Into Thin Air

Distraught over a climbing accident during World War II, a veteran must return to a deadly peak.

THE ICE SOLDIER

A Novel

By Paul Watkins

Henry Holt. 341 pp. $25

The small moments in history sometimes provide us with a grander view of the world we inhabit. Few contemporary novelists know this better than Paul Watkins. In his new book, The Ice Soldier , he once again digs into the rich earth of our almost forgotten past and emerges with another intriguing tale, this time with mixed results.

The ice soldier of the story is William Bromley. When the book opens, it is 1950, and William is teaching at St. Vernon's, a small private boys' school in London. He spends his days in the classroom, seemingly content in his unassuming life, and meets his friend Stanley at the Montague Club every Friday night, where they get slightly drunk and talk about whatever new girl Stanley is seeing at the moment. They call themselves the "Society of Former Mountaineers," a name that mockingly refers to their Oxford days, when they spent summers traveling from the Scottish Highlands to Chamonix in the Alps, looking for the next summit to conquer. The young men were inspired by Stanley's flamboyant uncle, Henry Carton, a famous mountaineer who had a peak named after him and now runs the Climber's Club in London.

When World War II broke out, William had enlisted and become a climbing instructor for the Royal Marines. Toward the end of the war, he was asked to assemble his Oxford pals to climb Carton Peak and set up a radio transmitter to stop Allied planes from crashing in the Alps. But the Germans had been tipped off, and the mission ended in disaster. Only William and one other man came home alive.

Now, six years later, the death of his friends haunts William, and he trudges through life without risk or love, his existence sad and lonely and dull. Only when Henry Carton dies is William given a second assignment that will change his life yet again: He and Stanley are asked to take the dead man's coffin to the top of Carton Peak, a dangerous climb that has been done only once before -- by Carton himself. The two men accept the challenge -- Stanley to prove his worth to the woman he loves, William to assuage the overwhelming guilt that has plagued his life.

Watkins is very good at elegant detail, and he offers beautiful descriptions of the mountains: "The crevasse spread wide beneath the hole, like the inside of an egg on whose thin crust I was now lying. The central part of the cavern disappeared into darkness. It seemed to reach into the belly of the earth. . . . I could make out the brittle teeth of icicles hanging down from the roof of the cavern. The snow along the sides was frothed into huge mushrooms." The account of William and Stanley's climb up Carton Peak with the coffin is grippingly told, especially when they are caught in a blistering storm and forced to take shelter in the shell of an airplane that had crashed during the war.

Watkins brings to life a time when mountaineers were the world's great adventurers, regaled in the newspapers and toasted in the streets, as brave and bold as today's astronauts. One wishes for more of this, but the structure of the novel is sometimes awkward (for no apparent reason, we get the same important flashback twice), and too many cinematic conveniences push the story along. Both William and Stanley fall in love, but the women are so lightly drawn that their characters seem almost invisible.

Unlike earlier Watkins novels, such as The Promise of Light , which was paced like a runaway train, or In the Blue Light of African Dreams , where the spoken words were as splendid and salty as the Legionnaires who used them, The Ice Soldier is strangely flat. Too much is revealed in great blocks of exposition, and we get little subtlety in character development; layers of a life should be shaken loose gently and allowed to drop away like falling leaves, not sent crashing to the ground like fresh-cut timber.

When The Ice Soldier succeeds, it does so because Watkins is such a natural storyteller and because his grasp of historical detail is so impressive. When the novel doesn't quite reach the lofty heights of the mountains it is ascending, we can still take a deep breath and enjoy the view. ·

Bruce Murkoff is the author of the novel "Waterborne."