbing companions. ("The late afternoon was always popular with the dead friends," he jests grimly.) A psychologist later explains, not altogether convincingly, that he was "borderline psychotic . . . it￯﾿ﾽs the visual and sensory deprivation of polar travel . . . that especially plays hell with the mind." The neatly woven narrative tapestry also contains reminiscences about times and travels with the author￯﾿ﾽs father, New Zealand beekeeper and Everest conqueror Sir Edmund Hillary, as well as various adventures and misadventures in the high hills. Despite thephysical and emotional extremities he￯﾿ﾽs experienced, Hillary avers, "I￯﾿ﾽm drawn to the simplicity of the pilgrim￯﾿ﾽs life, and the soaring emotions that go with it." More cautionary even than Apsley Cherry-Garrard￯﾿ﾽs The Worst Journey of the World or Jon Krakauer￯﾿ﾽs Into Thin Air. Agent: Bob Mecoy


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