Icefields

Told in taut but tender snapshots, "Icefields" is the story a small town in the Canadian outback, perched by the receding tongue of an icefield. Its name is Jasper, which could mean J'espère, as in French for I hope. Some time in the late 19th century, the London physician Dr Byrnes arrives here for an expedition on the glacier and ends up falling into a crevasse. Before being rescued, he sees something frozen into the ice that will continue to haunt him throughout the years.It could easily have been an epic: after all, it spans almost fifty years and sets out to charter how a wilderness becomes a city. Instead, Thomas Wharton has filed away anything unnecessary from his sentences, leaving us with a slender but very beautiful book.Dr Byrne is just one of the people we meet in this book. Others are Sara, the woman who nurses him after his accident - half Indian, half Native American - and Scottish Elspeth, who comes to work at a newly opened hotel. Then there's the young poet Hal, who begins a love affair with travel writer Freya. Now that I start thinking about it, I realise that this story is made up of contrasts. You've got religion versus science, as Dr Byrne's spiritual longing takes a very scientific expression in his study of the glacier. Then there's the struggle between nomads versus settlers: the restless adventurer Freya passes through the world, observing it, while the entrepreneurial Traft settles down to change it. And of course, at the heart of the book is the contrast between wilderness and civilisation.I keep going back to this book time and time again. To me, it ranks alongside "The Shipping News" by Annie Proulx for describing a place and the people that create it.