The Mountain Between Us (Charles Martin)

The Mountain Between Us
Charles Martin
Crown
Fiction, Suspense
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Top surgeon Ben Payne was headed home from a medical conference. Journalist Ashley Knox is mere days away from her own wedding. When a snowstorm grounds them both, they take a chance on a small private plane beating the weather out of Salt Lake City... until the pilot suffers a heart attack mid-flight. Now Ben and Ashley are alone, injured, in countless miles of snow and raw wilderness - and nobody even knows they're missing, let alone where to look for them.

REVIEW: It looked like a decent concept (and I remember being intrigued by the previews when the movie came out), so I grabbed the audiobook. One one level, it delivers on its basic promises, serving up one traumatic plane crash, two somewhat damaged people who become significantly more damaged during said plane crash, and a daunting journey of survival against steep odds. Unfortunately, it does this by dropping its characters into the heart of a national cliche preserve, where masculine men can handle any situation and are incapable of articulating pain or emotions (and have suffered greatly because of it), fragile women are helpless in their own survival (Ashley is dropped by a busted femur and is mostly helpless through the journey save as incentive for Ben to push himself, all while she's pushing him to open up about his feelings; she's not the only woman in the plot to suffer from being a cliche, though further discussion ventures into spoiler territory), and apparently nobody has read Gary Paulsen because the doctor with minimal hunting experience decides it's a great idea to take on a moose with a compound bow he's not too familiar with. Some plot "twists" are blatantly telegraphed, then strung out long past the point any tension could be derived from them. There's also a dog who serves little plot purpose (though it does at least survive). Some of the survival situations are indeed harrowing, if occasionally repetitive, plus it starts to stretch credibility how they keep getting out of certain situations (or, rather, how Ben keeps getting them out of certain situations, because not only is he the only one with any mobility, he's also the only one with any sort of relevant experience; even with some mountaineering under his belt and some dusty scouting badges, there's some serious turbulence in the suspension of disbelief at some point - and, seriously, did Ashley have to be completely incapable of offering any input or possessing any basic survival knowledge, even if she's too injured to use them? Ben has to not only be the doctor but the wilderness expert and navigation whiz, while she just talks as her contribution to the team? How stereotypically "strong man saves weak woman" can you get, here?).
Along the way, as is typical for survival-based stories, the immediate external crisis serves as a mirror (or at least a useful time-out from regular life) for characters to reflect upon greater problems in their lives... though, again, Ben gets the majority of attention, here, as he dictates recordings to Rachel, the childhood sweetheart who became his wife and savior who became the source of a greater plot-driving trauma. Meanwhile Ashley... well, she has some generic pre-wedding jitters and questions about whether True Love, the sort that lasts forever, is even a thing worth holding out for, so once again she's second fiddle to Ben's pain and Ben's story. At some point, these issues really started to bother me, and by the somewhat drawn-out ending I was hard-pressed not to roll my eyes as long-ago-telegraphed revelations are breathlessly revealed and long-ago-drawn conclusions are finally, painstakingly reached. While there's some decent survival material and some not-bad personal chemistry and trauma, the whole just fell flat to me.

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