Icefields [Paperback]

Thomas Wharton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1996

Winner of:

The Banff Grand National Prize for Literature

The Writers Guild of Alberta Best First Book Award

The Commonwealth Best First Novel Prize (Caribbean and Canada Region)

At a quarter past three in the afternoon, on August 17, 1898, Doctor Edward Byrne slipped on the ice of Acturus glacier in the Canadian Rockies and slid into a crevasse . . .

Nearly sixty feet below the surface, Byrne is wedged upside down between the narrowing walls of a chasm, fighting his desire to sleep. The ice in front of him is lit with a pale blue-green radiance. There, embedded in he pure, antediluvian glacier, Byrne sees something that will inextricably link him to the vast bed of ice, and the people who inhabit this strange corner of the world. In this moment, his life becomes a quest to uncover the mystery of the icefield that almost became his tomb.

Within the deceptively simple framework of a tourist guidebook, Icefields takes a breathtaking, imaginative look at the human spirit, loss, myth, and elusive truths. Here is an impressive literary landscape, and an expedition unlike any you have ever experienced.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This first novel begins with an imaginative and ingenious premise: a physician trekking across the Arcturus Glacier in the Canadian Rockies in 1898 slips and tumbles into a crevasse, where he beholds a winged human figure. The rest of the book tells of Dr. Edward Byrne's efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery in the ice. Along the way, he encounters a series of eccentrics, each involved in their own quest: the explorer Freya; the industrialist Trask; the poet Hal; and the slightly mad Elspeth, Byrne's lover. Told through scientific notes, journal entries, letters, and dialogue, this historical tale of the incalculable encountered in the mountains marks a promising debut.

From Publishers Weekly

This first novel by Canadian Wharton, borrows something of the mystery and icy obsessiveness of Peter HYeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow, the bleak hallucinatory vision of William Vollman's The Ice Shirt and a cast of haunted characters reminiscent of Josephine Hart's Damage. The result is a bit of a pastiche of styles and subjects of recent popular books (there's even evidence of an angel). But Wharton is a competent writer and this is likely to be strong on sales, even if it's not long on inventiveness. In 1898, Doctor Edward Byrne leaves England for an expedition to the Arcturus glacier. A fall into a crevasse hints at the magic of the glacier, and his subsequent convalescence in the "town" of Jasper clinches it. Byrne becomes increasingly tied to the glacier, not only bivouacking on a nunatak or rognon but obsessively describing it and studying it. As one Jasper resident says of his work on glaciers, "I thought he was the one man on earth who bothered that much with them, that this science was his alone, that he had invented it. Arcturology. The science of being distant, and receding a little every year." As the glacier recedes, it reveals new objects, some transformed beyond recognition by its passing. Time does the same thing for characters in the story, absorbing some only to spit them up later in another form, dragging others under forever. Wharton has a fine sense of description, dialogue that is as spare as the landscape and a subtle hand with narrative. But underlying it all is an old-world sense of awe (think Burke, Byron, Shelley) that allows this spare novel to transcend its limitations.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Washington Square Press (October 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671002201
• ISBN-13: 978-0671002206
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,545,365 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ice and the imagination, May 2, 2001

By 

"iarei" (Ljubljana, Slovenia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Icefields (Paperback)

One of the best fiction novels I have read this year. Storyline centers on the place of a dying glacier in shaping the lives of a handful of ice-bound individualists. The author is undoubtably well and widely read in the literature of what drives men (and women) with a certain monomania to cold abandoned places, makes a nice amalgam of themes embraced by the circle of NewEngland Transcendentalist, Polar explorers and other writers who see ice and solitude as the ultimate reflection of the possibilty of finite perfection.

Aside from that personal interpretation, pages turn easily, and one is left with quite a few gorgeous images:

"The glacier moves forward at a rate of less than one inch every hour. If I could train myself to listen at the same rate, one sound every hour, I would hear the glacier wash up against this rock island, crash like waves, and become water."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Prose that matches the beauty of the subject, May 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Icefields (Paperback)

This book is a magnificent expansion of what a novel can be. Those looking for an connect the dot plot line with traditional climaxes and conflicts may wish to stick to less challenging fare. Those who wish to explore an inspiring type of beauty and a character driven tale with great characters and interesting historical references buy this today. This is a debut that bodes very well for a promising future for Mr. Wharton.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mesmerizing and atmospheric despite the nonlinear story, September 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Icefields (Paperback)

This book was recommended by a friend on a hiking trip to Alberta, Canada this summer. I suspect the story is greatly enhanced if the reader has been to Jasper National Park and the memory of the park and its icefields are still fresh, or better yet is reading the book while surrounded by Jasper's awesome display of natural beauty and power. Many of the places are supposedly fictional, but easily recognizable even to a visitor. It deepened the story for me.

I found the book mesmerizing and atmospheric, partly because of the nontraditional, nonlinear, somewhat moody style of storytelling. But that is the same quality that bothered my husband so prospective readers will need to judge for themselves.