Adventure Literature: What Compels Us?

Adventure Literature: What It Is

If we can take the National Geographic list as instructive, Adventure Literature is inclusive of mountaineering books, polar accounts, sailing and survival epics, nature and travel writing, and general exploration.  The genre spans the centuries, the earliest books being primary accounts of opening the America’s. The Spaniard Nobleman, Cabeza De Vaca’s, Naufragios being an 16th century example.  Sebastian Junger’s, The Perfect Storm, and the popularized account of a fishing crews’ encounter with a 100 foot waves, a more recent example.

Books Quoted in This Review

Slowly Down the Ganges, Eric Newby
The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry Garrard
Sailing Alone Around the World, Joshua Slocum
Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrer
Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer
Touching the Void, Joe Simpson

Up until the turn of the century most books continued to be first person accounts of one exploratory exploit, disaster or ruminations.  1996 proved to be a turning point.  Krakauer’s, Into Thin Air, while a first person account, was also an account written by a journalist.  He recounts the events as a retelling from an uninterested outsider.  At the same time, Boukreev, writes of the same events as a participant Two different directions; reportage and autobiography.  Since the success of Into Thin Air, reportage has been a much more common element of successful Adventure Literature. 

It’s also worth noting that fiction to date has not been discussed as having a place with the genre.  Is The Hobbit Adventure Literature?  Well … it has all the elements of it.  Is W.E. Bowman’s, The Ascent of Rum Doodle, a fitting candidate?  It is about mountaineering … it has every single element of a mountaineering tome … but I’d say, no.  As for The Hobbit, I’d like to hear the case for, yes. It’s worthy of future discourse.

Adventure Literature: What Makes it Good

First, what makes it bad.  The bad stuff is usually a breathless account of some misfortune or near escape. It will be replete with too many adjectives and too little substance.  Or, it will appeal only to the converted.  A first ascent poorly recounted is interesting only to those interested in either the parties involved or the objective.

Or it bores. Unfortunately, not all Adventure Literature lasts or instructs.  Eric Newby who is capable of hugely entertaining works, dissappoints with Slowly Down the Ganges.  His account of floating down the Ganges River during the mid-60’s reads like a series of scrawled post-cards … none of it amounting to more than one somewhat interesting ancedote bollowed by another.

The good stuff on the other hand, confronts us with either a moral dilemma that transcends the genre, or exposes us in our full humanity. 

Joe Simpson’s, Touching the Void is an example of a moral dilemma informing an entire book; when faced with an impossible situation a climbing partner abandons another on a remote peak.  As the saga ensues, the reader is constantly invited to ask how he / she would have acted in the same position; would you or I have had the courage of cowardice to abandon a dear friend to almost certain death. Into applies broadly and well beyond the mountaineering genre.

Into Thin Air traverses similar ground, though the actors are found more wanting; selfishness is on full display as climbers ignore the peril of competing teams. The reader understands the severity of conditions and the impossiblity of guaranteed success, yet holds to judgement those individuals who put personal objectives ahead of the lives of others on the mountain. 

Apart from war, it’s only in the extreme testing grounds of the mountains, turgid sea and searing deserts that clarity of choice is laid so bare. Stark decisions are a simple miss-step away.

Cherry Garrard’s, The Worst Journey in the World, is an early and lasting example of Adventure Literature appealing to our humanity.  The book describes Robert Falcon Scott’s fated expedition to the South Pole. Anthony Brandt, in his introduction of the National Geographic Edition suggests that the book’s real importance lies in the answer it proposes to the question; what impels men to live through what basically amounts to a frozen hell?  I would suggest that its importance has nothing to do with what it is that compels men; but rather, what it tells us about man when he is faced with hell.  In this case, the account teaches us that we are capable of great humanity, that we can suffer much and retain our dignity, and that we are essentially decent.

Likewise, Seven Years in Tibet, written by the German prisoner of war, Heinrich Harrer, informs us of the decency of man. Faced with a suspicious and insular Lhasan society he engages the Tibetan capital and wins it over with the largeness of his heart.  He teaches that in the midst of war, to be good has a value out of proportion than what it is to be correct.

It should be noted too, that a minor subset of the genre, is accorded inclusion based almost entirely on lyricism.  Wind, Sand, Stars by Saint-Exupery, West With the Night by Beryl Markham,  and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solataire are obvious examples. 

Adventure Literature: What Next?

What next? What is left to conquer?  A record of the first solo navigation is worthy of record; and even if Sailing Alone Around the World weren’t well written, the book would be worth reading as a result.  Not so of a book written in 2007 by someone who happened to replicate Slocum’s feat … even if he does do it in a Spray replica.  The book MUST be well written and it MUST add something to our understanding of ourselves and others for it to be worthy of a read.

It is no longer the event, but the way the event is told and what it adds, that determines the worth of a book.  We may or may not see the trend towards journalistic retelling driving the genre.  We may see some noteworthy events told in the first person.  Given the instability of the world the killing fields in North Africa and the Middle East may produce some noteworthy works. 

As it stands now, winners of the National Outdoor Book Awards are for the most part, very personal accounts, that while well written don’t generally feel bigger than what they are.  The Daniel Pearle story seems bigger.  A Jonathan Foer novel seems bigger.  A Million Little Pieces, even through its controversy, seems bigger.

External Resources

• National Outdoor Book Awards
• National Geographic Adventure: 100 Best Adventure Books.
• Outside Magazine: 25 Best Adventure Books of the Last 100 Years
• Outdoor Book Review, Ron Watters

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