By Jon Krakauer

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

I don’t know how to feel about ‘Into Thin Air’.

‘Into Thin Air’ is Jon Krakauer’s memoir of the 1996 attempt on Everest which resulted in the deaths of five climbers. Krakauer, who is an experienced climber and mountaineer, was commissioned by Outside magazine to write a piece on a guided summit. He went up with a company called Adventure Consultants, led by celebrated climber and guide Rob Hall. During their summit attempt, they were surprised by a blizzard. Ultimately, four members of the Adventure Consultants group perished on the mountain, as well as the lead of another climbing service, Scott Fischer. Fischer was also a famous mountaineer and he ran a company called Mountain Madness.

Krakauer’s role in the disaster is complicated, about which fact he is very forthright. He was a customer, not a guide, and so not responsible for the lives on that climb. However, in his hypoxic state, he wrongly ID’ed another climber and asserted that the man had made it safely back to camp. This turned out not to be true, and that other climber died, a fact for which Krakauer holds himself partly responsible.

It’s natural, when a disaster happens, to look for someone to blame. Krakauer avoids doing this outright, which is admirable, I think. He steadfastly insists that everyone associated with both climber-led expeditions was on the mountain with the best of intentions, and that the intense conditions and lack of oxygen on top of the mountain compromise anyone’s ability to make decisions.

On the other hand, he does spend a significant portion of time making sidewise, blame-y comments along the lines of: “It’s hard to know why such an experienced guide would make such an irresponsible decision”, “We can only speculate about why he decided to ignore the turn-around time. Whatever his reasons, the results were catastrophic.” Those comments may technically be blameless, but they are also judgmental. They leave the reader with the distinct impression that Krakauer has opinions, if not about who is to blame, then at least about who made the situation worse.

And by the way, that might be OK: he was there, he’s allowed to have opinions about something that happened to him. The difficulty comes from the fact that his memoir has become, in the popular imagination, a matter of fact*. It was huge bestseller; it was adapted into a movie. Krakauer’s authorial skill and confidence have ensured that his account is the account.

*It is worth noting that several other members of the two expeditions also wrote memoirs, but none of them achieved the popularity or staying power of Krakauer’s.

And that might be a problem, because a convincing narrator is not necessarily an honest one, or even an accurate one. I do not mean to imply either that Krakauer is wrong or lying – I only mean that I cannot tell whether or not he is. And because he is such a good storyteller, I get caught up in the narrative and forget to think critically.

Krakauer is both a great narrator AND a convincing witness, and that is a powerful and dangerous combination. He delivers his tale with confidence, clarity, and excellent pacing, while infusing it with a first person perspective that is characterized by humility and self-examination.

It’s a really winning combination. The story itself is deeply compelling already – Krakauer’s writing craft turns it into a page turner, which begs the question: should it be?

I’ll admit it: I really liked ‘Into Thin Air’, both times I’ve read it. I think it’s a fabulous book: it’s well-written, it does a excellent job explaining and clarifying, and the story it tells is absolutely gripping. I am not a huge one for stories of men in the wilderness, but ‘Into Thin Air’ is incredibly entertaining.

And I’m not faulting Krakauer, at all. On the contrary, I would consider myself a Krakauer fan. I’ve read multiple of his books; I’ve enjoyed and admired everything of his that I have ever read. He belongs to that category of author who, when I see their name on a book, it makes me way more likely to read it.

But I read Krakauer like he’s a novelist: all my critical faculties go to sleep, I get lost in the story and just go with the flow. It’s fun that way, and he has the strength to carry you along. But he’s not a novelist – he’s a reporter, and a memoirist. We ought, surely, to be applying the same critical lens to his writing that we would to a newspaper piece.

Or maybe not. I might be overthinking it: maybe ‘Into Thin Air’ is a story, a book meant to entertain me. Yes, it technically happened to some people, but it didn’t happen to me, and the truth is that I will never know what happened on the top of that mountain. Perhaps I can relax my attachment to reality and just enjoy a book.

That is a real possibility, by the way: that I ought to just relax. It’s ok to just be entertained sometimes – not everything needs to be distilled for Meaning. I don’t need to tie myself in knots trying to figure out how to responsibly enjoy a first-person narrative.

I have no personal stake in how accurate ‘Into Thin Air’ is, whether Krakauer is fair or right or not. That is unknown and unknowable to me. In fact, I don’t really care how accurate it is, and that is precisely what worries me. I have been lulled into critical suspension, persuaded to just go with the flow and be entertained.

But I do think that there is a difference, in this regard, between fiction and non-fiction. As compelling a book as ‘Into Thin Air’ is, simply from a plot perspective, it describes a real event that happened to real people. We may forget facts, but we remember stories, and when something is memorable and compelling, we are more likely to remember it. Over time, it becomes true for us, whether or not it should be. So, in my opinion, we have a responsibility to pay attention when facts are presented to us as story. And ‘Into Thin Air’ is the ultimate facts-as-story book.

Maybe I’m just trying to remind myself that it is OK to love a story while still reading it with one eye open. I don’t have to solve everything. ‘Into Thin Air’ is a great read. It’s a really good book, whether or not it’s a True Story. Perhaps that’s enough.