"...Satellite images make it look like the glacier that used to flow through it has mostly melted away, but he says that doesn’t tally with what it looks like up there, either. He says no one knows exactly how big the valley really is. Bigger than assumed, in any case. And the mountain, it’s higher.” “Most of the time,” Cécile added. [p.179]
Nick Grevers, travel writer and mountaineer, has survived a terrible accident on the Maudit, a little-climbed peak in the Swiss Alps. His climbing partner Augustin is missing, and Nick's face is so badly injured that he can't speak, can't tell anyone about what really happened up there. He claims, via a scribbled note, that he can't remember: but he remembers everything. And his nurse passes another note to Nick's boyfriend Sam: 'Don’t believe them. It wasn’t an accident.'
Sam is initially repulsed by Nick's injuries, though what drives him out of the hospital and back to America is something that he sees, or thinks he sees, under the bandages. Fortunately, his love for Nick proves stronger than his repulsion, and he returns to Europe. The two decide to confront the memories, the trauma and the oddities, and travel to the village of Grimentz, high in the Alps, in the shadow of the Maudit.
There's a lot going on in this novel: Sam's own past trauma, focussed on a childhood act of arson, and on the myth of Prometheus; Nick's account of the ascent, and what they found there; the black birds that seem to haunt Grimentz, where the villagers are profoundly anti-cat. (Yes, Nick and Sam are accompanied by their cat Ramses, who survives. No apologies for this spoiler.) Some truly chilling scenes, and an ending that is credible conclusion rather than happy resolution. While I didn't find Echo quite as terrifying as Michelle Paver's Thin Air, it was a compelling read, and I'm still thinking about the layers of narrative here.
This is a novel that knows its cultural references. The chapters are titled after horror classics: At The Mountains of Madness; Sleepy Hollow; In the Hills, the Cities; The Turn of the Screw... I have to confess, though, that I nearly stopped reading quite early, put off by Sam's slangy contractions -- 'coulda', 'gonna', and especially 'cuz'. I did warm to him and his narrative voice, perhaps because of his coping mechanism of dark humour.
Fulfils the ‘survival story’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.
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