This is a book that will, if you’re like me, grip your attention and take you on a distinctly white knuckle ride from time to time. One aspect of literature vital to me is that I am lifted, ideally within a paragraph, to the scene of the action. John Peck, our restless author whom I met many years ago, does just that.
John made me feel that I was leaping to safety over the rail of his yacht Chayka of Ardour as the Yarmouth lifeboat swept up beside her on the next wave in that storm in 1975. I climbed the Matterhorn with him, I rowed the Atlantic and travelled to Africa and to the Arctic. His descriptions are vivid, his language real, straightforward and credible.
To my mind, having lived within the world of mountain exploration for over half a century, today it often seems to me that endeavour and adventure have tended to become publicity stunts, driven by media attention, by a relentless public relations team and, if one pauses to investigate, the dramas are not infrequently faked or exaggerated – and, we learn from the grapevine, well-paid. You will find nothing like this here. John tells it as it is, as he dreamt it, found out how do it, and carried it off.
John has also “done time” – and not behind bars. He has served his country. He has a distinguished record of public service, in the armed forces and in the police force. Few combine that sense of duty and dedication with a wild side that has taken John, and his friends, to their distinct limits. You may be breathless, incredulous, wondrous, and often worried at why John simply did not rest, and why, having taken such risks early in life he did not settle, as many do. That is perhaps his magic.
Eric Shipton wrote in the 1940s in Upon That Mountain: “There are few treasures of more lasting worth than the experience of a way of life that is in itself wholly satisfying. Such, after all, are the only possessions of which no fate, no cosmic catastrophe can deprive us; nothing can alter the fact, if for one moment in eternity, however brief, we have really lived.”
In Restless, John tells us all how he has really lived, and as you read this book, he’ll take you on journeys you’ll never forget.
Dr Charles Clarke
Neurologist, mountaineering doctor and yachtsman
Kishtwar, Kashmir 1965-1974;
Everest SW Face 1975 and NE Ridge 1982;
Kongur 1988; Menlungtse 1988;
Sepu Kangri & Eastern Tibet 1996-2000.
Skipper: Whisky Galore
Three Peaks Yacht Race 2009, 2010, 2011.
