The Ice Soldier
A Novel
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
One man's quiet life is shattered when he's forced to confront terrifying secrets he'd thought buried high in the Italian Alps
The New York Times has called his work "daring and remarkably assured," The Washington Post has dubbed it "shamelessly entertaining," and the Los Angeles Times claims it renders "the raw elegence of the human experience itself." Now Paul Watkins returns with his most engaging and atmospheric novel yet. The ice soldier of the title is one William Bromley. Following a disasterous turn in the Alps during the Second World War, William has constructed for himself a quiet and lonely life as a history teacher at a London boarding school. For different reasons, he and his best friend Stanley have given up the world of mountaineering for a more peaceful existence. Peaceful that is, until a soldier from William's mountain regiment reappears, tragedy occurs, and a terrible bargain is made. Slowly, the horrifying events of the war come back to William, and he realizes what he must do. He is to confront his worst fears and memories by returning to the glaciers and peaks of northern Italy.
The little-known role of the army's mountaineer corps comes brilliantly to life in this story of men pushed to the limits of endurance and survival, and haunted by the ghosts of war.
"Paul Watkins is without question one of the most gifted writers of his generation." —Tobias Wolff
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When asked why he wanted to climb Everest, British mountaineer George Mallory famously replied "Because it's there." For William Bromley, narrator of this vivid, elegant novel, the reasons for scaling Carton's Rock, a formidable pinnacle in the Italian Alps, are more complex. By 1950, his WWII service as a Royal Marines mountaineering instructor behind him, Bromley has settled down. He teaches at a London boy's school, he reads and on Fridays he gets drunk at the club with his best friend, Stanley. The resurfacing of an old climbing partner a participant in a disastrous wartime mission, which Bromley led, to install a radio transmitter atop Carton's Rock triggers guilty memories. And when Stanley's uncle Henry Carton, a renowned former climber, commits suicide and asks, as his last request, that his body be taken to the top of his namesake mountain, Bromley, seeking absolution, sets off with Stanley for the Alps. The final third of the novel details their gripping journey as they confront avalanche, hidden crevasses, and lost gear and food, all the while lugging Carton's coffin up the glacier. Watkins (The Forger; Archangel) is fluent in "the languages of rock and cloud and ice," and his empathy creates a clear portrait of a man refusing to be undone by the past.
