The Fall
Copyright © 2003 by Simon Mawer
Reading group guide copyright © 2004 by Simon Mawer and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may
quote brief passages in a review.
Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, January 2003
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-0-316-07379-0
Hachette Book Group,
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
.
Contents
EXTRAORDINARY INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
SIMON MAWER’S
The Fall
“Utterly convincing, one of the most credible accounts I’ve ever read of two people falling in love…. By combining the adrenaline-filled
appeal of a mountaineering adventure with the emotional clout of a love story, Simon Mawer has created an exemplary model
of that quaint old relic—the satisfying read.”
—Gary Krist,
New York Times Book Review
“The Fall
is an amazing novel…. The descriptions of London during the Blitz are masterful and horrible. The descriptions of mountain
climbing are breathtaking and terrifying. The entanglements of the lives and loves of the characters are spellbinding.”
—Margaret Grayson,
Roanoke Times
“The Fall
is about physical strength, moral weakness, and the enduring, tenuous, and even treacherous connections of the heart. It’s
an uplifting, disturbing, and sumptuously entertaining book by a writer at the top—make that the peak—of his game.”
—Kevin Riordan,
Courier-Post
“An engrossing story…. A very good novel…. The climbing scenes are stunningly well executed. Authentic in their detail, vivid
in their description, gripping in their portrayal of the emotional and physical drama, they are—most importantly—not just
for action’s sake, but germane to the human stories Mawer unfolds. Just as involving, though, are the relationships at the
novel’s core: in their own, subtle way Diana and Guy’s doomed love and Rob and Jamie’s doomed friendship are every bit as
heart-stopping as the thrills and spills of the climbs.”
—Martyn Bedford,
Literary Review
“A story beautifully woven against a backdrop of stunning scenery.”
—Lauren Gold,
Chicago Tribune
“Mawer’s ability to thread narrative through his various conceits can prove exhilarating….
The Fall’s
stark opening hardly prepares the reader for the gaping valleys and dizzying peaks of Mawer’s latest work. The book’s plot
simmers with abandoned youthful friendship and slightly sordid love affairs…. When Rob, Jamie, and their mothers and lovers
start to climb, Mawer uses the occasion to craft mini-essays on mountaineering and paints gorgeous landscapes. At those moments,
the novel ripples with energy and verve…. When Mawer essays the glories of conquered peaks and the supplicant landscapes below
them, his words even evoke comparison with those capital-R Romantics…. Yes, we’ve heard this language before, but Mawer freshens
it beyond immediate recognition into an active presence.”
—Richard Byrne,
Washington Post
“The Fall
is at its considerable best in its depiction of human extremes. Diana’s career as a nurse accompanying ambulances in the
Blitz; her humiliation at the hands of a backstreet abortionist; the boys, precipice encurled, exulting on the mountainside—all
this is written up with almost effortless fluency.”
—D.J. Taylor,
Guardian
“A powerful and constantly surprising literary thriller.
The Fall
scales the heights of fiction and leaves the reader gasping for air at the summit, admiring the spectacular view behind.”
—Mike Cooper,
Waterstone’s Books Quarterly
“A haunting tale about complex human relationships…. A truly good novel.”
—Sheila Hamilton,
Glasgow Evening Times
“Sons and mothers, husbands and wives, friends and lovers: in Mawer’s masterful hands, none of these relationships is what
it seems. Intricately weaving time and place, from the bombed-out ruins of World War II London to isolated Alpine mountain
peaks, Mawer crafts a sinuously devastating tale of forbidden love and faithless betrayal. A haunting and mesmerizing novel
from an expert storyteller.”
—Carol Haggas,
Booklist
“Gripping…. A well-crafted page-turner…. Mawer’s descriptions of climbing really are so powerful that they lift you—willingly
or otherwise—up into the gut-wrenching heaven and hell that lie beyond the clouds, along paths human feet were never meant
to tread…. And those immutable mountains provide the perfect backdrop for a novel about human strength and frailty.”
—Susan Flockhart,
Glasgow Sunday Herald
“Rock-climbing and mountaineering do not interest me at all, but I found Simon Mawer’s novel
The Fall
a riveting read…. A wonderfully constructed story…. A book which maintains a tense edginess from start to finish.”
—Gwyn Griffiths,
Morning Star
“Delightfully readable…. The story is dazzling throughout.”
—Tom O’Dea,
Irish Independent
“In less talented hands, the writer’s quest to capture the intense, elusive allure of the mountains might well overwhelm a
quiet novel. But Mr. Mawer is well aware of the metaphorical significance of struggle. His settings are finely painted with
the colors of time: neon today, gravy-brown for 1950s Britain. His men are boyish, competitive; his women on the wary side
of dishonest. And his narrative surges with an energy that thrusts the story forward to the very last page, from which a startling
new light shines on all that has gone before.”
