Book review: Outpost - A Journey To The Wild Ends Of The Earth, by Dan Richards

At some point in the future, I’m pretty sure Dan Richards is going to write a book that I can fall in love with. I enjoyed big chunks of 2016’s Climbing Days, in which he took an entertainingly off-kilter approach to writing a biography of his great-great aunt, the noted mountaineer Dorothy Pilley, by following in her footsteps in the mountains of Wales and Switzerland. However, while some of the meandering digressions proved intriguing or illuminating, others were simply frustrating, and the book also suffered from questionable editing from the folks at Faber & Faber. Richards’ new book, Outpost, has clearly been properly proofread (kudos to the team at Canongate) and some of the descriptive writing is wonderfully vivid – cinematic even – but, as with Climbing Days, there’s a niggling sense that the author keeps getting distracted from the main thrust of his story, and the intellectual wandering off and ping-ponging around can get so convoluted that you’re left wondering if there is even a main thrust to return to.