A timely, if ghoulish, morality tale

SIMON Newman has pretty much drifted through his life when we meet him earning his living serving coffee.

If he has a focus, it’s climbing, and his friendship with his friend Thierry, an American trustafarian who has fled his family to come to London.

Thierry and Simon have a website, Journey to the Dark Side. It’s a rather sick enterprise that posts on the gory and the creepy. Thierry is keen to grow it, to drive traffic to it.

To find the footage that will make it stratospheric.

Simon is despatched to go into the notorious Cwm Pot caves – his mission to film the bodies of cavers who have drowned in the caves.

The plan is to upload his images on Journey to the Dark Side and take it to the level of uniquehits that Thierry dreams of. Simon has other reasons to undertake the journey into the deep caves: he

needs to prove that he is over a fall he has suffered mountain-climbing. Because, Simon is a mountain climber.

He’s been one since he joined a club for troubled youths and fell in love with the camaraderie and joy of conquering mountains.

He chooses Ed, a thoroughly unpleasant caver who offers to lead him down Cwn Pot for a not inconsiderable amount of money.

Without wanting to spoil the plot of this taught psychological thriller, things do not go well in the caves and Simon is lucky to escape with his life.

In the caves and the pitch darkness he hears voices and faces Ed as a foe.

Thierry, of course, is thrilled at the results that footage of the caves receives.

All of a sudden, Journey to the Dark Side is being hit on a lot. Simon is less sure about the morality of the footage that has been put up on the site, but he goes along with it.

Interspersed in the story, we meet Juliet, a mother who is attempting to summit Mount Everest.

She’s lost her climbing partner in her first bid on the South Side of the mountain, and her story in The White Road is about her trying to ascend from the North Side.

In a series of brilliant diary entries, Juliet tells of her climb with a sense of desperation and a sense that a malign spirit is with her.

She’s faced down a barrage of criticism for being a mother who climbs and puts her life at risk, something that has happened to many women climbers but, oddly, not so much to fathers who take on dangerous peaks.

Sarah Lotz, with her impeccable style and ability to create characters so authentic that they become part of her readers’ lives, uses Juliet to have a considered go at the patriarchy.

But, more than this, she delves into the dilemma of a mom who has left her son behind. We leave Juliet and her tortured time on the mountain, fraught with bickering, betrayal and jealousy, and return to Simon’s life.

Thierry has hit on a brilliant idea: that Simon should join an expedition to climb Everest, and to film the bodies that have been left on the mountain. So off Simon goes. He knows why he is really there, but it has little to do with reaching the summit and everything to do with exploiting human suffering for ghouls on the internet.

Lotz’s description of the achingly exhausting process of acclimatising to the thin air of base camp and the even thinner air at the camps above it makes it hard to believe she has never climbed the mountain.

As Simon struggles to make sense of the group of people he is climbing with, he also becomes beguiled by the mountain and the remote possibility that he may want to summit if after all.

He forms two relationships, one with a brilliant woman climber and another with a troubled young man who is on the mountain under pretences as false as those of Simon.

Lotz brings to The White Road a sense of the contradictions of climbing, the solitude of it, alongside the need to form partnerships in order to survive.

It’s a brutal tale, but one that is told with a lyrical style that becomes almost poetic at times.

In the end there is a tragedy, or several.

Simon will never be the same again, what has haunted him on the mountain, the shadow of TS Eliot’s quote from The Wasteland: “Who is the third who walks always beside you?…” will continue to haunt him for the rest of his life.

After Everest, Simon returns to London a broken man; he has loved and lost, and he has lost himself.

Thierry, on the other hand, the “brave” rule-breaker of the internet, has become a corporate success, a man with a fitted kitchen, a nice woman and a

Brutal story with a lyrical style that becomes almost poetic at times

sweet baby.

In this truly superb and tightly-woven novel, Lotz takes a story that could easily, from a plot point of view, be a thriller, and turns it into a complex and satisfying morality tale for modern life.

A triumph of excellent writing and brilliant editing, this book is a exactly what a great novel should be.