FEEDING THE RAT Profile of a Climber...

FEEDING THE RAT Profile of a Climber by A. Alvarez (Atlantic Monthly Press: $17.95; 152 pp.)

The compulsion to go climb a rock is inexplicable to those of us who shudder while simply reading about the experiences the author finds so thrilling: climbing straight “up a vertical wall,” for instance, “with nothing but air and the wheeling swallows between my feet and the scree far below.” Mountaineering mostly seems to be hard work: a struggle against gravity in unforgiving terrain offering none of the rewards of most wilderness adventures, such as the rollicking thrill of white-water rafting, or the primal mystery of deep-sea diving.

A. Alvarez doesn’t entirely demystify the mountaineer’s motivations in these rousing, sensitive and evocative pages, but “Feeding the Rat” is unquestionably one up on the traditional explanation, “Because it’s there.” A British writer (“The Savage God”) and poet whose books on gamblers, roustabouts, paranoiacs and divorcees have painted him as a hagiographer of people living on all sorts of edges, Alvarez devotes most of these pages to profiling his friend, Mo Anthoine, a professional mountaineer.

Alvarez met Anthoine in 1964, after Anthoine had left his stepmother, a “Dickensian tyrant,” to join a 1960s community of other young English rebels in a small Welsh town, “all of them self-made internal exiles, like Russian dissidents, who had gone there to climb and then stayed on, taking odd jobs to keep themselves fed.” Anthoine’s goal was to keep the jobs as odd as possible, for he feared that the workaday world would ruin his “feeling for climbing.” And indeed, as Alvarez presents it here, climbing emerges as a metaphor for all types of escape from a predominately drab ethos.

Towns often appear as “dank,” “dingy,” and “mournful,” but in rebels such as Anthoine, Alvarez finds a colorful individual, his character brightened by continual striving for the better. “If you just tootle along you can think you’re a pretty slick bloke until things go wrong and you find you’re nothing like what you imagined yourself to be,” Anthoine says. “But if you deliberately put yourself in difficult situations, then you get a pretty good idea of how you are going.”

UNFRIENDLY SKIES Reflections of a Deregulated Airline Pilot by Captain “X” and Reynolds Dobson (Doubleday: $18.95; 236 pp.)

While the name suggests a character in a Buck Rogers’ space opera, “Captain X” is in fact a senior captain at a major American airline who felt obliged to use a pseudonym, as journalist Reynolds Dobson writes, to avoid the “disciplinary action” that is mandatory for any licensed air transport pilot who admits an error, “no matter how ancient, no matter how unavoidable.”

Our captain’s anonymity has its drawbacks, encouraging him to play a bit too easily with the facts: He alludes to a recent survey where “a majority of commercial pilots” said their planes were “less airworthy” than in recent years, but doesn’t cite the survey or offer any details about it. The pseudonym also encourages an emotional honesty that might trouble those of us who prefer to see him as a fatherly captain to whom we are entrusting our fate: “Captain X” views some flight attendants as sex objects, for instance (registering disappointment when they “slam their (hotel room) door and, click, shove the bolt behind them”), and admits that “when there’s word of an air disaster (and) . . . it’s your line that’s involved . . . the feeling is electric. . . . The crash of that Eastern (jet) would create some seniority advancements, for the pilot and his crew were all killed by the impact.”

There is at least some compunction behind these words, though, and they do not, of course, invalidate what he has to say about deregulation, a 1978 act that ended price restrictions, opened all markets to all domestic carriers and sanctioned buyouts and mergers of route structures. By allowing massive mergers such as the Texas Air binge (which added 177 new cities to the company’s route structure and shifted about 8,000 pilots), deregulation has forced captains to fly unfamiliar routes with unfamiliar flight crews. “It was not unusual for a pilot from one airline to be teamed with a co-pilot from another,” Captain X writes, “and the two of them sent off to some hell-and-gone airport neither one of them had ever seen before. That’s a formula for disaster.” And indeed, since 1982, there have been almost 4,000 near-collisions, with the ’87 figure more than double that of 1978.

