Salamander

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

Alberta novelist Thomas Wharton has achieved remarkable and immediate
success. His first opus, Icefields, won several regional, provincial,
and Commonwealth awards. This book may generate controversy because it
is not entirely original. Wharton includes material adapted from such
acclaimed international authors as Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges.
Since he acknowledges these and other adaptations, he dodges scandal,
but could disappoint readers who do not grant novelists the nonfiction
writers’ freedom to use acknowledged outside sources.

Salamander is structured to appeal to both literary nationalists and
cosmopolitans. It begins with the meeting of a French colonel and a
female bookseller in the ruins of her Quebec shop during General
Wolfe’s 1759 siege. She tells him the story of Count Ostrov of
Slovakia, who commissions London printer Nicholas Flood “to create ...
an infinite book.” The tale becomes the foundation for an
intercontinental epic.

Wharton serves the bibliophile in the same way that Herman Melville, in
Moby-Dick, catered to readers who were interested in whaling.
Bookbinding, presses, papers, and typefaces are examined. He subtly
mixes enlightenment with adventure, preventing technical details from
interfering with the story’s flow. But readers occasionally face other
challenges, such as the passage on page 360, which is inverted, making
it fully accessible only to those who possess, or can quickly acquire,
the ability to read backwards. Nonetheless, Salamander succeeds because
the story manages to hold the reader’s interest.