Fascinating fragments

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/03/2023 (950 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Thomas Wharton’s new novel The Book of Rain is in many ways a successor to his 2004 story collection The Logogryph, which was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. One of the highlights of The Logogryph is an essay on the imagined literature of Atlantis (in the story’s world, the island never sunk).

One of the threads of the plot in The Book of Rain similarly revolves around Atlantis, which similarly never sunk in the story’s world. Ironically, having survived the cataclysm that claimed the nation in Western myth, the island is now in danger of sinking due to environmental disaster.

At the core of the Alberta-based Wharton’s novel sits two science-fictional disasters. One, a mysterious ore known as “ghost” is being mined in Canada, which can be used to generate massive amounts of energy. However, the process of extracting and exploiting “ghost” has the side effect of destabilizing time and reality itself.

Two, technological advances have led to efforts to combat climate change, specifically the creation of cloud-like machines constructed out of millions of nanotech robots. These are initially designed with the idea that humans can thus take literal, technological control over the climate. But the machines develop something like a complex, non-human intelligence, and simply proceed with their own mysterious agenda, making the overall situation worse.

Although the novel seems to focus thematically on humanity’s relationship with the environment, and argue for particular environmental attitudes, in truth this is a sidebar, and the real thematic focus here is the relationship (and relationship breakdown) between humans and other animals.

The plot bounces (for the most part) between Alex’s return to the ghost-mining Canadian town (now a ghost town), where his sister Amery has gone missing, and Claire’s trip to Atlantis. Claire is on the drowning island as a travel writer updating its guidebook, although this is just a cover for her real job as a rare-animal smuggler.

Amery herself is the secret heart of the novel, its main character in many ways despite not appearing in most of the book. She has been making illegal trips into a contaminated, destabilized zone where time and reality itself is warped in order to study and save its animal life, and has disappeared.

These plots develop in tandem but disconnected from one another, interrupted also by fragments from the past, the future and the lives of other characters. Wharton has always had a fragmentary style, but he takes it to new heights here.

Although writing science fiction, Wharton uses a magic realist tone. Journal entries, discussions of the video games that Alex is supposed to be working on instead of hunting for his sister, strange mythologies drawn from the language of animals and a museum dedicated to displaying sounds are a few of the unusual aspects the novel combines in its mosaic-like plot.

Wharton’s great strength as a writer lies in collecting all of these disparate pieces without making his story incoherent or even too-coherent. At the same time, he doesn’t fall into the trap so many writers with similar themes do, and always keeps the emotional lives of his characters, rather than the novel’s thematic ideas, as the focus.

In a short speech late in the story, a professor named Michio argues that “if we’re going to save ourselves from our own stupidity, we have to completely transform the way we look at what’s around us, starting with what our best theories tell us is actually real. It won’t be easy. Maybe impossible.”

If it is possible, of course, the technology of stories themselves (represented in the book by the journal Amery keeps, the video game Alex is designing and a host of other metaphors) — not nanobot clouds — are what will make this fundamental paradigm shift possible.

Jonathan Ball’s books included the award-winning short story collection The Lightning of Possible Storms (Book*hug, 2020) and the comic book series The Eye Collector (Heavy Metal/Virus, 2022). Visit him online at www.jonathanball.com.