Thomas Wharton - Salamander

Salmander
Thomas Wharton
McClelland & Stewart
372 pp.; Hardcover
ISBN 0-7710-8833-7

Book lovers will identify with Alberta author Thomas Wharton's Salamander, even though the world of the novel is far removed from ours. The great literary and musical works of the day set the backdrop for the novel's interweaving stories that span from China to America. A story about the worldwide search for a very special book, the novel is set in the eighteenth century and juxtaposes ideas and stories from characters who hunger for knowledge, who revel in words and find immense, almost erotic pleasure in the pages that lie between the covers.

And it is no surprise -- Salamander is born out of the Wharton's own lifelong love of reading. "I've been a reader all my life and I love books. When I was a kid I had the ability to completely lose myself in the world of books even to the point that even when I wasn't reading I would be living that world. Maybe making maps of the place, or drawing pictures of characters. One of the main inspirations for Salamander was to write about reading, about books, because they had been so important to me," he says from his home in Edmonton where he is a full-time writer and stay at home dad.

Wharton can still lose himself in his work. He studied the novel's time period in depth while working on the novel, taking up the piano, immersing himself in the art and literature of the day, and even going to the point of writing while wearing a period costume he put together for himself. "I didn't spend much time doing that, but there again I was completely drawn into the world, in this case, I was writing about. I seem to need to play those silly sort of games of pretend, Mr. Dress-up or whatever, in this case."

His fascination with the eighteenth century grew out of what he perceived to be a tension between two different world. "It was the fact that the eighteenth century really was a mixture of an older world of superstition and faith and the newer world, more like the world we live in of technology and cynicism and disbelief, skepticism about a lot of things," he explain. "There's a great kind of tension I was interested in exploiting, between what we think of as the modern world and the older, pre-technology kind of world."

Wharton's first novel, Icefields, was published in 1995 and won numerous awards, including the regional Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Caribbean and Canada) and the Writers Guild of Alberta Best First Book Award. A very soft-spoken and down to earth person, Wharton says that he did feel some second-time jitters. "With the first book, it was sort of like stumbling in the dark and ending up with a book not quite knowing how you did it. I remember heading for the second one with much more of a sense of, 'Now that I've done it once I have an idea of how it should be done,' and that helps one gain confidence but the question at the same time is, 'Can I do it again, or was it just luck?' The second novel is really the test of whether you can call yourself a writer or not."

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic