This Game of Ghosts

Joe Simpson

This Game of Ghosts is Simpson's follow-up to Touching The Void. Well, more a straight autobiography of Simpson than a follow-up. It supplies the story of how Simpson in his teens got the climbing bug which eventually led to the Touching The Void disaster in the Andes and it follows his rehabilitation and return to the mountains afterwards. It's a slow starter. It's a good fifty pages, maybe more, before we get anywhere near so much as a Derbyshire peak. Most of these early pages deal with growing up as the youngest of five Simpson children in Gibraltar and the Far East. The author clearly believes stories from these formative years contain clues to the climber he was to become. I'm not so sure. It's definitely a better book once he gets his climbing gear on. Also, some of the best bits deal with the publication of Touching The Void and the humble thrill he feels as it gathers publishing momentum. When the royalties and prize money start to come in it's clear that the novelty of not having to live off benefits rather throws Simpson.

Strangely, the cover of This Game of Ghosts echoes Another Day Life. One shows a helmeted climber, the other a helmeted soldier. Reading Simpson's book straight after Kapuscinski's I was half-determined to find the thrill-seeking of mountaineering too frivolous a preoccupation to enjoy the book at all. But ultimately Simpson writes too well about mountaineering and he's also too wise to the charge. I didn't enjoy it like Touching The Void but it's still an absorbing study of obsession.