After the Crash: And other stories by David Pickford (Epub)

Description

David Pickford’s After the Crash and other stories is a collection of nine short stories that will take you from The Door to the River to the wildest reaches of the Sahara in The Jahannam’s Lair; on board Twenty Red Twenty, the first manned mission to Mars, and into the labyrinth of Cain and Abel’s psycho-drama in The End of the Past. Five of the stories compose a series of vividly descriptive episodes of mountain literature, where the perilous conditions of the adventurous life are explored and questioned, extreme skiers are tested to the limit, an alpinist suddenly finds himself marooned high in the Himalaya after a plane crash, the border between myth and reality is blurred during a long solo climb, and a tragic mystery is solved by a lone climber who reassembles the lost pieces of The Map of Thunder Canyon. The remaining four stories range from the visionary dreams of a child to the ideology of a Waziristani jihadist. Controversial, poetic, melancholy, original and thought provoking, each story is revealed in just enough detail to let your imagination conceive what might happen next.

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⭐ Most of the stories are set in wild places, with characters facing extraordinary challenges. Such places test commitment and character, make us weigh who and what matters to us, and offer possibilities for grace and transcendence. Risk makes the outcome of each story uncertain, and gives tremendous narrative drive: we have to know what happens next. Who could read a description of an avalanche where the ‘downdraft from the snow cloud was so powerful it stalled both the chopper’s engines’, and not want to know what happened to two skiers whose fates we’ve come to care about?The range of settings is fabulous. To give just a few examples, we follow the sole survivor of an air crash in the Himalayas as he tries to escape from a cirque of high mountains; the battle of wits between an American drone pilot and a Jihadi fighter; a climber trying to make the first descent of Thunder Canyon’, an impossibly deep and dangerous ravine that has claimed the lives of three Japanese mountaineers; the tribulations of the first manned mission to Mars, faced with an attack by a Russian missile (wonderfully entertaining and satirical); and the story of two extreme skiers, male and female, avalanched in a steep couloir. Contrasted with these is a final story about two brothers and their different gifts and fates, which is hauntingly moving.David Pickford’s evocation of landscapes is exceptional. Precision of description and brilliance of imagery made the stories almost hyper-real as I read them. For example, when the climber trying to descend Thunder Canyon looked at the map, a ‘cauldron of twisting contours swirled in front of him’, and, later, ‘their sheer density confounded him’. As he pulled down an abseil rope, the retaining walls of the canyon ‘echoed with the whistle of the cord as it fell through space’. In the title story ‘Crash’, a glacier ‘spiralled up and away to the east, gleaming like a snakeskin in the sun’. And in ‘Last Exit from Hotel Noir’ snow fell in ‘fat, lazy flakes’, resulting in a couloir ‘full of powder as light and effervescent as champagne froth’. These descriptions are just perfect.It would not do this collection justice to typecast David Pickford as belonging to a narrow genre of climbing fiction: he deserves a far wider readership. And, as well as that, I felt some of his stories would work very well as film, TV or radio pieces. (I hope he’s retained these rights).He reminds me most of the celebrated Australian novelist Tim Winton, with his stories of remote Western Australia and the wonderful evocations of surfing in books like ‘Breath’. I look forward with much anticipation to what David Pickford writes next.

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