There is no denying that Sir Ranulph Fiennes has enjoyed, or rather endured, an extraordinary life. The explorer has traversed both poles, crossed the Sahara and ran seven marathons on seven continents in seven days, the latter at 59 and just 16 weeks after a double-heart bypass. In the process, he has also raised almost £20 million for charity, lost fingers to frostbite while attempting a solo trip to the North Pole, and almost perished countless times.
This collection celebrates a dozen of Fiennes’s greatest adventures as he celebrates his 80th birthday, from his earliest expeditions, when still a serving member of the Royal Scots Greys, the same British army regiment commanded by his late father in the second World War, to his three-year Transglobe Expedition, the first circumpolar journey around the earth.
Many of these writings have previously appeared in the explorer’s 25-plus other books, so those who have read A Talent For Trouble or Mad, Bad & Dangerous To Know can probably skip this without missing much. If you haven’t gorged on Fiennes’s particular brand of heroic endurance porn before, however, this will form a decent introduction, although the fact that it skips across continents and time frames does leave the reader crying out for a little more context on occasion.
After a while, the specifics of each journey become a little tedious, as Fiennes explains his way around yet another deadly crevasse, and it takes something truly shocking to blast the reader out of our reverie, such as his assertion that approximately 10 per cent of climbers who summit Everest never make it back down, making Fiennes’s 2009 achievement, at the age of 65, all the more remarkable.
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There are too few insights into Fiennes’s own personality, bar a remarkable capacity to survive hellish conditions. Only occasionally do we glimpse beneath the stiff upper lip to the man beneath, from his difficulty in conquering lifelong vertigo on the deadly north face of the Eiger, to his confession that he fronted up £6,000, 75 per cent of his life savings, on a Land Rover for his 1969 journey up the Nile, much to the chagrin of his mother “who could see no end to my lunatic approach to life and my failure to settle down to a worthwhile profession”. Thankfully, he never did.
