The Angry Mountain

There are adventure novels, and then there are Hammond Innes novels, which tend to feel as though they were written by a man who had personally inspected the terrain, distrusted comfort, and regarded danger as an excellent structural principle for fiction. The Angry Mountain, published here in a 1970 Fontana Books edition, is exactly the kind of title that promises hardship, menace, geography with opinions, and human beings making brave or foolish decisions in places where nature is unlikely to offer sympathy.

And what a title it is. The Angry Mountain does not bother with ambiguity. This is not A Slightly Irritated Hill. This is a mountain, and it is angry, which immediately suggests that the landscape itself may be one of the novel’s chief antagonists. Innes was very good at that sort of thing. He understood that real adventure does not happen in blank, interchangeable scenery. It happens in places that matter: mountains, seas, ice, deserts, remote frontiers, difficult countries where the weather alone could invalidate your plans before breakfast. His settings are never decorative. They are active participants in the trouble.

Originally published during the war years, and still potent in this later paperback form, The Angry Mountain carries that classic Innes blend of urgency, movement and moral pressure. He was never merely a writer of derring-do. Beneath the action, there is always strain: people tested by extreme circumstances, loyalties under pressure, decisions made with too little time and too much at stake. He writes the kind of fiction in which a landscape can become a moral theatre, forcing the characters to reveal whether they are brave, desperate, loyal, weak, cunning or simply doomed by geography.

There is something distinctly satisfying about Hammond Innes as a phenomenon. He belongs to that sturdy tradition of British adventure writing where the prose is brisk, the stakes are serious, and the reader is expected to find mountains, coastlines, sabotage, war, escape and endurance inherently interesting without the help of ironic self-commentary every third paragraph. He writes as though peril is enough. Quite right too. A mountain in wartime need not apologise for being dramatic.

The wartime setting gives the book extra weight. Innes was particularly good at making conflict feel lived-in rather than merely staged. The danger is not abstract. It is physical, immediate, and tied to the larger realities of occupation, resistance, survival and the terrifying inconvenience of war in difficult country. One imagines cliffs, villages, passes, fear, movement by night, and the constant awareness that both men and landscape may turn against you. This is adventure fiction with grit under its fingernails.

There is also a lovely irony in the way books like this now sit so neatly on shelves. Once, they would have delivered readers into urgent worlds of escape and high tension; now they rest politely between other paperbacks, looking almost domestic. But open the covers and the old machinery still works: the sense of exposure, the hard edges of place, the pressure of events. Good adventure fiction ages rather well because danger, unlike fashion, requires very little updating.

This Good copy has the honest appeal of a paperback that has likely already given one or two readers a highly satisfactory excursion into stress, hardship and dramatic topography. A good adventure paperback ought to look at least faintly seasoned. Too pristine, and it seems untested. This one has the respectable air of a book that understands its duties.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, whose name continues to libel its own stock, this is a fine find for readers of classic adventure fiction, wartime suspense, and novels in which the setting is as formidable as any villain. The Angry Mountain offers exactly what Hammond Innes did so well: danger, motion, endurance, and the strong possibility that survival will require more than luck. Which, really, is what one wants from a proper mountain.

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