This piece appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on the 22 November 1996

In May 1985, Simon Yates and Joe Simpson climbed the West Face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. On the way down, Simpson fell, driving the lower bone of his right leg up through the knee joint. Yates lowered his friend 3,000 feet, before bad decisions mounted up and he was forced to cut the rope. The rest is enshrined in the history of the NCR Book Award. Even as Yates was mourning him, Simpson got out of the crevasse he had fallen into, dragged himself down the mountain and turned up howling in a gully near their camp. Touching the Void became a bestseller, a mountaineering classic, and George Steiner's Sunday Times Book of the Year for 1988. Yates, of course, became known as the man who cut the rope.

Some years later, he found himself back in South America. He had assembled Sean Smith, Noel Craine and Paul Pritchard to attempt a new route on the Paine Towers in Chilean Patagonia. Psychologically, they were less than prepared. Paul forgot to bring a tent - though he found one later on a train. The team binoculars belonged to Noel's mum. Only one of them had done any big-wall climbing before, in California: that was, he had to admit, "a picnic compared to this". Faced with cruel and unusual weather (under the summit the wind made a sound none of them had heard before, "as if the air was somehow being torn apart"), an exhausting commute up thousands of feet of steadily decaying fixed rope, and the appalling exposure of the face itself, they rapidly realized that their intention to "laugh their way up the wall", conceived some months before in a Sheffield pub, wasn't necessarily going to see them through.

Against the Wall is the story of how this understanding dawned. As such, it is a lively and well-written account: big falls and lost gloves, big decisions and lost tempers; the cold, the wind, the brain-numbing architectonics of the wall itself; constant uncertainty, constant impatience, vivid flashes of human perception in barely human situations. So much of climbing is waiting for other people to climb. You grow bored: yet clip the wrong bit of rope while taking a piss one morning, and you go 2,000 feet to the first bounce. Yates is good at describing this, even better at conveying his own confusions and inner conflicts; his own weariness. The Central Tower of Paine asked him the same question Siula Grande had asked Simpson: why bother? The answer recorded here comes as quite a shock. On the way to giving it, Yates is forced to consider the character of Paul Pritchard, less an opposite than a former self.

It is no surprise to read that Pritchard got so excited on the bus ride down through Argentina that, in Puerto Montt, he climbed a radio mast, "because nothing else was available". Or that he arrived without proper down clothing (some of which he also "found" later, in the only partly abandoned baggage of a Spanish expedition which had tried to reserve the route). All he needed to bring was his obsession, his intensity: his myth. He was twenty-four years old. Lethal first ascents on the Llanberis slate, a tendency to "live off his wits" and a passion for trashy haircuts, combined with that vagueness of manner which disguises an iron will, had already made him a cult in Britain. He was "a free spirit, an adventurer", the kind of climber we would all like to be, the kind of climber Yates himself had been until the previous summer when, quite suddenly, "what had appeared, just a few years before, to be an ideal way to live, suddenly seemed to be totally undesirable . . . . I began to consider my own mortality."

Yates had "decided to change". He had decided to grow up. Pritchard's way of life is often less lived than set, like a rhetorical trap, for people who have made this decision. Yates steps into it more than once, making himself sound a bit old, a bit wooden, a bit like a scoutmaster. Pritchard and Craine do seem to have been wilfully unprepared for the conditions in Patagonia. But, in the end, Yates's puzzled judgment, "they could find themselves in serious trouble if they didn't pay a bit more attention to basic essentials", confirms not a temperamental, or even a philosophical difference, only a simple difference of age.

On this, the book turns. But the turn-up for the book is this: once Yates has made his - to a climber - barely credible decision, his intel-ligence, maturity and strength of character shine through. Against the Wall becomes elegiac, intensely readable, full of the real excitement of climbing - the sudden knowledge that you are living in the rapidly closing window between beauty and death.

Copyright Times Literary Supplement 1996