Mike Harding, Yorkshire Transvestite Found Dead On Everest

The book title refers to evangelical eccentric Maurice Wilson's 1934 attempt to summit Everest and so could be claimed to be misleading in that it is the title of an article in Harding's frequent column in "The Great Outdoors" magazine. This book is indeed a collection of articles written by him for his column, therefore those seeking out the book in the hope of finding out more exclusively about Maurice Wilson will be disappointed in finding just the one dedicated article of a few pages and a solitary other mention of Wilson in passing in a later article. Everest itself gets frequent mentions but mostly transient ones. Indeed, instead of expounding further on the fascinating history of the Yorkshire maverick, Harding uses the story in a flippant way to make a weak joke about national UK stereotypes. A shame when the only comprehensive alternative is the costly out-of-print "I'll Climb Mount Everest Alone: the Story of Maurice Wilson" by Dennis Roberts, or the German language "Wo die Schneel wen tanzen" by Peter Meier-H sing, especially when it is still not clear how high his faith propelled him and whether the mysterious tent sighted at 8500m was his.

Harding writes with all the blustering buffoonery of a retired general but is actually a perceptive and erudite man-of-the-world, with a northern coarseness of wit that cuts through the crap and gets to the point. Except often his points can become clouded by being clever with word play, similes, metaphors and simple tongue-in-cheekiness. His mild bawdiness and Goonish British comedic surrealism delivers the same sort of "Jolly Gee" rampant in W. E. Bowman's masterly "The Ascent of Rum Doodle".

Harding also has an inner vision that looks out upon a world of wonder. There are many wonderful books that deal with the motivation to get out into the wilderness, not least Connor's "The Philosophy of Risk" and MacFarlane's "Mountains of the Mind". But this is not a new study only for modern minds. It was integral to Mallory's landmark writing about his pursuits in the outdoors. Harding is also that aesthete, sharing that view; the mountains are stuffed with romance and awe as much as they are dripping in the sweat and blood of their mere mortal challengers, and poetry and prose are the appropriate paints with which to conjure the beauty of natural landscapes.