Customer Reviews

Icefields

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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."

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Those who wish to explore an inspiring type of beauty and a character driven tale with great characters and interesting historical references buy this today.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.

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.

I read this book with the greatest of expectations. They were based upon the synopsis printed on the rear cover of the book and the artwork on the front cover.

Mr. Wharton did an excellent job of visually depicting the vast stretches of the icefields. He did for writing, what Ansel Adams did for black and white photography.

However, I was expecting more of a story based upon the synopsis. The theme outlined held a lot of promise as to what could possibly occur. Unfortunately, I was waiting in vain for it to occur. He never delivered on that theme. The synopsis of the theme was the main reason I chose to read "Icefields."

The story concerned the saga of Doctor Edward Byrne and many eccentric and colorful characters he met in his travels, set in the harsh beauty of the Canadian icefields.

Had that been the synopsis, I would have read the book with different expectations, and I would not have been disappointed.

Like another reviewer here, I came to Icefields after reading Wharton's second novel, Salamander. The two could NOT be more different! What they have in common is Wharton's astonishing gift for imagery, and for seeing (or hearing or touching or tasting ...) the mundane in completely new ways. I would agree with the reviewer who cautioned potential readers that the blurb is not quite accurate, but where that reviewer said that the novel failed to deliver, I would put it the other way around: the novel *does* deliver, but the blurb on the back cover doesn't accurately capture what that message is.

I found the novel to be a quiet, beautiful, and intensely inward-looking work. Almost minimalist. Again, different from Salamander. Remarkably thought-provoking (*like* Salamander). To me, it seems almost like a mirror image to Alan Garner's Strandloper -- though, since the settings are rather polar opposites (literally), perhaps a photographic negative is a better analogy.

Thomas Wharton's first book gets high marks for what is not said. Many authors throw words at a reader until at times they get in the way of the story. Not so with Wharton. His spartan use of words, leaving room for one's senses to fill in the spaces, truely relfects his subject: the stunning stark physicality of the ice fields, and the metaphor of the ice fields of the heart. I found myself wanting to savor each paragraph, each line; not to rush forth to the end. No skimming here for the reader, rather luxuriate in the craft of a marvelous first novel

This is the greatest book I have ever read.It fills the imagination to the fullest. This book is so beautifully written,and you can be sure that Thomas Wharton could be the best Canadian writer of all time. Don't pass this one by!

It's hard to believe this is a first novel. Wharton crafts a complex tale full of sensuality and bravado. I read his amazing second novel Salamander before coming to Icefields, and I was worried that I'd be disappointed. I wasn't. Although not as an accomplished book, Icefields is engaging and a wonderfully worthwhile read.

"That's what he called himself once, the summer her left for the war, and I'd laughed. Glaciologist. I'd never heard the word before. I'd never considered there might be others like him, scientists who studied only 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."

The book takes place during the first two decades of the last century in what was to become Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada. Byrne, a doctor, was exploring the region when he falls into into a crevasse on the Arcturus glacier. In the time it takes his group to notice his absence and haul him out, he sees something in the ice; a pale figure with huge wings. The image haunts him, even as he is rescued, revived and returned to London. Years later he is drawn back to the glacier and the book chronicles his life studying the ice and the other people who live for awhile at the hot springs hotel built at its foot. Evocative, poetic and strange, this is one of the most interesting books I've read this year.

I will admit to a bias; I spent almost every childhood holiday in the area and have been up on the Athabasca glacier. Every place name was resonant with memory. It's a spectacularly beautiful, fragile area and Wharton's descriptions of the first residents of the region and the conditions under which they lived, a peculiar mixture of Victorian gentility and wilderness was fascinating. Alongside Byrne, Icefields tells the story of a poet come west to be a guide, a servant girl who takes charge of the running of a hotel and develops a relationship of sorts with Byrne, an intrepid female explorer and a tracker turned entrepreneur who sees opportunity in the coming railway.

Wharton has written a mythical story of the search for meaning; for what's passed by; for what's yet to come; for the love of one for another and the fear of it. This story has been written thousands of times by hundreds of authors - and will be - in the same numbers - probably for the rest of time.

This version, however, is short enough to not have the reader wallow in melancholy; while long enough to let you really sense the glacial landscape he chose for the setting.

I have no idea which of the characters I most identify with, but I would like to meet several of them - each for a different reason.

This isn't a difficult read, but it will cause considerable reflection about our obsessions and their impact on others as well as ourselves.