Into the Silence

The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest

By: Wade Davis

Narrated by: Enn Reitel

On June 6, 1924, two men set out from a camp perched at 23,000 feet on an ice ledge just below the lip of Mount Everest’s North Col. George Mallory, thirty-seven, was Britain’s finest climber. Sandy Irvine was a young Oxford scholar of twenty-two with little previous mountaineering experience. Neither of them returned.

In this magisterial work of history and adventure, based on more than a decade of prodigious research in British, Canadian, and European archives, and months in the field in Nepal and Tibet, Wade Davis vividly re-creates British climbers’ epic attempts to scale Mount Everest in the early 1920s. With new access to letters and diaries, Davis recounts the heroic efforts of George Mallory and his fellow climbers to conquer the mountain in the face of treacherous terrain and furious weather. Into the Silence sets their remarkable achievements in sweeping historical context: Davis shows how the exploration originated in nineteenth-century imperial ambitions, and he takes us far beyond the Himalayas to the trenches of World War I, where Mallory and his generation found themselves and their world utterly shattered. In the wake of the war that destroyed all notions of honor and decency, the Everest expeditions, led by these scions of Britain’s elite, emerged as a symbol of national redemption and hope.

Beautifully written and rich with detail, Into the Silence is a classic account of exploration and endurance, and a timeless portrait of an extraordinary generation of adventurers, soldiers, and mountaineers the likes of which we will never see again.

©2011 Wade Davis (P)2011 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“The First World War, the worst calamity humanity has ever inflicted on itself, still reverberates in our lives. In its immediate aftermath, a few young men who had fought in it went looking for a healing challenge, and found it far from the Western Front. In recreating their astonishing adventure, Wade Davis has given us an elegant meditation on the courage to carry on.” (George F. Will)

“I was captivated. Wade Davis has penned an exceptional book on an extraordinary generation. They do not make them like that any more. And there would always only ever be one Mallory. From the pathos of the trenches to the inevitable tragedies high on Everest this is a book deserving of awards. Monumental in its scope and conception it nevertheless remains hypnotically fascinating throughout. A wonderful story tinged with sadness.” (Joe Simpson, author of Touching the Void)

“Into the Silence is utterly fascinating, and grippingly well-written. With extraordinary skill Wade Davis manages to weave together such disparate strands as Queen Victoria’s Indian Raj, the ‘Great Game’ of intrigue against Russia, the horrors of the Somme, and Britain’s obsession to conquer the world’s highest peak, all linking to that terrible moment atop Everest when Mallory fell to his death. The mystery of whether he and Irving ever reached the summit remains tantalizingly unsolved.” (Alistair Horne, author of The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916)

One of the greatest narrations ever

Enn Reitel's performance is spectacular. It takes a good story and brings it to life. His delivery adds gravitas.

Great story

I loved this, and listened to it in 3 big gulps. I did have a problem with the narrator though. His voice was really nice to listen to until he mispronounced something which tended to jolt you out of the zone.
Don't they have editors for this kind of thing?
I was particularly embarrassed for him when he referred several times to "Magdalen" college. This is a bit of a faux pas for someone with an accent like his.
Still a good yarn though!

Tremendously immersive history of early Everest .

Outstanding study of the three post WWI British Everest expeditions culminating in the ill-fated climb of Mallory and Irvine in 1924. Great detail on all the climbers, the British in India,the culture of Tibet and WWI. Highly recommended.

Fantastic

Easy to listen to and a captivating story. The amount of research that went into putting this together is impressive.

What a great, but sad story...

Wade Davis is a master story teller weaving the magnificent with the tragic. His inclusion of the Great War into the story was essential to its success. I absolutely loved the book from start to finish.

Fascinating account of the conquest of Everest

Very interesting story spanning from the Great War and how that put British men into a mindset for mountaineering to the 1980s detective work trying to piece together what happened to Mallory.

Amazing adventure.

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes, it's about men of uncommon valor.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Mallory, as he was a monumental figure.

Which character – as performed by Enn Reitel – was your favorite?

All. He made them come to life. He is a master of story telling.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

The title of the book. It is about so much more than just Everest and mountain climbing. It is about a time in the not so distant past that we tend to forget.

Any additional comments?

Wonderful on all levels.

One of the Great Narrative Histories of All Time

I'm not kidding about the title. Wade Davis' other titles gave no indication that he would or could produce such a tour de force, but this book is remarkable. In my opinion, it's the greatest piece of narrative history since "The Guns of August", even though this book is only tangentially about WWI. Davis has Tuchman's ability to weave biography into historical narrative, to give comprehensive detail and broad overview simultaneously, and his prose is assertive and yet sometimes poetic. This is a really brilliant book, far greater than the sum of its parts. Maybe one of the hundred greatest works of historical literature.

Outstanding nonfiction

This book was so much more than I was expecting in the best of ways. I learned a lot

Mostly Fantastic

It's pretty clear that Wade Davis has read everything ever written about Mallory's Everest expeditions, and has synthesized a definitive account. This is an amazing book for lots of reasons, but it's not always an awesome read. At times if feels like Davis is attempting to create a visceral analog to the scaling of Everest - and doing a damn good job. I'd swear there were chapters that included the number of grains in wheat shipments to the expeditions. And while my inner scholar bows to Davis' virtuosity, the reader in me - the lover of narrative - is often left gasping for air.

But mostly this book is awesome. There are biographies and histories that venture into a past that predates the subject of a book. Sometimes the backstory informs the main narrative and provides a bit of extra context. And sometimes one has no idea why the author decided to include a particular bit of information (I recently read an awful biography of Amelia Earhart that included a full history of the state of Kansas, before ever once mentioning the books main subject). Wade Davis does a much cooler thing. He takes you on these long, meandering stories, all compelling in their own right, before turning a final corner and revealing something awesome and wholly relevant.

But the expeditions become literally tough going. There's so much detail and that detail is very repetitive. It feels like a litany more than a narrative. But it's an amazing piece of scholarship. The downside is that not everyone will dig it. I didn't. Not always.

But Davis is a fantastic writer, and this is an amazing, if pedantic telling of a story that seems newly fresh, with renewed interest in Mt. Everest. That interest is rooted the surreal, trendy flirtation with death, the mountain has become for over-privileged Westerners, but the juxtaposition fully underscores the achievements and tragedy of Mallory's life and death on Everest.