Much of “Unfriendly Skies” is cursory, not discussing the dangers of the new “hub-and-spoke” system of controlling traffic, for example (it requires additional take-offs and landings, thus heightening the chance for an accident). Captain X does target a host of other problems, though, and advocate some promising solutions, such as computers that can prevent the crew’s attention from waning on the new super-automated planes; these computers can “act like gadflies,” he writes, “asking pilots questions that the pilots must answer so that the machine will be satisfied that it’s got a mentally alert companion flying with it.”

BYZANTIUM by John Julius Norwich (Alfred A. Knopf: $29.95; 408 pp.)

John Julius Norwich sheds a lurid light on the Dark Ages in these pages, evoking the superficial spectacle of Byzantine wealth as well as the underlying political dreams, machinations, and palace vice. Though sometimes verging on “Life-styles of the Medieval Rich and Famous,” “Byzantium” is generally an engaging account of a period that few of us are likely to have studied in school.

Norwich envisions history as an art, selecting only those details that will enhance the drama of his narrative, rather than as a science, where cause-and-effect is objectively determined. These pages illustrate the dangers of taking that philosophy too far, however, for by emphasizing the human drama he thinks will interest us the most, Norwich overlooks the social, cultural and economic movements that gave form and direction to the Middle Ages. Norwich doesn’t explore, for instance, the implications of declining urbanization in the 6th and 7th centuries (it frustrated intellectual advancements in the 8th Century) or of the shift in spiritual allegiance from Roman deities to a single Christian God (it introduced the concept of “Orthodoxy” to the world). Thus, it’s no surprise that Norwich is often mystified by the Byzantine people’s behavior. “That a plebeian mob,” he writes at one point, “should be inflamed to fury not by political slogans but by such questions as the relation of the Father to the Son or the Procession of the Holy Ghost puts a great strain on our understanding, but is true none the less.”

His treatment of the Muslims is similarly dismissive. “Insofar as anyone knew anything about them, they were presumed to be little better than savages . . . making not the slightest attempts toward unity or even stable government.” Then, Norwich writes, “in the twinkling of an eye, all was changed” as the Arabs expelled the Byzantine army from Syria in AD 636. Armies organized “in the twinkling of an eye” rarely overthrow empires, of course, and this case is no exception: Prior to 636, the Arabs had, in fact, developed culture as well as political unity. Many lyric odes about the nature and power of God, for example, had been composed by Muslims from the 4th Century to the 7th Century.

It is somewhat ironic that Norwich’s account should depart from the notion that the past exists to enlighten the present, for the Middle Ages themselves were darkened by a similar departure. Norwich never claims to be a scholar, though, and so this work remains compelling, if not enlightening, for its lively enthusiasm and curiosity.

RELIGIOUS CHANGE IN AMERICA by Andrew M. Greeley (Harvard University Press: $25; 128 pp.)

The rather bizarre premise of this book--using something as secular and scientific as government and university public-opinion polls to illuminate something as ethereal as spirituality--seems particularly striking in “objective” charts such as “Figure 9.1: Model for explaining contact with the dead among widowed.” Andrew Greeley knows that social science has its limits, though: “There are no social indicators,” he writes, “which can be used to measure” the changing impact religious doctrines have on people’s daily lives. Greeley does argue persuasively that changes in the practice of religion can be measured, however, discrediting the predictions of many social scientists that America is rapidly becoming “secularized”: “Rates of church attendance, prayer and belief in life after death have remained remarkably steady.”

Greeley, a novelist and sociologist at the University of Arizona, occasionally strays from his dispassionate style, offering ethnocentric interpretations: At one point, for example, he calls Americans “the best-educated and most modernized” people in the Western world and suggestively links this “fact” to the unusually high percentage of Americans who believe in an afterlife. “Religious Change in America” is a responsible and intriguing work on the whole, though, for Greeley reports many important trends with great clarity, such as the feeling that science is diminishing our spiritual awe: “It is, as the German Scripture scholar Rudolph Bultmann remarked, ‘difficult to believe in the mystery of lightning when one can control electricity with the flick of a light switch.’ ”