Book Review: Peaks on the Horizon

Peaks on the Horizonby Charlie CarrollSoft Skull Press, 2015UK author Charlie Carroll's thoroughly absorbing history/traveler's account of Tibet, The Friendship Highway, has been released by Soft Skull Press in a pretty paperback edition with the US title Peaks on the Horizon: Two Journeys in Tibet, giving American readers an easier chance to snap up one of the strongest nonfiction books to appear yet in 2015 (although not to snap them up directly from the source, since neither Soft Skull nor its parent publisher Counterpoint sees fit to acknowledge the book's existence on their their websites or catalogs; but one imagines there are other venues).Peaks on the Horizon tells the story of two Tibets, and it does so through the viewpoints of two idealistic men. There's Tibetan-born refugee Lobsang, who makes the arduous trek back to his homeland, and there's Carroll himself, who meets up with Lobsang in the course of his own travels but who has always fantasized about visiting a country so fabled that even its nicknames are legendary:

For Tibetans, in Tibetan, Tibet is simply Bo. I liked that name. I also liked the country's nicknames, or perhaps we should call them subheadings: The Roof of the World; The Land of Snows. These were literal and almost scientific, but I found they made Tibet far more alluring than the fictional name Shangri-La, which brought to my mind thoughts of the fraudulent Lobsang Rampa, poorly named suburban bungalows, bad indie music, ersatz Indian restaurants in provincial English towns, and guidebook false promises.Either way, I wanted in. Some thirteen thousand feet above this fetid and dirty city of Chengdu was a country of stone and ice, and, even though it was officially closed, there was still a way in. Tibet was not just on the horizon, it capped it.

But this Tibet of stone and ice, this semi-mythical place, is just one of the Tibets Carroll's gripping narrative describes. The other is the forlorn country whose long history of conquest at the hands of the Chinese Carroll relates with a dramatist's flare. This other Tibet is ostensibly forbidden to outsiders (although Carroll is far from the only white-skinned Westerner who's found a way in - and then safely back out), and its daily realities are far from the stuff of myth:

It is in this Tibet that everyone, at al times, is under surveillance: from the ever-present military and police, from the clandestine spies, from those employed to examine all Internet and mobile phone usage, from random and legal house searches. It is in this Tibet that all speak with voices lowered and eyes shifting, in this Tibet that the borders remain closed for the best part of each year, and in this Tibet that, as I saw, most Tibetans from the bottom up scour out existence so devoid of any kind of 'liberation' as we might know it, that one wonders how Mao's terminology for his country's annexation of theirs could ever be justified.

Large parts of Carroll's smooth, confident account fall into the classic stranger-in-a-strange-land sub-genre of all travelogues, with the clueless foreigner encountering all the weird customs of a very odd and isolated land and people. As anyone who's ever been there (and in parts north, including Mongolia) will attest, when it comes to 'odd' in Tibet, nothing takes pride of place to the region's food, nearly all items of which center around large, hairy, and charmingly opinionated creatures called yaks, which permeate virtually every aspect of life on the high plateaus of central Asia - including, as Carroll finds out, the menu. At one point in Peaks on the Horizon, he gamely orders tsampa, yak soup and yak-butter tea ("Made from a tiny sliver of tea mixed with large lumps of yak butter and fistfuls of salt, it has the consistency of soup and tastes like a spoonful of lard dipped in saltwater") and then, good sport that he is, tries his best to put this revolting fare in a good light:

Aside from its taste, yak-butter tea is perhaps the perfect drink for high0altitude existence: the fatty butter helps the body protect itself against the searing cold; the salt works against the onset of dehydration by restoring electrolyte balance; and the filmy liquid creates an effective balm for the lips. Tsampa - nuggets of dough made from barley flour and yak butter - is likewise widely consumed across all Tibet, and has taken on a kind of unifying and almost nationalistic quality, as encompassing as a flag, encapsulated by the Tibetan saying: 'The Chinese eat rice; we Tibetans eat tsampa.'

Apart from its stomach-clenching elements, such passages will demonstrate the abiding truth of Peaks on the Horizon: Carroll is a winningly immediate writer, with a deeply personal feel for the memorable, the authentic. His book is studded with great scenes and great moments, like when he finds himself on the desolate shore of Lake Nam-tso in the wilds of Tibet:

I followed the beach as it skirted around the edge of the lake, away from the tourist and my companions, as the shingles turned to pebbles and then to clumps of black rock. Perched atop an overhang, above the surging and carving water, I removed my hat, lowered myself on to my gloved hands, and plunged my heat into the next wave. It felt like diving into a bonfire.

A great deal of Peaks on the Horizon reads like diving into a bonfire; this is travel-writing of the highest order, simultaneously ambassadorial and conspiratorial. All travelers - armchair or otherwise - are urged not to miss it.