Death on the Mountain

THE MOUNTAIN (122 pp.) -- Henri Troyat--Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

Leon Tarasov was born in Moscow in 1911, but like a lot of other White Russians, he and his family wound up in Paris. The boy took to his adopted language like a Cossack to vodka, and under the name of Henri Troyat, became a successful young writer. Although he wrote brilliant biographies of Dostoevsky and Pushkin, his specialty has been winning the top French prizes for fiction. At 24 he took the Roman Populiste, at 27 the Prix Goncourt. Then the stuffy French Academy awarded him the Prix Louis Barthou for his all-round excellence. And now his latest novel, The Mountain, has carried off something called the Prix Litteraire du Prince Rainier III de Monaco.

The Mountain is that fairly rare thing in modern fiction, a moving story about a good man. Cleanly and dramatically written, it might have been even more effective if the hero weren't a little touched in the head. In the tiny French mountain village where he lived, Isaiah was a great mountain climber, a great guide. In a country where the profession is taken seriously, he was an important citizen. Then he had had a series of accidents, and in the last of them Isaiah's skull had been fractured. When he got home from the hospital, he was a broken man, still powerful but a bit simpleminded, good only for tending sheep and common labor.

Younger brother Marcellin was a lesser breed of mountain man, lazy, lecherous, greedy. He could twist Isaiah around his finger, but poor fuzzy Isaiah loved him and needed him. When the Calcutta-London plane crashed on the snow-covered peak of the great mountain,* Marcellin itched to get at the gold that was rumored to be part of the cargo. When a rescue attempt failed, he browbeat Isaiah into guiding him to the summit.

Those who get their armchair thrills from books like Annapurna (TIME, Jan. 12) will recognize the familiar shivers as Author Troyat skillfully takes them up the treacherous mountain with the brothers. Once at the plane, Marcellin, in an orgy of greed, strips the frozen corpses of their valuables as the shocked Isaiah begs him to stop. They find one survivor, a lovely Indian girl, barely alive. Isaiah is not too simple-minded to know what they must do: get the girl down and to a doctor. Marcellin wants no survivors. In an ending that is nearly as pat as it is inevitable, Isaiah passes judgment on his brother, beats him almost to death and leaves him to die.

The Indian girl dies too before they reach Isaiah's house, but by that time Isaiah is crazed indeed, keeps talking to her and introduces her to his sheep. Needlessly, Author Troyat's simple story of good and evil ends on a note close to pure melodrama.

*A fictional parallel of the crash of an Air India Constellation on Mont Blanc 2 1/2 years ago (TIME, Nov. 20, 1950).

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