Andy Kirkpatrick: Cold Wars - Reviewed

Andy Kirkpatrick doesn't look much like the classic, stereotypical, professional climber. In the flesh, I always think of him as being more like a loveable, battered old teddy bear complete with bald patches and whisps of escaping stuffing.

He's the antithesis of the plastic-perfect modern time celebrity, all untouchable shininess and brittle unreality. And there's a wistfullness about his writing when he talks about himself that makes you wonder whether he'd even have bothered to climb if he'd been blessed with rock star good looks and astonishing natural ability. 

On the face of it, that all makes him much more of an 'everyman', easier to relate to, except that Kirkpatrick doesn't so much push his envelope as persistently jump into deliberately under-sized ones with a series of predictable sufferfests as a result.

Psychovertical, his first, Boardman-Tasker prize-winning book, was a brilliant, dryly understated read that climaxed messily with his solo of one of the world's hardest aid routes in Yosemite, spawning pages dripping with fear and introspection. 

Cold Wars, the follow-up, is every bit as well written, but the party line is that while the first book was an investigation of 'why' he climbs, this is about the personal cost of climbing at an extreme level.

Which I suppose it is. But that makes it sound dry and introspective and, well, sorry about the word, 'existential', which it mostly isn't. Or 'isn't just'. Instead, the book reflects Kirkpatrick's existence as a professional climber and climbing writer. Bursts of other-worldly suffering on routes seemingly picked out for their bottomless potential for self-inflicted pain are interwoven with episodes from family life.

It's the jolting disparity between the two that really hits you. Curiously, after two books worth of Kirkpatrickism, the climbing sequences seem almost matter of fact. Partly I guess because very few of us, even if we do climb, have ever chosen to put ourselves in the sort of sketchy, high death quotient positions that Andy seeks out, partly because there's only so much faltering, progress above iffy gear on tottering piles of desperate choss that you can read about without it seeming, well, routine.

The really memorable passages of Cold Wars, for me anyway, weren't so much the climbing episodes, though they're still gripping, but the relentlessly honest accounts of everyday life. That and the thoughtful, analysis of his various climbing partners.

It's easy to glamorise climbing, talk about the shininess and the beauty and the moments of fear and relief and partnership, but it has its cost in real life. As a father with two small children, Andy finds himself increasingly torn between the selfish demands of climbing, paricularly the high risk stuff he seeks out, and the pull of family life and connection. 

There's a quietly readable passage when he visits, with his young son in tow, the shared house where top alpinist and climbing partner Ian Parnell lives when not climbing. On the one hand you feel yourself almost feeling sorry for Parnell, who clearly lives to climb, and as a result is still existing stuident style when not climbing, and on the other hand, you can't help sharing Kirkpartick's quiet envy of the uncomplicated simplicity of his lifestyle.

Ultimately that's what Cold Wars is about. Kirkpatrick talks about the central theme of the books as being about the cost of climbing on his 'normal' life, but actually reading the sandwiched accounts of home life and climbing trips and his attempts to reconcile the two, you realise that it's as much about the cost of a happy, normal, family life on his climbing as the other way round. 

Cold Wars isn't a classic of climbing triumphalism, it's far more complex and far more interesting as a result. Brilliantly, but simply written, painfully thoughtful and yet still an incredibly easy and gripping read. Human and yet extraordinary at the same time.

Cold Wars is published in hardback by Vertebrate Publishing and priced at £20. More details at www.v-publishing.co.uk.