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Summary
Summary
"An outstanding book." -- The Wall Street Journal * "Gripping at every turn." -- Outside * "A gem of a book." -- The Guardian * "A hell of a ride." -- The Times (London)
An extraordinary true story about one man's attempt to salve the wounds of war and save his own soul through an audacious adventure.
In the 1930s, as official government expeditions set their sights on conquering Mount Everest, a little-known World War I veteran named Maurice Wilson conceives his own crazy, beautiful plan: he will fly a plane from England to Everest, crash-land on its lower slopes, then become the first person to reach its summit--all utterly alone. Wilson doesn't know how to climb. He barely knows how to fly. But he has the right plane, the right equipment, and a deep yearning to achieve his goal. In 1933, he takes off from London in a Gipsy Moth biplane with his course set for the highest mountain on earth. Wilson's eleven-month journey to Everest is wild: full of twists, turns, and daring. Eventually, in disguise, he sneaks into Tibet. His icy ordeal is just beginning.
Wilson is one of the Great War's heroes, but also one of its victims. His hometown of Bradford in northern England is ripped apart by the fighting. So is his family. He barely survives the war himself. Wilson returns from the conflict unable to cope with the sadness that engulfs him. He begins a years-long trek around the world, burning through marriages and relationships, leaving damaged lives in his wake. When he finally returns to England, nearly a decade after he first left, he finds himself falling in love once more--this time with his best friend's wife--before depression overcomes him again. He emerges from his funk with a crystalline ambition. He wants to be the first man to stand on top of the world. Wilson believes that Everest can redeem him.
This is the tale of an adventurer unlike any you have ever encountered: complex, driven, wry, haunted, and fully alive. He is a man written out of the history books--dismissed as an eccentric, and gossiped about because of rumors of his transvestism. The Moth and the Mountain restores Maurice Wilson to his rightful place in the annals of Everest and tells an unforgettable story about the power of the human spirit in the face of adversity.
Author Notes
Ed Caesar is an author and a contributing writer to The New Yorker . Before joining The New Yorker , Caesar wrote stories for The New York Times Magazine , The Atlantic , Outside , The Smithsonian Magazine , Esquire , The Sunday Times (London), British GQ , and The Independent. He has reported from a wide range of countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kosovo, Russia, and Iran. He has won a number of awards for his journalism, including the 2014 Journalist of the Year from the Foreign Press Association of London. His first book, Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon , was awarded a Cross Sports Book of the Year award.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Caesar (Two Hours) delivers an evocative portrait of the life and times of British adventurer Maurice Wilson (1898--1934), who captivated the public's attention with his doomed attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1934. Despite the best efforts of the British government to stop him, Wilson flew his Gipsy Moth biplane (which he had only recently learned to pilot) from England to India, hired three sherpas, and walked more than 300 miles to the base of the world's tallest mountain disguised as a Tibetan priest. Drawing on archival records and love letters Wilson wrote to a friend's wife, Caesar highlights Wilson's middle-class upbringing and military service in WWI, where his battalion was nearly wiped out in Germany's spring offensive of 1918. After the war, Wilson burned through relationships, suffered a nervous breakdown, and traveled the world. Back in England, he turned to fasting, Indian mysticism, and the power of positive thinking to recover from depression and prepare for his Everest expedition. Caesar skillfully explores the political, intellectual, and spiritual movements of the era, as well as Wilson's psychic scars from the war. Though his climb ended in tragedy, Wilson inspired Reinhold Messner to make the first solo ascent of Everest in 1980. This entertaining, well-researched chronicle is a valuable addition to mountaineering history. (Nov.)
