ASPIRING: Mountain climbing is no cure for middle-age
Kieran Kelly
Macmillan, pbk, $40
Review by Philip Somerville
I approached this book with a little trepidation because I feared being subjected to a self-indulgent know-it-all Aussie.
I suspected dollops of phoney self-deprecation mixed with over-the-top descriptions of the drama and the dangers.
Kelly is one of those executive-class Australians now common in the popular mountain zones of New Zealand.
They love, not surprisingly, the contrasts with their homeland and the challenge this country provides.
And they are proud of what they achieve.
But while Kelly does, indeed, lay on thick the perils of climbing Mt Aspiring, his story caught my attention from the first page and I read it quickly in just two sessions.
Sure, I was predisposed to find common ground, being about the same age and last year finally fulfilling a lifelong aim to climb Otago's premier peak.
Interestingly, though, our experience in the mountains, our upbringings, our motivations, our characters and our reactions to the climb are all different.
Kelly runs parallel narratives.
The reader is pitched between the detail and tension of the climb itself, his childhood and his recent family circumstances.
He was taunted as a bastard in rural New South Wales, spent a traumatic interlude in an orphanage and felt rejected by a distant stepfather.
Then, with the last of his three daughters approaching the end of her secondary school years, he attempts to fill a looming vacuum in his life and to live out, in a small way, dreams spurred by his boyhood reading of mountaineering books.
The climb proves to be far more than a physical ordeal as Kelly confronts his demons and doubts - and the results are anything but triumphant.
Kelly flounders physically and emotionally and comes to question his own adequacy as a father.
Intriguing, too, is his relationship with his Wanaka guide, Anton Wopereis.
While Kelly at times hates his guide for what Kelly sees as his detachment, his bluntness and lack of encouragement, Kelly concludes that Wopereis would have been his first choice for any subsequent climb, the best person to keep him alive.
The guide's death on Mt Cook in January this year adds poignancy to the story.
The local connections are further enhanced by the use of two chapter introduction quotes from Men Aspiring, by the late Paul Powell of Dunedin.
Kelly, also the author of two books on adventures across Australia's desert, has a slick, sharp style which he exploits for effective emotional impact.
The result is powerful, easy to read and full of interest, particularly for us middle-aged men.
Philip Somerville is ODT editorial manager.
