The Eiger Obsession: Facing the Mountain That Killed My Father
By John Harlin III, Simon & Schuster, 2007

      In a recent review I discussed Doug Crandell’s memoir, The All-American Industrial Motel, in which the college-educated author attempts to enter his father’s working-class world. John Harlin’s memoir, The Eiger Obsession, is also centered on the confrontation between a son and his father’s world, even if the worlds in question are, literally, based in entirely different geographies. The results are different, too. Unlike Crandell, who pursues his father’s lifestyle only to find ultimately that he belongs elsewhere, Harlin spends his life trying to distance himself from what was important to his father.

      Harlin’s book is divided roughly in half: the first half recounts the eventful, if short, life of his father; and the second half concerns itself with the author’s own struggle with his father’s weighty legacy. Harlin’s father, also named John, was a famous mountaineer. The son of an airline executive, the elder Harlin had an early life of privilege. As a boy, he was a world traveler, handsome and athletic, charismatic and charming. There seemed to be nothing that he couldn’t accomplish. He married, had two children and boasted of an enviable job as the pilot of a fighter-bomber in the U.S. Air Force. What he really loved, however, was climbing mountains, and he spent every spare minute scaling peaks. When his commitment to the Air Force was fulfilled, he settled in Switzerland with his family, where he could be close to his beloved Alps.

      The mountaineer made his name in the testosterone-soaked world of European alpinists by proving himself on climbing routes throughout the Alps, but his obsession was the North Face of the Eiger, a notorious near-vertical wall that rises more than 6,000 feet above the highest human habitation. The North Face had claimed the lives of many climbers and had not been successfully climbed until 1938. The elder Harlin first climbed the face in 1962, but he was determined to establish a new “direct route,” a path straight up the face that would tackle every obstacle in the way, as opposed to the easier, more circuitous route. In 1966, Harlin died on his direct route – which would soon be called the “John Harlin Route” – just a short climb from the summit.

      John Harlin III, Johnny, was nine years old when his father died. He was an avid and talented skier who did not particularly share his father’s fixation on climbing. That would change as the boy grew older and found that mountains were in his blood. By the time he was an adult, the shadow of the Eiger hung over him, and he gradually realized that he would one day have to climb the mountain on which his father had died. When in 2004, a producer approached him with the idea of making an IMAX film about his return to the Eiger, Harlin knew the irresistible opportunity had arrived.

      Harlin III does not depict his father in a particularly appealing light. Self-absorbed and arrogant, Harlin II was the kind of man who exaggerated (if not outright fabricated) his accomplishments and tolerated nothing less than suicidal devotion in his climbing partners. He saw his family as a hindrance to his climbing career, and his children were an especially irksome anchor. When six-year-old Johnny learned to ski, his father had no interest in his accomplishments until the boy was good enough to keep up with the old man on the slopes. Harlin followed his wife, an aspiring biologist, to her teaching job in a Swiss mountain village where he took a position as the school’s physical education director, a job that was a convenient cover for his own forays into the mountains. Apparently more interested in his own adventures than in the safety or education of his students, he led his students on dangerous treks. He cloaked his adrenaline addiction in vague pseudo-philosophy, putting together an unpublished manuscript entitled Introspection Through Adventure. Yet he became a legend in the because-it’s-there school of European mountain climbing – primarily, one must assume, because of his good looks, athletic skill and stoic machismo – which held that death was the ultimate thrill, and an unwillingness to give one’s life in the quest for adventure was beyond contempt.

      The younger Harlin approaches mountain climbing from a more mature, less narcissistic angle. His family – his wife and young daughter – are more important to him than any peak, and especially after he comes horrifically close to tragedy in the mountains he has no patience for the notion of death as adventure. The constant specter of his father’s legend nags him, but his own addiction to climbing is lighter, as he seems more like a college boy obsessed with video games than an egomaniac with a death wish. Most significantly – and one gets the sense that Harlin himself may not realize this point – by channeling his love of adventure into a successful writing and publishing career, he has outpaced his father. The elder Harlin, perhaps because of his unbending egocentrism, was never able to translate his climbing into wider accomplishments.

      The Eiger Obsession, despite its broad overtones of father-son relationships, will appeal primarily to fans of mountain climbing. If you don’t already know all about couloirs, Jumars and belays, you’re unlikely to be enthralled by the blow-by-blow descriptions of the elder Harlin’s climbs, and you’re even less likely to understand why the man is a legend in the arcane world of Alpine climbing. Harlin III is a friendly and energetic writer, but he writes from the vantage point of an enthusiast – and his book does little to engage a nonspecialist. A climber might be able to make sense of it all, but for the rest of us, it is easier to comprehend the author’s feelings of abandonment and resentment toward his father than it is to understand his obsession with following in the old man’s footsteps.

Copyright 2007 Ad Media Inc.