The Ice Soldier, by Paul Watkins

Stranded in the mountains of the mind

Mountaineering books deal largely in failure. There is nothing climbers like so much as a good post-mortem of what can go wrong on a peak, from Nanga Parbat in 1934 to the disasters on Everest in 1996. Reaching a summit is anyway often a false ending: it is a commonplace of mountaineering that more lives are lost on the descent. Joe Simpson's Touching the Void, the bestseller of the genre, is hardly a success story.

Paul Watkins has used the emotional possibilities of such failure to fashion a novel of considerable power. His hero, William Bromley, is recovering from a wartime operation in the Italian Alps which went terribly wrong: he has renounced climbing, leading a lacklustre existence as a teacher at a boarding school. Together with his best friend Stanley, he forms a "Society of Former Mountaineers", who now spend their time drinking a bottle of white wine while deciding which red to choose.

The darkly resonant voice of an old mountaineering legend, Henry Carton, reminds Bromley that it is only "in the mountains that you learned who you were, for better or for worse". He is forced to return to the scene of his failure and confront some demons, taking Stanley with him. To point up the metaphor, after Carton's death they have to drag his coffin with them up the peak, to honour his last request.

As the coffin becomes an albatross around their necks, almost pulling them down a crevasse, Watkins plays with the stock-in-trade incidents of the expedition narrative - the avalanche, the storm, the unfriendly locals and the knot which gives way - and breathes fresh life into them.

Watkins has form in this area - his travel book, Fellowship of Ghosts, was an account of the mountains of Norway - and like his previous novels this is reminiscent of a genre now little seen: the literate thriller in the manner of Hammond Innes or the entertainments of Graham Greene. Set in a convincingly monochrome Fifties Britain, The Ice Soldier is storytelling of high art and of an occasional mordancy that would not sit amiss in Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy. Watkins's touch is perhaps less sure with romantic elements: both the climbers get their girl with suspicious ease, and with dialogue of such stilted briskness that Brief Encounter seems verbose by comparison.

Yet Watkins is particularly good with the sense of rancour and injustice that drives so many in the climbing world long after they have got back home, and leads them to revisit the mountains, whether in literature or for that one fatal expedition too many. He evokes the spirit of the "Alpenglow", the spectral solar fog-bow which Edward Whymper and his remaining companions saw on descending from the Matterhorn after the most emblematic of all mountaineering disasters, in which a rope broke and sent most of the party to their deaths.

Despite having made the first ascent of one of the most famous mountains in the world, Whymper spent the rest of his life both running away from and trying to justify his triumph. In mountaineering, as in politics, there are very few clean endings.

Hugh Thomson's 'Cochineal Red: travels through ancient Peru' is out from Weidenfeld in July