FALLEN GIANTS: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empires to the Age of Extremes By Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver, Yale, $39.95

In May 2009, when Apa Sherpa summited Everest for the 19th time, and first-time climber 19-year-old Priti Patil also made it to the top as part of the same expedition, the events merited hardly a mention in the national press. A far cry from the banner headlines that greeted the 1953 expedition, which was even co-opted as part of the coronation as a symbol of a new “Elizabethan Age” (no matter that the successful summiteers were a New Zealand beekeeper and a Tibetan guide settled in India — the Commonwealth was still lit by the fading glow of the Empire). A few weeks ago in the pages of this paper, Anirban Das Mahapatra commented: “Once considered a final frontier reserved only for the world’s most daring adventurers… the peak is increasingly viewed by less-accomplished people as their next summer destination.” These developments underscore the appropriateness of the title of this history of Himalayan mountaineering.

The only time Himalayan mountaineering grabs headlines is when sufficient numbers of Westerners are killed — witness the success of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, about the 1996 disaster on Everest. Significantly, the simultaneous tragedy on the North Face was hardly written about — possibly because the climbers were three Indian constables of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police — and the Indian expedition was not wired up in the way the guided camps on the South-West Face were, allowing the world to watch and listen in horror as the dying Rob Hall made his last incoherent phone call to his wife.

To be fair to the authors of this comprehensive history of Himalayan mountaineering, the Indian expedition does rate a mention. Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver bring to their mammoth task their training as professional historians, and their evident love for hiking and climbing. To prevent their account from being what Arnold Toynbee denounced as “one damn thing after another”, they make it plain that “the terrain we seek to explore, consists not only of glaciers, ridgelines and mountain faces, but also the cultural values, expectations and conflicts that have marked Himalayan climbing over the course of its roughly 150-year-old history”.

As the authors point out, mountaineering has had a rich literature — written for the most part by the climbers themselves, some of whom have proved to be gifted writers. Unlike cricket or baseball — two other sports that have spawned a huge literature — mountaineering is not a spectator sport, and only the climbers, in many cases, are on the spot to record their triumphs and tragedies. Many of the earlier books are sadly out of print. The authors have thus trawled through a vast array of sources, from the usual climbing books and official accounts to the personal correspondence of the climbers themselves. For these are an effective corrective to the triumphalism of many expedition accounts and give some idea of the human frailties, and even meanness of spirit, that attend the daily slog of any expedition.

This is the first comprehensive account since Kenneth Mason’s Abode of Snow which appeared in 1955, a book now of out date, for the expeditionary culture which it chronicled was bound up with notions of imperial destiny (fostered by the hierarchical culture of the English public school and the army), where the sahibs were the main actors with the porters as the extras. (These attitudes could be infectious: during the classic Nanda Devi expedition of 1937, the American climbers, unused to having servants to fetch and carry, soon got used to shouting “Koi hai”.) At the same time, it did bring to the fore genuinely admirable qualities of comradeship, team spirit, and sacrifice. This has been replaced by what the authors call “hypertrophied commercial individualism of the age of extremes” — borrowing the phrase used by Eric Hobsbawm. For the authors, in many ways this is a story of decline, “a story of fallen giants in more than one sense”.

As the authors point out, for Westerners the Himalayas have been far more than simply very high mountains. For the British, secure in their hold on the subcontinent, the idea of conquering the peaks was closely connected with political considerations of controlling the colonial frontiers against the Chinese and the Russians. For the Germans it was bound up with the National Socialist notions of creating the hard, physically fit “Aryan” man, and a compensation for the defeat of World War I. In a “gentleman’s agreement”, each country laid an informal claim to a particular 8000-metre peak — for the Italians it was K2 (picture), for the Germans Nanga Parbat, while the British made it clear that Everest was off limits.

Each attempt on these emblematic peaks was a failure, attended by the usual recriminations and controversies. The 1938 American expedition to K2 was a case in point. Yet another American expedition led by Charlie Houston and Bob Bates saw almost superhuman efforts to save a dying comrade, including a famous belay by Pete Schoening, which saved most of their lives, and has entered the annals of mountaineering. (Dee Molenaar, who was on that fateful climb, has drawn the maps and peak sketches for this book.) Although the charismatic figure of George Mallory figures large in the pre-war story, the authors are careful to point out the achievement of Edward Norton, who set a height record which would stand till the 1950s.

They have also brought together interesting and successful expeditions to peaks which, in technical terms, were more challenging — such as the climbing of Kamet (which led to the European discovery of the Valley of Flowers) and the successful ascent of Nanda Devi by Bill Tilman and Noel Odell. They point out the inspiration of an expedition often overlooked today — Spencer Chapman’s Alpine-style ascent of Chomolhari in 1937, for the noble sum of £39. It is a pity that this expedition does not get greater attention.

From the outset, it is clear that there was a conflict between the large military-style expeditions favoured by the climbing establishment and the lightly equipped band of close friends favoured by mavericks like Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman. The success of the Annapurna expedition — the first of the 8000m peaks to be climbed — seemed to underscore the success of the large expedition, and was one of the reasons for replacing Shipton in 1953 by John Hunt, the army man.

Ironically, the military-style expeditions succeeded just as they were to be replaced by an entirely new climbing ethos, borne of the social changes of the post-war world. From the 1960s, a new wave of middle- and working-class climbers began to wash up against the unassailable peak of the climbing establishment, particularly in Britain. These men (and it was a largely male-dominated world at first) were not fired by notions of national glory, but saw climbing as a personal expression of the physical limits of endeavour. They preferred to use Alpine-style tactics to attack technically interesting peaks and faces.

As the authors put it, they viewed the old-style expeditions as “embarrassing relics”. This approach can be exemplified in the career of Rheinhold Messner — whether one considers his climbs without supplementary oxygen, or the way he unashamedly enjoys his celebrity.

The authors have not lost touch with human details, and have attempted to be judicious in their summing up of major controversies. This is one of the few books in which the women get their due — from Claude Kogan, who made a tragic attempt on Cho Oyo in the 1950s, to Wanda Rutkiewicz and Arlene Blum. (But there is no mention of Alison Hargreaves, whose solo unsupported climb of Everest is a landmark in women’s climbing.) The climbers from Poland — whose mountaineers would share much of the Indian establishment’s problems of equipment and funding — are also credited for their successful winter climbs, thus breaching another canon of traditional mountaineering. The book ends with the advent of guided climbing, and the 1996 tragedy and the controversial and ethical issues it stirred up. As the authors conclude, “a lot had happened to the world, and to mountaineering since Mallory’s time — and not all of it for the better”.

Ultimately, this is very much a history of Western mountaineering in the Himalayas. A history written from the Indian/Pakistani or Nepalese perspective would be very different — given that, from time immemorial, mountain peoples were content to eke out their livelihoods in the shadow of the giant peaks, without the desire to scale their heights. Tenzing Norgay seems to have been an exception: from the time he joined the 1930s expeditions as a porter, his ambition was fixed on the summit of Everest. Even the authors fail to point out that in some ways he was the most experienced member of the 1953 expedition. This was his seventh time on the mountain. The year before, he and the Swiss guide, Raymond Lambert, had narrowly missed the summit. After his achievement, no expedition could sideline their sherpas, and Western climbers could no longer ignore the ambitions of the former “human mules” for a share of summit glory. The incomparable achievements of Apa Sherpa, Ang Rita and others should be seen in this context.

Nevertheless, for its breadth and sweep, and its cast, which includes climbers, surveyors, mystics, misfits and hard-headed mountain men, this book should stand next to Walt Unsworth’s magisterial Everest.