Thomas Wharton explores the natural world through a lens of fantasy and science fiction
The Book of Rain is on the shortlist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
Thomas Wharton's The Book of Rain surrounds the disaster that unfolds after a town is evacuated due to ghost ore, a new minable energy source more profitable than gold — and one that can also disrupt time and space, slowly making an environment inhospitable.
Told in three intertwined storylines, the science fiction novel is set in the mining town of River Meadows, one of the three hotspots in the world for ghost ore. Alex Hewitt and his sister, Amery, are among the first wave of evacuees, however Amery continues to return to save animals trapped in the toxic wasteland. When she fails to one day return from a trip, Alex enlists the help of her mathematician friend to bring her back — all they need to do is break the laws of physics.
The Alberta-based author has written several novels, including adult and children's fiction, nonfiction and a collection of stories. Wharton's debut novel, Icefields, won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in Canada and the Caribbean. Icefields was also a finalist for Canada Reads 2008 and was defended by Steve MacLean.
In 2001, his novel Salamander was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for fiction and was also a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
The Book of Rain is on the shortlist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. The annual $60,000 award recognizes the best novel or short story collection by a Canadian author.
Back in April, Wharton spoke with The Next Chapter's Ryan B. Patrick about his latest novel.
The Book of Rain is set in the mining town of River Meadows. It's home to this mineral called ghost ore. What is ghost ore?
It is based on bitumen, the substance that's mined in Fort McMurray in the oil sands. So it's based on this idea of a toxic black goop that gets dug up out of the ground. I've never lived in Fort McMurray; it's not really my territory. So what I usually do in quick cases like that is I make up my own thing and I have it reflect something in the real world.
So ghost ore is a fantastical or science fictional way of looking at bitumen and saying what is this stuff? What does it do to the environment and what does it do to us as people?
Not just physically, but in terms of creating an entire culture to get the stuff out of the ground and all the people that takes and an entire community. Everything's based around this one thing and I like playing with those ideas and I usually come up with something as a fantastical twist on them.
Speaking of playing around things in the fantastical, the ghost ore causes these things called decoherences. Can you describe what that is all about?
It's a word I borrowed from physics and just appropriated it for my own use. It actually refers, if I understand correctly, to when a quantum state collapses into a particular measurable state. From a state of possibility to a state of actuality. That's called decoherence.
And I always thought it was kind of funny that the word that physicists use for our reality is a word like that — decoherence rather than coherence. I just find that interesting. So I just borrowed that and gave that name to the kinds of odd states that are caused by this ore as it's being dug up. It's a metaphor for the effects of this resource extraction on the environment and on people, but bent through a lens of fantasy or science fiction.
It's a metaphor for the effects of this resource extraction on the environment and on people, but bent through a lens of fantasy or science fiction.- Thomas Wharton
Decoherence is also known as a wobble. These time wobbles manifest themselves. How are they affecting these characters?
So Alex, for example, moves to this small town of River Meadows with his family from Vancouver and it's a real displacement for everyone. So partly the decoherences are a way of describing that. And if there's an autobiographical element in the book, that's probably it — the idea of moving from my hometown to another place, because that's what happened to me when I was 15.
Alex's story is like mine, but he has this experience where he's in a diner with his family and he sees this young woman sitting nearby by herself and he has this feeling that he can see a future in which they're connected with each other. He doesn't understand what's happened to him — he thinks about it and it bothers him.
So part of the story that goes on from there is what did that strange event mean for him? And he comes to understand it a little bit better.
The book is ultimately about how we as humans impact the land and the wildlife. So how are the animals, particularly the birds, reacting to the impact of the ghost ore in the time displacement?
Like so many real world industries, it's a struggle for them. The fate of animals in a human-dominated world is mostly to die. As awful as that sounds, if you stop and think about it and look around, birds are dropping from the skies because of pollution and the tearing up of habitat destroys animal lives. So it happens all around us all the time. And again, I'm just putting a fantastical filter on that and thinking about that.
I thought one of the ways that animals might adapt to survive human beings would be for them to come up with their own language so that they can talk to each other, right? You know, in a sense, animals already do have their own. They do speak to each other, so I just took it one step further and that the language they developed, which in the novel I called the uttering, is a survival mechanism to try to survive human beings.
I thought one of the ways that animals might adapt to survive human beings would be for them to come up with their own language.- Thomas Wharton
What do you hope readers take away from this narrative?
For me as a reader, primarily, I love books that after I've read the book and I set it down, it has changed my way of looking at things in some way. I go out into the world and whatever the book was about, I see it with new eyes. So that's something I value as a reader. And that was what I was hoping to do with this book. It's got a thriller aspect and I hope it tells an exciting story, but I also hope that someone after they've finished this book and put it down might go outside and maybe pay a little more attention than they usually do to a bird or the natural world out there.
Just stopping, listening and looking a bit more about who's out there, and at what kinds of non-human people are out there in the world.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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