by Thomas Wharton
RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
2023/$34.95/424 pp.
Thomas Wharton’s The Book of Rain is a cascading, disorienting, multi-layered narrative that navigates the complexities of climate change and human and non-human animal relations. To be honest, I approached this book with reservation. The story of a “ghost ore” linked with “time slippages and space” conjured for me the vast gulf of multiverse tropes that have inundated popular media. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. The Book of Rain’s prose is beautifully enigmatic. Wharton creates the feeling of slipping in time with subtle shifts in grammatical tense and the inclusion/creation of mythological and meta-textual elements (a Borgesian map of the world in game form, for example). The result is fast-paced and at times hair raising, combining mythology and contemporary industrial practices to create an evocative speculative world.
The book predominantly follows three characters: Alex Hewitt, a recluse drawn to game (board and video) design; his sister Amery Hewitt, a conservationist who goes missing while exploring the Environmental Reclamation Area also known as “The Park”; and Claire Foley, a smuggler of exotic pelts posing as a writer of a guidebook for the disintegrating island of u’Yoi. The book also includes field notes, archival material and a particularly rewarding (re)creation myth.
One of the most exciting elements of this book is the parallel Wharton makes between ghost ore mining and the oil industry. The fictional city of River Meadows feels so similar to northern Alberta towns centred around the oil sands. Wharton captures the hefty, lumbering machines, mass excoriations of the earth, and belching pollution alongside the exquisite beauty of the trails, forests and animal life. The characters themselves suffer from an existential angst connected with the excavation and the by-products of the industry: feral clouds and distortions in time and space called “wobbles.” The lost city of Atlanta appears on a map, people slip in and out of “harmless” sleep states, animals become locked in space. But the deftest part of Wharton’s execution is that, while all the slippages are alarming and the deterioration of the island is disconcerting, the characters live amidst these oddities with an everydayness that is frighteningly similar to how people live with the knowledge of rising ocean levels and extreme weather events: with inevitability.
Of course, no book is without its faults. Some of the briefly mentioned characters and scenarios feel underdeveloped, even stereotypical. Nevertheless, Wharton’s deft, beautiful prose, distinct narrative style and interconnected sections often left me excited by both the language and the revelations. The book leaves the reader unsettled and desperate to learn the Uttering.
Marc Herman Lynch is the author of Arborescent (2020).
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