Two Sherpas by Sebastián Martínez Daniell (tr. Jennifer Croft)

Review by Eleanor Updegraff

‘Does Shakespeare leave anything to chance?’ asks a character in Sebastián Martínez Daniell’s Two Sherpas. The implicit answer is, of course, that he does not – and nor, we sense, does Daniell. It’s a bold suggestion for any author to make, yet in this razor-sharp novel about colonialism and human ‘conquest’ of the natural world, the only dizzying heights worth worrying about are to be found on Mount Everest. More, the comparison feels apt: in the tradition of the Bard, Daniell uses a neat cast of characters, a sprinkling of sub-tales and a touch of comedy to create a story far broader than the reader might expect, an acerbic dissection of a tired world order and personal history of two very different individuals.

Poised on the edge of the world’s highest mountain right from the novel’s opening lines, the two titular Sherpas hold tight to the rocks around them as they look down on a fallen client: an Englishman who has slipped and landed on a ledge some metres below. He now ‘lies there Britishly upon the mountain’, forming the lynchpin of the entire novel yet, for all this centrality, maintaining an air of supreme unimportance. As the two Sherpas observe him, wondering how they might stage a rescue — knowing full well they can’t and, quite fleetingly, even permitting the suggestion that nothing about this scene is entirely accidental — Daniell unfolds a story to be viewed from this perspective: the white man lying prone in an environment to which he is alien, his climbing days well and truly behind him.

Narrated in brief chapters (numbered, though in Daniell’s characteristically disruptive fashion a few are titled instead), Two Sherpas interweaves the history of the Sherpa people with early ascents of Everest by British expeditions, the mountain’s gradual occupation by day trippers and inexperienced tourists looking for another box to tick, and the personal stories of two men — the ‘old Sherpa’ and the ‘young Sherpa’. The former has grown up in the shadow of Everest but, for all his skill and ability to read the mountains, dreams of faraway oceans, a place at university, any life but this one. The other, an outsider, is there less by dint of birthright and more by permission of the authorities, a man who betrays in every word ‘his sorrow, his aversion, and his licence’ to be involved in this story. A stand-in for the author? Perhaps. As we know, Daniell leaves nothing to chance.

While the younger Sherpa’s keen perspective is important — particularly the domestic scenes of his childhood and his longing to move forward into a different future — the older Sherpa seems to be slightly more significant. In a close third-person perspective, Daniell transports us from the austere beauty of the mountain, where his sharp prose picks out individual rocks and small but telling details, to the hot streets of a distant seaside city, setting for a transformative moment in the older man’s life. Here, the writing shifts to match the atmosphere, becoming more opaque and laconic, making its points less overtly but still with Daniell’s trademark biting sarcasm. His meandering yet faintly admonishing tone is one that translator Jennifer Croft has captured with exquisite nuance it is often unexpected descriptors or cleverly placed phrases that give this novel its delicious sense of humour. And while the meaning of such scenes isn’t immediately apparent, we find ourselves trusting the narrator when he tells us, ‘you have to enjoy the detour, even at the risk of procrastination’. All will be revealed in the end.

And, after all that delightful procrastination, it largely is, even if — spoiler alert — there is no classic conclusion to the drama unfolding at a snail’s pace on the mountainside. Over the course of 100 chapters, we are dragged back time and again to this scene, to the immobile, alien Englishman who still manages to disrupt the flow of thought and narrative, to the two Sherpas standing on a higher level ‘expecting something… with a repertoire of serene gestures that balance between resignation and doubt’. The dialogue they exchange there turns out to be a scant fifteen lines, yet these words provide the framework for an entire novel with a deep and lasting message, not least about how the balance of the world must be reset, that we find ourselves at a moment of waiting, many of us perhaps about to plunge into the abyss.

Ultimately, however, it isn’t anything the Sherpas say that will prove most important — to this reader, at least. It is (what else?) a line of dialogue written by Shakespeare, the first words of Julius Caesar, proclaimed by the younger Sherpa in a school play. ‘Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!’ he cries. And we know, considering the overfull slopes of Everest, that in neither Shakespeare nor Daniell do these words appear on the page by chance.

Two Sherpas is published by Charco Press, 28th February 2023