Review | Himalaya: A Human History looks beyond the stereotypes harboured by the West

Himalaya: A Human History by Ed Douglas, W.W. Norton & Co. 3/5 stars

“We’re just about to walk off the map,” George Mallory wrote in a 1921 letter from a reconnaissance trip to Everest, the mountain the British explorer would die on while attempting to summit in 1924 (or possibly having done so). Mallory was seeking an elegant phrase to convey his sense of the remoteness of this place, but the idea of the Himalaya as an inaccessible, unknown landscape has long been a trope of Western writing on the mountain range.

In Himalaya: A Human History, mountaineer and writer Ed Douglas attempts to overturn that stereotype. “It’s not that the Himalaya is an intellectual blank on the map: there’s a wealth of scholarship on every aspect of life there,” he writes. “It’s more that myths and legends about the Himalaya continue to dominate popular culture, insulating the West from using that scholarship to create a wider understanding of the region.”

Douglas’ ambition with this book is to bridge the consequent gap of understanding, and people this “blank” land­scape with those who have lived in, ruled, fought over, visited, traded with and, yes, climbed mountains in, the Himalaya.

As a result, the narrative scope of this 500-plus-page book is, chronologically and geographically, hugely ambi­tious. The mountain range covers 600,000 sq km, a long and narrow curve arcing across five countries: China, Nepal, India, Bhutan and Pakistan.

The landscape may be dominated by the sawteeth of the range’s high peaks – 10 of the world’s 14 “eight-thousanders”, mountains more than 8,000 metres above sea level, can be found here – but the diversity of the landscape is underappreciated: as Douglas notes, variation in altitude mimics, in abbreviated form, variation in latitude, so with “a few kilometres of altitude gain, you can travel the equivalent of thousands of kilo­metres in latitude, from the tropics to the polar ice caps”.