High America

There was a point on the first page of Andes&nbspthat made me freeze in horror at what the remaining 500 pages might contain. It wasn&rsquot landslide, a volcanic eruption, climbers succumbing to hypoxia, nor popular culture&rsquos best-known Andean tragedy &mdash the Uruguayan rugby team who survived a plane crash and wished they hadn&rsquot. Jacobs says that his interest in the range had been stimulated by stories of his grandfather who had worked there as a railway engineer before World War II. Hell, I thought, it&rsquos going to be a &lsquoJourney into the Past&rsquo, the &lsquoJourney into Oneself&rsquo. I&rsquod prefer a long walk off a short pier to one of those. Thankfully, I was dead wrong. Jacobs&rsquo journey is informed not by soupy family anecdotes, but the writings of authors and explorers who&rsquove been there before him. Accounts of Alexander Humboldt&rsquos eighteenth-century expeditions and the travels of Christopher Isherwood are oft-quoted.

Jacobs&rsquo journey begins in his interest in the geology of mountains, concluding that they are &ldquoephemeral things that are born and die just like human beings&rdquo. His plan is to &ldquotravel the whole length of the Andes and, in doing so, observe the mountains as I would the unfolding story of a human life&rdquo. What emerges is a pleasantly loosely-knit, undefined itinerary that allows Jacobs to meander conversationally between geology and vivid images largely of &ldquofaraway terraced mountains crisply lit up by snatches of early-morning sunlight&rdquo with a bit of &ldquoswaying palms set against thickets of cassia, capers and arborescent mimosa&rsquo&rsquo.

The main focus is its social and political context, provided with lengthy (but never tiresome) historical backgrounds. Indeed, there is more history than anything else. Simon Bolivar&rsquos reputation as an undisputed and altruistic hero in the struggle for independence is thoroughly parsed, Chavez&rsquos rise to power analysed and Jacobs also gives us insights on terrorism in Colombia. That said, he does thankfully make the odd sweeping statement. Writers who cautiously hedge their bets and refuse to be taken in by the romance of travel are a modern plague. The chapter &lsquoAndean Baroque&rsquo takes him to Quito, a pre-colonial Incan city, the &lsquotrue&rsquo architectural style of which is baroque &ldquoI stared dazed at all the acanthus, tendrils, angels, oversize volutes, wings, spirals, Corinthian capitals, twisted columns&hellipAnd I ended up seeing all this as a crazed, hysterical, vainglorious response to a seismic world capable of destroying it all in seconds.&rsquo&rsquo While Jacobs satisfactorily lays out the Andes&rsquo past, he also hints at its future, one of careless and devastating environmental degradation, of continuing cultural imperialism and of a brand of political opportunism all its own.

This is not an adventure story. It&rsquos far grander and less pompous than the account of one man facing his mortality. The Andes themselves and the civilisation that co-exists with them are the adventure. It&rsquos such a relaxed account of what one might reasonably expect to be an arduous journey that there are moments when it feels that Jacobs is beaming this to us from a desk at the British Library.