RaveThe Literary Review (UK)... a strange book ... Praise is due to Ed Caesar for managing to tell this tale so well, because the sheer madness of Wilson’s life would surely have thrown off all but the most sure-footed biographer. Caesar sets about it with fantastic energy and makes use of a marvellous collage of letters, diary entries, poetry, telegrams, interviews and archival iced gems ... Caesar is superb at unpacking Wilson’s manic sense of adventure ... Caesar begins, adopting an awkward second person, a quirk that sometimes hobbles the text ... Perhaps it’s inevitable, given Wilson’s Janus-like nature, that Caesar sometimes seesaws between pathos and bathos in the space of a few sentences ... Alas, Caesar follows Wilson’s lead in terms of first-hand alpine research. He does none ... That’s a shame, because the chapters about Wilson’s airborne adventures really sing as a result of the author’s endeavours, while the sections on the Himalayas feel slightly flat. Perhaps Caesar’s quest for absolute fidelity is misplaced. You don’t need to scale Everest to experience exposure, the crunch of hard snow beneath one’s boots, the rasp of crampons on rock, the ecstatic fatigue at the end of the day: you can do all that in the Cairngorms ... This is, however, a minor gripe given the book’s general excellence. Caesar is to be applauded for giving romantic, adamantine, lion-hearted Maurice Wilson his overdue day in the sun.
