Fergus Fleming: Killing Dragons

Granta

$69.95

Review: Richard Thomson*

When he was 9 years old, Albert Smith was given a book called The Peasants of Chamouni, which included a graphic description of the European Alps' first horrific mountaineering disaster. He was hooked.

Well before the end of Killing Dragons, a colourful history of the exploration of the high Alps of Europe, you suspect Fergus Fleming experienced a similar epiphany.

An archetypal Victorian showman and entrepreneur, Smith toured England in the 1840s with a collection of lamp-lit scenes of Mont Blanc, giving a grand lecture about the Alps that included titbits such as "I believe they show you, somewhere on the glacier, an entire boys' school from Geneva, shut up in the ice like strawberries in a mould of jelly."

In 1851 he climbed Mont Blanc. Among his provisions were 91 bottles of wine, three of cognac and two of champagne (all 19th-century mountaineers apparently popped a bottle or two on the summit), six legs of mutton and 46 chickens.

Smith milked the experience to create a new show that included St Bernard dogs, Alpine milkmaids and unabashed exaggeration. He performed for Queen Victoria and escorted the Prince of Wales to the Alps. His enthusiasm for the Alps spawned a Mont Blanc board game, a Mont Blanc quadrille, and ice skating at a "glaciarium" surrounded by Alpine scenes.

Compared with most of the climbers of the golden age of mountaineering, Smith was pleasantly well-adjusted and focused on enjoying himself.

Perhaps that is reflected in the fact that he was a populariser rather than an explorer.

Fleming generalises his Alpine explorers: "Always fixated and sometimes peculiar, they shared a background of illness and phobia: sickly childhoods were ubiquitous; insomnia and indigestion were common; one man was afraid of heights, another of garlic. And yes, a lot of them were British."

This book is filled with oddballs, such as grumpy old Edward Whymper, survivor of the Matterhorn disaster of 1857.

Killing Dragons is history as ripping yarns. Faced with a subject as faintly ludicrous as mountain climbing, it's an admirable approach.

Fleming is more interested in finding a good story and telling it with wit and style than in writing an exhaustive history (though there is a comprehensive bibliography and index), but his sense of historical context is sound, his personal assessments astute.

Take the book on its own terms, and it will be difficult not to enjoy it.

* Richard Thomson is a journalist and former editor of New Zealand Climber magazine.