Guardian Review
On 16 April 1934, Maurice Wilson set off from the Rongbuk monastery in Tibet to climb Mount Everest via the North Col, entirely alone. He carried 45lb of equipment and food including a defective altimeter, his talismanic "flag of friendship", an ice axe (but no crampons), a copy of The Voice of Silence (his Buddhist text), and a concave mirror (to signal his progress). He also bore the blessing of an ageing lama, and the dream of reaching the roof of the world - the first person ever to do so - on his 36th birthday. Remarkably, he had no technical mountaineering expertise, nor even any alpine experience. In fact, as Ed Caesar notes in this gem of a book, "Wilson had hardly climbed anything more challenging than a flight of stairs". How the son of a Bradford mill owner got to the Rongbuk monastery forms the central narrative of this carefully crafted, riveting tale. Wilson's short, irregular life pivoted, as with so many of his generation, on a single day in Flanders. As a second lieutenant in 1/5th West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own), Wilson witnessed the destruction of his battalion at Wytschaete, on 25 April 1918. "Almost every man not taken prisoner was a casualty," Caesar writes. Isolated, in advance of the British frontline, raked by German machine guns, Wilson continued to fire on the enemy. The citation for the Military Cross he won stated: "It was largely owing to his pluck and determination in holding this post that the enemy attack was held up." It was Wilson's first day on the frontline. Caesar is a journalist foremost, rather than a historian, yet the book has been meticulously researched. The principal primary sources are Wilson's diary and his letters, which provide an incomplete and, at times, unreliable picture: Wilson was, as Caesar notes, a dreamer, a chancer, and a man adept at varnishing the truth. To add historical backbone to the protagonist's own narrative "forged in private trauma", the author hunted through history society collections, ships' manifests, accounts of expeditions to Everest, National Archives, India Office Archives and the Alpine Club collection. He toured battlefields on the western front. He learned about London nightclubs in the early 1930s, and flying a de Havilland Moth - the plane Wilson audaciously flew to the Himalayas. Caesar even flew a Moth himself, taking the controls, albeit under instruction, in the air. Quite how traumatised Wilson was by the ghosts of Flanders is never apparent, though Caesar probes the issue. If Wilson suffered post-traumatic symptoms, he was never diagnosed. Nor did he ever receive a pension on account of his injuries, despite applying six times. The rebuttals left a "sense of grievance against authority figures¿ The anger never left him." Wilson tried to settle in Bradford again after the war, but he was already "chasing a chimera", his mother later wrote. From 1923 for a decade, he travelled the globe, ripping through two failed marriages, further relationships and businesses. He was undoubtedly restless; there were also hints of mania. The storyline is, for the most part, historically linear, but there are several digressions to help us understand this complex man. Bradford - the booming "Worstedopolis" before the first world war and a "town of widows" after - gets a few pages. The Great Trigonometrical Survey, the British mapping project in India, which first proclaimed "Peak XV" as the highest mountain and renamed it "Everest", is briefly reviewed. More space is devoted to the development of alpinism as a western sport, and the emergence of Everest as a "modern and peculiarly British obsession". A host of extraordinary characters thereby appear, including Alfred Wills, Edward Whymper (whose account of climbing the Matterhorn was a "worldwide 1871 bestseller"), Sir Francis Younghusband, George Mallory and Charles Howard-Bury, the explorer who spoke 27 languages. Howard-Bury was captured by the Germans during the spring offensive of 1918 - he escaped - and went on to lead the first British Everest exploratory team in 1921. A small criticism is that these digressions could be longer and more elaborate. At 227 pages, I felt the book ended too soon. There are a handful of maps and illustrations, a short bibliography and notes. In 1932, back in London after his world tours, Wilson became obsessed with a married woman, Enid Evans - the "love" in the book's subtitle. The relationship was platonic - Enid's husband was Wilson's good friend. Through the curious dynamic of this threesome, Caesar considers the rumours from within the mountaineering community that Wilson was a transvestite - possibly the first transvestite to win the Military Cross. Shortly after meeting the Evanses, Wilson underwent a "spiritual awakening" - not uncommon in the postwar era of pioneering adventurer-poets, all men, mapping the world while having transcendental experiences. He started reading Buddhist literature and developed an interest in purification through abstinence, and in the search for a "'golden' or higher plane of existence". Somewhere in this rebirth, Mount Everest crystallised as the irresistible beacon in Wilson's consciousness. The story then turns into a Boy's Own tale of derring-do. Wilson decides to fly himself to India. He buys a de Havilland Gypsy Moth and sets off on the three-week journey. Civil aviation was embryonic. Wilson hardly knew what he was doing. British imperial authority was weighted against him. There were innumerable near misses. "It must have been hard not to think he was being protected," Caesar writes. Against the odds, Wilson makes it to the subcontinent, where his plane is impounded, to stop him flying over Nepal to Everest. He then sets off on foot, disguised as a Tibetan priest. Wilson's first attempt on the summit of Everest, which began on 16 April, ended ignominiously, when he limped back to the Rongbuk monastery. A month later, revitalised by the care of his Bhutia porters, the "show", as he frequently referred to his adventures, began again. "By any measure, he had not the tiniest chance of reaching the summit," Caesar writes. But if the line between life and death really was as thin as that day at Wytschaete suggested, why turn back? On his second attempt, "the whole sorry, beautiful, melancholy, crazy tale" reached its inevitable end. Wilson died of exhaustion and exposure at the bottom of the North Col, a 21,000-foot wall of ice, snow and rock, in early June 1934. His final legible diary entry read: "Off again, gorgeous day."
