Thin Air (2016) by Michelle Paver

Thin Air (2016) by Michelle Paver: It's 1935. Upper-class British twits throng the unconquerable places of the globe seeking to conquer them. The poles have been penetrated. Only a handful of mountains remain upon which to plant the Union Jack. All a group of British mountain-climbers need to reach the summit of the third-highest mountain in the world, Kangchenjunga in the Himalayas, is fortitude and a small army of Sherpas and other native supply-carriers.

To Kangchenjunga come Stephen and 'Kits' Pearce and several others. The Pearces are semi-estranged upper-class brothers, older 'Kits' the adventurer and Stephen the doctor the expedition now requires, its previous doctor having fallen ill. Stephen wants to prove himself. 'Kits' just wants to emulate the heroes he spent his boyhood reading about. When it comes to Kangchenjunga, that hero was Edmund Lyell.

Lyell led an ill-fated, high-casualty expedition up Kangchenjunga in 1906. Then he grew rich and famous on his account of that expedition and the fame and adulation it brought to him. Lyell is now dead. On their way to Kangchenjunga, the Brits visit Charles Tennant, the last survivor. He lives close enough to Kangchenjunga to see it out his study window in the distance. But when Stephen questions him as to what really happened on that disastrous, lucrative foray into old and darkness, Tennant throws him out. Old nerves?

Well, we'll find out.

Michelle Paver does a marvelous job evoking so many things in this novel, from the privation of high-altitude mountain climbing to the petty bickerings of sibling animosity to the casual racism and classism of the typical upper-class Brit in 1935. It's made even more marvelous by her attention to brevity. Thin Air is almost a novella in length; all one wants at the end is more, even as one admires the skill required to tell a ghost story in short, sure strokes.

Or is it a ghost story? As in many ghost stories, Thin Air suggests human frailty and guilt as possible explanations for the seemingly supernatural at certain points of the narrative. That doesn't mean either/or -- the ghosts inside and the ghosts outside jostle for primacy in many of the greatest tales of the supernatural. Paver has written something at novel length here that can stand beside great ghost stories by Shirley Jackson, M.R. James, and Robert Aickman, all with a piquant taste of post-colonial cultural criticism. Highly recommended.