... what a story ... How has this story slipped into a crevasse in the glacier of time, lying frozen and largely forgotten for so long? Perhaps the world is better now at embracing eccentricity and – (not too much of a) spoiler alert! – failure than it was. Where once he was dismissed as a madman and an embarrassment, now Wilson can be properly celebrated. In another kind of adventure in which chaps took themselves to the most unforgiving places, Donald Crowhurst’s story is a more intriguing one than that of Robin Knox-Johnston, who succeeded where Crowhurst failed. Perhaps Wilson is to Everest and aviation what Crowhurst is to sailing alone around the world ... this is a personal book. Not only does [Caesar] set out almost obsessively to get to understand Wilson and his motivation, he also wants to understand his own almost-obsession ... Wilson’s story is bonkers, but also beautiful. The profile Caesar builds is compelling, colourful and warm – of a complex, contradictory man with admirable self-belief and a healthy disregard for class boundaries and national borders. The boy from Bradford for whom Mount Everest’s icy peak was a shining light, the flame to which the Moth was inexorably drawn. And that’s a story that rarely ends well.
This bonkers ripping yarn of derring-don’t is a hell of a ride. It is an eye-opener into the mind of a daredevil for those of us whose idea of risky business would be, as Victoria Wood put it, to step on to an escalator in a soft-soled shoe ... Caesar dashes off Wilson’s formation with journalistic panache, neatly colouring in the outlines of his background and war service, with succinct digressions on shellshock, the economic development of Bradford, and Wilson’s survival of the war ... scrupulously researched — Caesar has not just tramped the fields of Wijtschate, but looped the loop in a plane like Wilson’s — but with no damage done to the flow of the story. (Although I scratched my head over what the book Sexual Life in Ancient Greece was doing in the bibliography) ... The story of how a man could be driven to try to scale this 'giant’s tooth made of rock and ice' has a built-in excitement, but Caesar enhances the flavour with extracts from Wilson’s letters to the third woman in his life, Enid Evans, and from his diary. Wilson’s voice is as characterful and funny as we might expect of someone with this much 'pluck' ... Maurice Wilson was a one-off, quite outside the ordinary run of people, and The Moth and the Mountain is a 'sorry, beautiful, melancholy, crazy' tribute to a man who, like a leaf in autumn, burnt brightest just before he fell.
This tale of a 'driven and defiant' amateur and his dream is true and presented with brio by Ed Caesar ... The author is a talented storyteller with a flair for detail. His subject’s absurdity is not lost on him. Yet Mr. Caesar also displays a handsome refusal to laugh at anyone’s dreams ... Wilson’s story is an entry less in the annals of mountaineering than in the Book of Life. That such an extraordinary person even existed is cause for celebration ... To give every detail of Wilson’s tenacious struggle upon Everest would be to spoil an outstanding book ... returns readers to a romantic era when Everest was terra nova rather than an experience to be bought. It remained unvanquished. From the first page we know Wilson never stood a chance. But no one ever made a more dashing attempt.
... 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.
Ed Caesar’s irresistible book The Moth and the Mountain tells two essential stories. Its primary story is an account of Maurice Wilson’s ill-fated 1934 attempt to be the first solo climber to summit Mt. Everest ... The important second story Ed Caesar tells is about his own obsession with solving the mysteries of Maurice Wilson. What gave Wilson his bold determination? ... The Moth and the Mountain has many, many riveting moments of storytelling and insight, and yet, some answers to the mystery of Maurice Wilson remain shrouded in the mists of Mt. Everest.
Ed Caesar, the author of a fine book on the quest to run a two-hour marathon, has long been captivated by Wilson, and in The Moth and the Mountain, he writes beautifully about the attractions and problems of researching his life ... A historian might try to construct a biography of such a figure through a deep analysis of the surrounding culture — using it to inform speculation on the hero’s worldview ... But Caesar — bred in the fact-checking tradition of The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer — will not be drawn into speculation. He insists that we cannot know what Wilson really believed, and that much of what Wilson says about his spiritual conversion may be untrue ... Caesar is a fine writer, but he has not managed to find the art to resurrect a man whose final act is so bereft of context or explanation.
... engrossing ... [Caesar] has delivered a lovely book despite the paucity of some source material ... Caesar skillfully sketches out the early missions, often involving men who fought on the Western Front. The thirst for adventure was a patriotic duty, he writes, but also an attempt to find enlightenment for these men by testing themselves in the most unforgiving places on Earth ... Credit to Caesar for rescuing such a splendid tale of an engaging maverick from the footnotes of Everest history.
... readers in the mood for an eccentric adventure story will be captivated by this fast-moving account ... Confessing to a near obsession with Wilson's story, and aided by the discovery of a cache of documents in the possession of his subject's septuagenarian great-nephew, Caesar is a deeply sympathetic biographer. He's ferreted out provocative tidbits about Wilson's personal life and reflects on the toll Wilson's brief service in some of the bloodiest fighting of the Great War took on the second half of that life. Whether viewed as an inspiring tribute to one brave man's indomitable spirit, or a chronicle of sheer madness, what Caesar calls the 'whole sorry, beautiful, melancholy, crazy tale' is one of truth that often seems far stranger than fiction.
The book reads like a novel with twists and turns ... Throughout, Caesar incorporates new information in this historical account, including previously unpublished letters and family documents ... Wilson has long been a footnote in Everest exploration, but this thorough and fascinating biography will remedy that. For readers of exploration, adventure, and Everest history.
Caesar passionately tracked down this elusive character through scant sources and engagingly depicts Wilson and his times in ebullient and well-written prose ... Caesar manages to brilliantly capture Wilson’s epic adventure and how it encapsulates so much of the disillusionment and courageous efforts of the interwar period. Caesar has created a widely appealing and affecting character study, microhistory, story of love and loss, and inquiry into some surprising effects of trauma and personal tragedy.
... [a] loopy, sometimes labored narrative ... Caesar has an unfortunate habit of addressing himself in the second person as he recounts how he came to the long-forgotten (though documented) story ... Still, he turns in a multifaceted tale full of learned speculation—at least one climber claims that Wilson made the summit—and intriguing minor mysteries. It’s not Into Thin Air, but Caesar’s story has plenty of virtues all the same ... A welcome addition to the library of oddball adventurers.
... evocative ... Caesar skillfully explores the political, intellectual, and spiritual movements of the era, as well as Wilson’s psychic scars from the war. Though his climb ended in tragedy, Wilson inspired Reinhold Messner to make the first solo ascent of Everest in 1980. This entertaining, well-researched chronicle is a valuable addition to mountaineering history.
