On the South Col route alone, the focus of these books, two clients and three guides die and others are left horribly injured by frostbite (less well known is the loss in the same storm of three members of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police expedition on the northeast ridge). But the climbers are slow, queues build up, and as they're all high on the mountain a killer storm moves in. Two guided parties are on the South Col route: Adventure Consultants, and Mountain Madness.
The basic storyline, for those not familiar: in 1996, Everest is entering its phase as mass holiday resort. And it makes a detailed exploration, not just of that often-described mountain, but of the rationale and morality of paid-for adventure. The three-volume work is set around the disastrous Everest season of 1996. It's written from three different viewpoints, by three different people. But the mountain classic that I'm calling The Everest Trilogy not only goes 8837m higher, but a step further in literary terms too.
(That said, I did once reread the first volume, in French, when stormbound for two days in an Alpine hut.) Its relevance is that the first three volumes, instead of coming one after the other, tell the same story from three different points of view. Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet doesn't count as a mountain classic, being set, as the name suggests, at an altitude of 9m. Three bestselling books were written by survivors, Into Thin Air, The Climb, and Left for Dead, but these conflicting accounts may be most illuminating if read together, says Ronald Turnbull. The 1996 Everest season saw the worst loss of life on the mountain to that date, as large guided parties with big stakes in success were caught in a storm at extreme altitude.
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