Thomas Wharton, The Book of Rain
[I had to go back and edit this post. Although there's always more to say, this time I felt I needed to go back and say more. -- rwp, 2 July 2024]
Thomas Wharton's 2023 novel The Book of Rain is deliberately indirect, piercingly imaginative, and a painful joy. I'm glad to see that it received some award nominations, but I very much hope that it finds an awful lot of readers.
At bottom, it delivers exactly what I think readers have been asking for, in these times of catastrophes and catastrophism, especially for some of those readers who've enjoyed David Bradley's Clade, Annie Proulx's Barkskins, Michael Christie's Greenwood, or Richard Powers' The Overstory.
A brief review, to begin
The Book of Rain is climate fiction, more or less, if that phrase has any reliable meaning at this point. Its narrative is anchored in a small northern Alberta town where a fictitious ore is mined, an ore generating so much power as to be virtually magical in its impact on the world.
The children of the Hewitt family are the novel's key characters, with scenes from their childhood but mostly from their adult lives, and about the echoes that radiate out into the world from their having been dropped into this town built around the mining of "ghost ore." Game design, birding, religious cults, illegal trafficking in endangered wildlife: Wharton gives you a whole dizzy world of connections that he then glues onto an almost entirely separate story that's something like a fable, thus refusing to wrap up all those dizzying connections.
As a result, this is a novel of hope where you, dear reader, are the one responsible for figuring out where the hope comes from and what shape it might take.
If you want to know more of what this novel's about, then Kevin Hardcastle's review at Quill & Quire will cover most of that for you. He doesn't have enough patience with Wharton's approach, but he's not the only reader who'll react that way, and in any case it's a readable, fairly brief review.
A much longer commentary, probably most meaningful only to those who've read the novel already, is Allen Hepburn's at the Literary Review of Canada. (Mind you, he doesn't even gesture toward some of the novel's largest structural issues, so his piece could've been vastly longer.) Hepburn puts his finger on something crucial in commenting that the book's mission is "to imagine alternative realities. Can human beings avoid total calamity, especially when they are responsible for so many smaller catastrophes? What might the world look like and how might human beings behave if they listened to the distress signals sent out by animals and the earth itself?"
Or just read the novel, which is what you should do.
But if for some reason you don't want to just leap into reading the novel (trying to decide if it'll suit your book club, perhaps?), your very best decision would be to read one of Wharton's own essays, from 2023 in Hazlitt about the challenge of writing fiction now, in the face of all the environmental crises looming at us, and about some steps toward resolving these challenges.
Wharton's "Cat Fox Neutrino" is a genuinely hopeful essay about environmental catastrophes, and its subtitle is perfect for what all us readers should have on our minds right now: "Searching for a new literary realism in the Anthropocene." In a nutshell, even though Wharton doesn't mention The Book of Rain "Cat Fox Neutrino," Wharton was finding himself reading novels that failed to capture the world as it is, as he needed it to be, and as I'd argue that we all need it to be:
"not just the damage and the dread but the wonder, too; stories that would place humans and their inwardly focused lives within something larger, a wider and wilder universe that would let me take great restorative lungfuls of imaginary air and encounter other kinds of people. Nonhuman people."
We need to remember that we don't live only in a world limited by our wee perceptions and preconceptions, but a wider and wilder universe offering restorative lungfuls not just of imaginary air but of real air as well. With The Book of Rain, Wharton goes some distance toward giving us just that kind of access to our own world, through the vehicle of his slightly imaginary one.
Written mostly for myself. You've been warned
(Right, here be monsters: we're veering away from review now into something more like an essay, so you choose whether to come along. My pattern here at Book Addiction HQ has generally been to write to show myself my own thoughts, only later overlaying enough reviewishness to offer a little more accessibility. I've been meaning to try reversing the pattern, so here we go.)
In the ancient of days, in those times before even the before times, Thomas Wharton was one of the writers I went to simply for the joy of it.
He wasn't interested in unpacking a story's truths or mysteries, I didn't think, simply in presenting them: building a mystery, one might say, which has nothing to do with Sarah McLachlan or with a mystery novel (or even with a mystery play, for that matter). I felt that Wharton was a remarkable novelist who followed his wandering intentions wherever they might lead, and I was clear with myself that I didn't need to understand.
Time passes, but in general I continue to feel the same way. I was happy at the time saying that I'd admired Icefields, even if it wasn't the novel I'd been told it would be, and it was a really good novel to teach back then; I enjoyed Salamander, to a genuinely unseemly degree at the time, even if most of it has faded from my memory in the succeeding nine (?!?!?) years. Still, I haven't returned to either of those novels, which is a little unusual when I've felt so strongly about a book or an author, so I should maybe try rereading one or the other.
His almost irretrievably out-of-print The Logogryph, though, from Gaspereau Press, occupies an entirely different place in my mind/heart.
Even if I've regularly identified other books as favourites, The Logogryph might be the one irreplaceable book I own (and that's not only because you can't find a copy for less than $50 anywhere!).
For one thing, The Logogryph first came into my hands as a gift from a student who wanted me to supervise her Honours BA project on it. Working with her was a delight, capped off by her winning perhaps our department's most oddly titled award, so it stands out for all kinds of extra-textual reasons. Setting that aside, though, The Logogryph is unlike any other book I know, and dazzlingly so. For the last several years, it has ridden everywhere with me in my vehicle, into doctor's offices and mall parking lots and tents and who knows where else. During these years, I've dipped into it literally dozens of times, so it's arguably the book I'm more familiar with than any other.