—
Economist
“The Fall
is a compulsive read. Once you start you won’t want to stop, and it finishes, appropriately, with a cliffhanger that will
probably have your jaw dropping.”
—Victoria Murchie,
Aberdeen Press & Journal
“A densely plotted novel…. With almost geometric precision, patterns of inheritance and affection emerge. The geometry of
genetics and love, while carefully plotted, does not feel arbitrary. On the contrary, the coordinates of affection and affinity
make
The Fall
all the more moving.”
—Barbara Fisher,
Boston Globe
“Compelling drama…. Rob and Jamie’s ill-fated ascent of the Eiger is as visceral and disciplined a piece of writing as the
climb itself and, as mountaineering accounts go, is as gripping as Jon Krakauer’s
Into Thin Air
.”
—Russell Celyn Jones,
The Times
(London)
“Powerful…. Mawer has a knack for creating a memorable story of sentiment then turning it into something rich and strange….
In addition to his other virtues—the precision and eloquence of his prose, his uncanny way with interlocking plots—Mawer may
be said to not repeat himself….
The Fall
is not only riveting but deeply satisfying, a novel that approaches pure thought.”
—Thomas D’Evelyn,
Providence Journal
“Simon Mawer’s work is rich with a desire to see through to the core of things…. The struggle of Rob and Jamie’s ascent is
felt in the pit of the stomach, even if you don’t know a bivouac from a crampon.”
—Zoë Green,
Observer
(London)
“One of the most beautifully written books to have emerged in recent years.”
—Dean Powell,
Western Mail
Also by Simon Mawer
FICTION
The Gospel of Judas
Mendel’s Dwarf
A Jealous God
The Bitter Cross
Chimera
NONFICTION
A Place in Italy
FOR GILLY
T
HE WEATHER WAS GOOD
for the Snowdon area. The rain had held off all day, and there was enough of a breeze to keep the rock dry. Damp could not
have been a contributory factor. There was even the occasional shaft of sunlight cutting down through the varied cloud to
brighten up the cwm, but no direct sunlight on the fluted walls and boilerplate slabs of the crag itself. This is a north
face.
Someone shouted: “Hey, look!” It was one of the group of walkers. Climbers would not have made a noise about it. Someone shouted
and stood up and pointed toward the East Buttress. “Hey, look at him!”
There was a lone figure climbing. He was about twenty feet off the ground. The man who shouted had been watching for a little
while, but at first it had not been clear that the figure was truly alone until he, the climber, had reached twenty feet up
the great, blank central wall of the East Buttress. The wall is a smooth, slightly curving sheet of rhyolite, a beaten metallic
shield that, to inexpert eyes, appears unclimbable.
“Look at ’im. Bloody idiot or what?”
“Isn’t he doing Great Wall?”
“No ropes, nothing. He’s bloody
soloing.
”
The solo climber on the Great Wall moved quite smoothly up the shallow groove that gives the line of the route. He bridged
easily, his feet braced outward to make an arrowhead of his body. You could see his hands going up on the rock above him,
imagine his fingers touching the rock and finding the flakes and nicks that are what pass for holds on that kind of route.
Mere uneven-ness. What the climbers of the past would have called
rugosities.
They all seemed to have had the benefit of a classical education. Not the present breed. “Thin,” the modern climber might
say. Not much else.
“He seems to know what he’s doing,” the walker called to his companions.
“He’s not wearing a helmet,” one of the others remarked. The walkers were all watching now, some of them standing, others
sitting on rocks—the grass was still damp—with their heads craned back to see.
The climber moved up. There was a catlike grace about his movements, a certain slickness, a feeling that, perched as he was
above nothing at all and holding nothing at all, he was secure in what he did. He was now flylike, plastered across the center
of the gray blankness, laying away on a rib that he had discovered, reaching up for a farther hold, bridging wide and stretching
up with his right arm. He was actually feeling for a piton that had been there for the last thirty-seven years, one of those
bits of climbing archaeology that you find in the mountains: a peg, placed there from a rappel one wet and windy day in the
spring of 1962. The peg is oxidized, but smoothed by the numerous (not too numerous) hands that have grabbed it thankfully
over the years. It will be there for many years yet, but not forever. Not even the cliff is forever.
“Look!” A gasp from the watchers, a movement up on the cliff face as the lone climber made a smooth succession of moves and
reached the peg and made height above it.
“What happens if he slips?” one of the walkers, a young girl, asked.
A man’s voice spoke: “He’s dead.” It brought a hush to the party. They had been watching the thing as entertainment; abruptly
it had been presented to them as a matter of life and death.
“Who
is
he?” another of the party asked. There was a clear sense that this unknown climber, this figure of flesh and bone and blood
and brain, must
be
someone.
“A bloody idiot.”