But in anticipation of seeing him talk at an event in London next week, I thought I might try him out and see if his style had changed any since an adolescent reading of Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less over twenty years ago.

In truth, I cannot really remember the content of that book or even if I enjoyed it. Along with other novels of its ikind, I have found a direct corollary between pageturnerishness and forgettability. I wondered if this would be the case with his latest offering.

I actually enjoyed it. In parts. And I cringe as I write this but I actually wept at the end. The genre is one that pleases me – what I call the factual-fictional biography which in case you are confused is when the outline of a celebrated life is woven with the whimsy and imagination of the novelist into a jolly good read. It is a form that introduces you to and educates you in the life of a hopefully intriguing person whilst showcasing the writers wit and skill in inhabiting the mind of the protagonist.

The Paths of Glory is the story of the half-forgotten mountaineer, George Mallory, whose ascent of Everest in 1922, over thirty years before Hillary and Tinseng, ended in tragedy – his body was not discovered until 1999. No one is sure whether he actually made the summit. What is sure is that he got within 600 feet of it.

So Archer charts the progress of Mallory’s life from boyhood, through his years at Oxford where he hobnobbed with the likes of Lytton Strachy, GBS, Dora Carrington and other Bloomsbury intellectuals. And true to form he weaves a good story. Page follows page as you devour the tale of Mallory and his quintessentially English life at quintessential Oxford, displaying quintessential English character traits such as bravery, wit, phlegmaticism and sheer genius. Oh and sheer dogged determination to get to the top. But (and this is where the book starts to flounder), Archer, almost as if he has realised half way through that this guy’s personality is getting a bit too stylised, seems to go back and embue his Mallory’s weltanschaung with a precocious and anachronistic streak of femininism. At the tender age of nine, when most lads were sucking lead soldiers and blowing up frogs, Archer has Mallory musing on the fate of women and the injustice at the inequality in the education system, “‘Isn’t it possible’, suggested George, ‘that a husband might benefit from being married to a well-educated woman?’ ‘That’s the last thing a man wants’” snaps his mother. One of the novel’s more convincing statements.

So to avoid stereotyping Mallory, Archer attempts, almost as an after thought, to flesh him out a bit by turning him into a Suffragette. Which is odd because it turns out that the theme of women overwhelms the whole book in ways which I am not convinced Archer intended.

There are many impardonnable mannerisms of style in this novel. Not least is the characterisation of the personalities surrounding Mallory and indeed Mallory himself. While the men seems to all resemble Kitchener to greater or lesser extents, the female characters have hardly any substance at all and float in and out of the narrative like ephemera with nothing more to them but rigid morals and a saintly virtue. However there is one ‘female’ character which dominates and this is Chomolungma herself. On an unforgiveable number of occasions, the climbers in the book refer to the mountain as ’she’ – the ‘unforgiving lady’, the ‘temptress’, the ‘icy queen’… Unforgiveable but enlightening. One cannot help but feel that Everest, to Archer, represents the whole of the fairer sex and that all that great mountain’s attributes are those of the other 51% of the population: majestic, frozen, mysterious, unconquerable, awe-inspiring, dangerous, frozen, distant, and above all, there. That is one point of view of course. Another maybe that mountains are mountains and women are, well, women – that is men with a slight chromosomal difference and a more intuition.

That’s why I love factual-fictional biographies. They tell you more about the author then the author would wish you to know.