The Logogryph is a suite of fragments that may or may not count as a novel, depending on how catholic you are about genre. Along with several sections set in a contemporary Atlantis (the mythical island not being mythical here, and also never having sunk), this book is full of separate strangenesses that accumulate into an astonishingly surreal mosaic:
- a character who falls out of a novel into the world
- entries under "A" in the index for an imaginary book ("Albacore tuna, 724-29; mention of in Proust, 738")
- selections from the lost journals of Da Vinci
- a tale about the Chinese invention of paper
- two readers locked in combat through the malicious annotation of books, which each subsequently deposits in second-hand bookstores for the other to find and hate
- the mention of a novella published with a 27-volume appendix of everything edited out before publication
- and so, so much more.
I heard rumblings, dimly, that 2023's The Book of Rain would cover some of the same ground as The Logogryph, and I can't tell you how sharply my ears pricked at that. Still, even though I put it at the top my my Christmas list, and received it, somehow I couldn't move it far enough ahead in my enormous reading queue that I could get to it until this summer.
But when I realized mid-read that this novel overlapped conceptually with The Logogryph in all kinds of ways, such as in the appearance of Atlantis and a complicated woman named Claire and the structural conceit of non-overlapping mutually reinforcing narratives? Our culture's narrative about screaming teenage fangirls is mostly misguided, and this essay about the phenomenon is wonderful, but I wasn't far off being a screaming teenage fangirl.
As with so many books that I've loved, but that I didn't read during the year of their publication, I deeply regret being tardy with this review. I want this novel in as many hands as possible, and if I can't buy it for everyone, I can at least try to be convincing about it wherever possible, but once the year of publication is past, well, there's less benefit to authors and publishers from posts like this one.
At the top of Wharton's own web page about this novel, he has placed a single line from the book that doesn't show up on the publisher's site: “What difference can it make to save the life of one animal?”
The thing is, even though this novel is full of humans, it's not about them. (It's about us human readers more than about these human characters, but it's not really about us either.) It's about the world we/they live in, and the nonhuman animals with whom we share the world and by whom we're so enormously outnumbered.
As a result, I didn't even notice at first that so few of the human-centric storylines were resolved, if indeed any of them get resolved. Alex Hewitt's complicated game design (echoing the pseudo-tarot of The Logogryph), the wildlife trafficking by Claire (a name shared by the object of the narrator's desire in The Logogryph), the flickering sometime-existence of Atlantis (a nation rendered in, yes, The Logogryph with a depth staggering for its brevity), and all the rest of this novel falls away into what's meant to seem a far-future fable from a time when humans can communicate with nonhuman animals, and from a world shared with relative equality between humans and nonhumans.
Given what's happening in the novel right before the fable begins, mind, it's possible that under the influence of the ghost ore's effects, we've travelled with Amery Hewitt out of the novel's primary world, which isn't quite our own world, and into some third Earth. (After all, there's one moment in the text where the island of Atlantis flickers into and out of view on a schoolroom map, under the influence of ghost ore's aftereffects, so the concept of overlapping and asynchronous Earths is baked right into the novel.) This would mean that the fable isn't a resolution in any way, purely the result of a rupture in a world that has continued along its existing path to a future that Wharton doesn't share with us.
Let me be clear. (And let me also be clear that HERE BE SPOILERS! Nothing above this point should count as TMI, but this next paragraph might be too much.)
When the novel proper ends, and the fable begins, the reader's actively juggling all kinds of storylines that could end in all kinds of ways. We are--okay, I was--deeply invested in these characters and their lives. For a reader like me, arriving as a devotee of The Logogryph, I was especially excited about Alex Hewitt's game-development work, echoing as it did the pseudo-tarot from Wharton's earlier book, because I thought it might help me climb even more deeply inside The Logogryph's nested worlds. Someone who reads a fair bit of climate fiction might be holding fast to Claire's story, with her trafficking conundrum on Atlantis; a fantasy reader might be stuck on the continued existence of Atlantis itself, with its richly complex culture; an SF reader might be fascinated by the boundaries and interpenetrations between what appear to be separate Earths, possibly sparked by the very existence of ghost ore.
But I've read The Book of Rain twice now, and I've wandered through it an awful lot. As I've thought about Wharton's previous books, my sense here is that Wharton's not all that interested in resolution itself, but in a different and more meaningful way. With his previous novels, one could argue that there's a kind of transcendence simply in the lack of clarity: imprecision, or possibility, is what allows the co-creation of meaning between reader and writer. (One might say that culture comes into being precisely through this form of co-creation, but that'd be a long essay all on its own.) Here, the point is that all human-centred meaning--human culture, in fact--needs to be understood as merely one facet of a broader reality. It's not that resolution doesn't matter, not that there isn't an ideal reading of this novel: it's more that the fact of possibility itself is what lies behind the novel.
This novel is so environmental humanities, one might say, that it leaves behind much of the humanities for a broader, more sensitive, more trans-species form of community.
As Ursula Le Guin wrote long ago, in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, science fiction offers readers a thought-experiment whereby we get to think differently about our own world. That's true for fiction more broadly, too, which means that I don't have to worry about whether The Book of Rain ought to be considered literary fiction (which is what Penguin calls it), or whether it's science fiction or even fantasy. (And I'm mostly on board with Brenton Dickieson, too, in this short, rambling piece about the useful foolishness of generic division.)
The Logogryph has measurably changed how I go through the world. The Book of Rain has a more conventional structure, which in my view means it'd be less likely to have that same effect on me, but cautiously, I'm coming around to the idea that The Book of Rain represents a good example of just the kind of fiction Wharton was arguing for in "Cat Fox Neutrino."
In other words, The Book of Rain is the kind of fiction we need now, and it's the kind of fiction you ought to try reading--even if you might wish you'd get to learn more about these characters, and the Earth you share with them for the first 80% of this novel.
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