You are tent-bound in the mountains, in a storm. Time to read a good book. Will it be British mountaineer George Mallory's choice: Shakespeare? Or Dostoevsky, the favourite of another mountain-loving Briton, Bill Tilman. Heavy stuff, both of them. For a lighter read, try W E Bowman's hilarious mountaineering satire, The Ascent of Rum Doodle. First published in 1956, Rum Doodle is now on The Guardian's list of '1000 Novels Everyone Must Read' and among Colorado-based publisher Chessler's '100 Best Mountaineering Books'. It has been called 'an epic', 'Homeric',' inspiring' and 'very, very funny'.
A team of fictitious 1950s-era British climbers set out to climb the world's highest peak, the 40,000½ foot Rum Doodle, in a country called Yogistan. As you read the book, you will recognise Yogistan as a thinly veiled Nepal. And, once you finish, you will remember Binder, the book's narrator and expedition leader – naïve, always rationalising, and clueless; Prone, the doctor – always ill; Jungle, the route finder – always lost; and Constant, diplomat and linguist – always arguing. There is also Wish, the expedition scientist; Burley, head of the commissariat; and the photographer, Shute, who never actually succeeds in taking any pictures.
After the voyage out from London to Bombay, the team reaches Yogistan at the chaotic Chaikosi railhead where they engage 3000 Yogistani porters led by Bing, Bang and Bong, and the avoid-at-all-costs expedition cook, Pong. The intrepid Yogistanis speak in burps and belches, smoke stunk, and eat what can only be called gunk. Binder (which is actually a UK brand of gaseous butter beans) does his best to tell the story. With unbridled understatement, for example, he describes a great obstacle that his gang must surmount: 'The North Wall is a sheer glass-like face of ice,' he writes, 'broken only by rock, snowfields, ice-pinnacles, crevasses, bergschrunds, ridges, gulleys, scree, chimneys, cracks, slabs, gendarmes, Les Dames Anglaises, needles, strata, gneiss and gabbro … A formidable obstacle, and one to daunt the hearts of a disunited party supported by mediocre porters …'
Along the way, he meditates on the number 153, contemplates the seat of Constant's pants, worries about his men's love lives, and touts the inestimable value of a stock of 'medicinal' champagne. When his men fall into a crevasse, the bubbly keeps their spirits up until rescued by Bing and Bong.