Kirkus Review
The tale of an eccentric plan to be the first known European to scale Mount Everest. "The idea was mad any way you looked at it," writes New Yorker contributor Caesar of the plan British adventurer Maurice Wilson (1898-1934) cooked up to fly to Nepal and crash-land his plane at the foot of Everest, then climb solo to the summit. Never mind that Wilson, a shellshocked veteran of World War I and survivor of the Spanish flu, had no experience flying or climbing. He overcame those shortcomings by walking the 200 miles from Bradford to London in hobnail boots several times and, yes, learning to fly. "Wilson was preparing himself purely to endure," writes Caesar, "as if toughness were the only quality required in the Himalayas." It was not, and while it's probably a spoiler to note that his expedition was spectacularly unsuccessful, it was an example of derring-do in the service of personal redemption--perhaps. Wilson was clearly in need of healing: He abandoned wives at the drop of a hat, gave little attention to the ordinary business of making a living, and may have been a transvestite. "If Wilson was a transvestite," writes the author in this loopy, sometimes labored narrative, "he knew how to source a wardrobe." He was also undeniably brave. Caesar has an unfortunate habit of addressing himself in the second person as he recounts how he came to the long-forgotten (though documented) story: "You read the literature on Wilson. It's nowhere near satisfactory. He is dismissed by generalists as a crank, and by alpine historians as a reckless amateur--a footnote in the history of mountaineering." Still, he turns in a multifaceted tale full of learned speculation--at least one climber claims that Wilson made the summit--and intriguing minor mysteries. It's not Into Thin Air, but Caesar's story has plenty of virtues all the same. A welcome addition to the library of oddball adventurers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Maurice Wilson was a middle-class Englishman who, like his brothers and most of his generation, suffered greatly during WWI. The experience of combat and attendant trauma left a hole in Wilson's soul that he strove to fill. Caesar (Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon, 2015) passionately tracked down this elusive character through scant sources and engagingly depicts Wilson and his times in ebullient and well-written prose. The Moth is the airplane Wilson flew, alone, from England to the Indian border with Nepal despite having little flying experience and with much of the imperial government opposed to his quest. The mountain is the big one, Everest, unconquered at the time, but which Wilson, again with no mountaineering experience, vowed to climb to the summit alone. Caesar manages to brilliantly capture Wilson's epic adventure and how it encapsulates so much of the disillusionment and courageous efforts of the interwar period. Caesar has created a widely appealing and affecting character study, microhistory, story of love and loss, and inquiry into some surprising effects of trauma and personal tragedy.
Library Journal Review
In 1933, Maurice Wilson (1898--1934) took off from England in a biplane with the intention of flying solo to Mt. Everest and then climbing it unsupported. This plan was audacious for multiple reasons, including his inability to fly, lack of mountaineering skills, and that he was forbidden to do so. As journalist and author Caesar tells in this fast-paced narrative, Wilson was a rebel and a World War I veteran who spent the postwar years marrying, divorcing, and traveling extensively. The author describes how, while recuperating from an illness, Wilson read about others taking on Everest and began to see the mountain as a place for "personal and metaphysical rebirth." The book reads like a novel with twists and turns, as Caesar shows how British officials worked to discourage Wilson, who ended up flying to Darjeeling instead of Nepal. Forbidden from leaving Darjeeling, Wilson disguised himself as a Tibetan priest and walked to Everest. He died during his second climbing attempt in 1934. Throughout, Caesar incorporates new information in this historical account, including previously unpublished letters and family documents. VERDICT Wilson has long been a footnote in Everest exploration, but this thorough and fascinating biography will remedy that. For readers of exploration, adventure, and Everest history.--Margaret Atwater-Singer, Univ. of Evansville Lib., IN
Table of Contents
Prologue The World Will Be on Fire | p. xiii |
1 Do I Understand This Madman? | p. 1 |
2 Owing To His Pluck | p. 9 |
3 Exiles in a Strange Country | p. 27 |
4 Good Old Days of Early Freedom | p. 45 |
5 Bullet-Proof Soldier | p. 57 |
6 The Naked Soul | p. 69 |
7 Most Amazing Air Adventure Ever Attempted | p. 85 |
8 He Is Not Repeat Not to Proceed | p. 111 |
9 Adventure Personified | p. 137 |
10 All Pretty | p. 169 |
11 Moorland Grass | p. 187 |
12 Cheerio | p. 197 |
Epilogue | p. 215 |
Acknowledgments | p. 229 |
Notes on Sources | p. 235 |
Notes | p. 239 |
Bibliography | p. 257 |
Image Credits | p. 259 |