The Eiger Sanction by Trevanian
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Third time I’ve read The Eiger Sanction, first time reviewing. And both times I reread the novel, I’d forgotten the “twist” endings. Most likely because it’s a bit anti-climactic. Or because I’ve never written a review for it before, and I tend to forget things easily. I’d make a lousy spy.
Actually, Jonathan Hemlock isn’t a spy, he’s an assassin. An assassin who likes fine art, his solitude, hates people, his job. You know, every assassin trope you can think of. Or cliché, if you want to be mean. (The difference between a “trope” and a “cliché” is whether you like what you see or not). We’ll forgive Trevanian for this, though, since the book was written back in the early 70s.
You remember the 70s, don’t you? When racism and sexism where just part of the picture. When a man could sit in a chair gazing at a mountain, and a woman he’d never met before would simply bend over in front of him to signal she was eager to have sex. You know, the good old days.
Trope, cliché: more like male fantasy. But again, we let it go, for just as Herman Melville had to hide his essay about the whaling industry inside a revenge novel, so too does Trevanian wrap his love of mountain climbing in, well, a kind of revenge novel.
Yes, I compared Trevanian to Melville. And why not. The novel uses the word “insouciance” twice. It describes an un-climbed mountain as retaining its “hymen.” Trevanian himself once said, “I read Proust, but not much else written in the 20th century.” For crying out loud, he uses a one-name name, like Cher or Madonna. Or Voltaire. Or Ludacris.
Rodney Whitaker (Trevanian’s real name) claimed that The Eiger Sanction was a spoof. I’m not sure how a man who doesn’t read books written before 1901 knows enough about man-fantasy assassination-thriller-revenge novels to spoof then, but, benefit of the doubt and all that. If you want a decent little vacation novel, and have access to a dictionary, The Eiger Sanction is a goodread.