This review contains spoilers, so if you want to save The Abominable for yourself, you’re not going to want to read what follows.
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Not too long ago, I read and loved The Terror which was a delicious mix of history and fiction, spiced up with a little supernatural to make a truly compelling book set in a place I love reading about. I thought that The Abominable would do for climbing Everest what The Terror did for Artic exploration. On this front, the first two parts of the book delivered. But sadly, despite the promise on the back of our climbers being tracked by a ‘dark creature’ and the constant yeti-teasing in the text, part three turned out to be a wild disappointment as I discovered that the supernatural horror element had been replaced with a spy thriller. Spy thrillers leave me cold, so this was not a good twist for me.
Jacob Perry is climbing with two new friends when they hear the news that George Mallory and Andrew Irvine have disappeared while attempting to summit Mount Everest. Following in Mallory’s footsteps were a minor English noble and his friend who have also disappeared, so Jake and his friends decide to use the opportunity of recovering said noble’s body to get his family to pay for their own attempt on the mountain. The first part of the book sees the friends preparing for their attempt while the second sees them actually climbing, and these two parts – despite not including the howls in the distance or dark creatures promised in the blurb – saw me well and truly in my happy place, learning in extreme detail about crampons and moraines and belaying and whatnot as our group battled to survive in an extremely hostile environment. But then came part three. MAJOR spoilers will abound below, so click away now if you don’t want to hear any more….
One howl is heard before we meet our ‘dark creature’…..which turns out to be a bunch of machine-gun toting Nazis looking to hide some photos showing Hitler raping Jewish boys. And from here on out, the book lost me. I dutifully kept turning pages hoping that a yeti might still turn up but instead my enthusiasm continued to leach away while our group got all Tom Cruise-y and shot and cut Nazis off the mountain. By the time we got to the end, with Jake having gone on to meet Charlie Chaplin at a dinner party held by Winston Churchill, I was officially over it all.
If I could just review parts one and two of The Abominable, it would have received a shining recommendation and a 4 star review. But part three really kicked that all to pieces for me and if there had been a mountain in my vicinity, I’d have tried to hurl the book off it. Instead I’ll have to settle for knocking a couple of stars off.
