I guess I have a complicated history with Dan Simmons now. His last mammoth, brick-like epic novel about survival in extreme cold, The Terror, stuck around my house for months haunting me before I could bring myself to crack into it. But once I did, I became consumed by its tale of the 1845 Franklin expedition and its doomed attempts to find the NorthWest passage. The book got me through a weird, lonely time in which I returned to my house one Christmas only to find that nobody else was home, and the heating was broken. I shivered through several days before either of these situations could be rectified, eating up the pages of Simmons' masterpiece, glad only that I was at least safe from the twin horrors of cannibalism and being stalked by unknowable Arctic monsters. The book even left me with a recurring fascination with polar exploration, and the Franklin expedition in particular.
The Terror is, by and large, regarded as a bit of a modern horror classic (it now has a well-reviewed TV adaptation too). Initial impressions of his follow-up 2013 novel The Abominable seemed to indicate that the reader could expect something, well, similar. After all, the title is similar. The cover is similar. And the premise is similar - again, we have a small group of men caught in a struggle for survival against a hostile, extremely cold environment - this time, it's an Everest expedition in the 1920s. And again, there are hints that the team are being stalked by some mysterious creature native to this frozen realm. Given the location, and the title of the book, one naturally assumes that this creature will turn out to be the Yeti.
Now, I had read reviews that tempered my enthusiasm somewhat. These reviews remained somewhat elusive about the nature of the threat, thought they implied that perhaps the creature was not a physical, flesh-and-blood Yeti, as such, and that the book held a surprise twist close to the end. I was ok with that. After all, great things have been done with the more metaphysical notions of monsters and supernatural events, such as the 1957 British movie The Abominable Snowman by the great Nigel Kneale (terrible title, but do check it out). So I trusted that, even if the team might not encounter a Yeti as we expect one to look, Simmons would find some satisfying, alternative take on the phenomenon. After all, the high-altitude world of Everest is a weird one, where oxygen-deprived climbers regularly meet with the ghosts of dead comrades, see unexplained atmospheric phenomena, and push themselves to the brink of death. The possibilities were endless.
The book begins with a framing device: Simmons meets ageing American climber Jake Perry, who later gifts him with his extraordinarily long (and extraordinarily well-written) memoirs. We learn that back in the 20s, Perry joined an aristocratic, eccentric English climber known as 'the Deacon' and a rather stereotypical Frenchman named Jean-Claude (of course) on a secret, three-man attempt to scale Everest, an expedition that has been kept out of the history books.
Simmons is known for including masses of historical research in his novels, and he doesn't disappoint here. The Deacon lectures his crew (and the reader) at length on virtually every aspect of 1920s mountaineering. We learn much about the technique and technology of climbing during this time, though the Deacon then produces so many revolutionary new technologies and pieces of equipment that his expedition, were it real, would probably have been quite anachronistic for the 20s time frame. The team bounce around Europe, climbing in the Alps and meeting mountaineering experts in Germany and Austria. We get quite a bit of detail about the socio-political forces brewing in Germany at this time - something that feels like background detail at first, though it later becomes clear that Simmons is building up to something with this. Some of this stuff is fun, and some of it is jarring and unrealistic. Perry bumps into so many important historical figures that it starts to feel a little silly.
Things improve once the expedition gets underway. The crew spend a little time in British India on their way to the Himalayas, and given my fascination with the history of the British Empire, I enjoyed this section quite a bit. It's a long time though before they get to Everest, close to halfway through the book if I recall correctly, leaving me wondering exactly how Simmons was intending to pace the book. The climbing sections themselves are great: like in The Terror, I was completely immersed in the horrors of this frozen, deadly world. Every aspect of the difficulty of climb is emphasised, from the dangers of falling to the hardships of existing where the air is thin. This was great, rousing stuff, but again, the more I read, and the more I invested in the characters and the book, the more I began to wonder what it was all leading up to. The pacing was really strange - the promised central threat hadn't shown up almost 3/4 of the way through the book. There had been a few mentions of the Yeti, but the creature, or whatever was out there in the blinding snows, remained resolutely off-stage. What was Simmons playing at? I knew that something strange was coming, but leaving the reveal so long meant that either he had to have something dynamite up his sleeve, or it was going to be a serious letdown.
There'll be no spoilers, but suffice it to say that when the threat was revealed, I was disappointed. The tone of the book changes quite a bit, very late in the game, and for me a lot of the momentum and buildup from the preceding 700 pages was squandered. Where Simmons had carefully built up this believable environment where literally every step was agony, and reaching each new camp was a hard-fought victory, now characters were romping up and down between base-camps willy-nilly to deal with this new threat. The nature of the threat itself is not necessary a terrible idea, but it feels trite and light compared to the themes that could have been explored in this environment, and out of place considered the historical seriousness of the rest of the book.
Regardless, I ploughed through, keen to finish this monster of a book, determined to make it to my own particular summit (reviewers of The Abominable have found it impossible to avoid referring to finishing the book as mounting an impossible summit). And the last part of the book proved that Simmons is entirely capable of writing great things, as well as equally capable of squandering a great situation. Returning from the mountain, Perry has a couple of truly haunting encounters that properly take advantage of the dreamlike mystery that pervaded high peaks such as Everest. In fact, he even comes across evidence that something truly mysterious and fascinating (and, from a literary point of view, quite unique) might just be haunting the mountain. It's only a glimpse, but it's a thousand times more interesting than the main threat he has just tangled with.
Simmons then went on to annoy me further by having unnecessary chapters in which Perry has meetings with an unbelievably large roster of historical celebrities, all of whom seem to have come from central casting, and who conform to a disappointingly shallow interpretation of history in which people are either heroes or villains. Yawn. Simmons even pulls some really laboured 'reveals' where he 'conceals' the identity of certain historical figures until he's ready to pull back the curtain. It's always painfully obvious who they are ahead of time.
There are some great moments in The Abominable. But I feel if Simmons wanted to go so far out of his way to make it different to The Terror, he ought not to have chosen such a similar premise. Perhaps a reader should not have expectations of a story ahead of time, but even so, the change in tone (genre, almost) that comes late in The Abominable makes it feel like some kind of failed bait-and-switch.
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