Omni Daily Crush: "Reading by Lightning," and a Q&A with Author and Amazon.ca First Novel Award Winner Joan Thomas

In late September, the Canadian contingent of the Amazon Books team traveled (or travelled, as they say north of the border) to Toronto to help celebrate the five fantastic finalists of the 33rd Annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and to honor(/honour) the winner.

Let me pause here to acknowledge that you may be wondering how it could have been the 33rd Annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award. There isn't room in this post to explain (gotta keep it tight), so I'll just say it's an award with an illustrious history and impressive previous winners (like Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, and--most recently--the amazing Gil Adamson), and we feel very honoured to have been involved since we first opened our virtual Canadian bookstore. You can find out more here--and keep an eye out for the 34th Annual FNA winner, who will be announced in April of 2010.

I wasn't a judge for this award, but I was thrilled when I heard their unanimously enthusiastic verdict: Joan Thomas for Reading by Lightning, which has the markings of a real classic (and not just a classic of CanLit). I felt real affection for her vibrant heroine, Lily Piper, born on the dust-covered Prairie in the first quarter of the 20th century to a devout family who thought she might be flirting with the Devil. Her sudden departure/escape for England as a young woman, the onset of World War II, her mad love for her kooky, hot, brilliant adopted (adopted, so it's not weird!) cousin George, her bouts of wild grief, and the strange dynamic with her mom that only gets stranger--it all feels true to the time and Lil's character, but contemporary and totally absorbing. Plus, Thomas's writing is often crystaline.

I notice the novel's official description calls it a bildungsroman, which seems like a pretentious word for such an everygirl story--but come to think of it, Lily isn't really an everygirl. She's imaginative and amazing, and she had a fascinating life. Though I finished this book almost 3 months ago, I can pull myself back to the final scene at will, and though I don't remember the exact line, the memory still does something warm and interesting in my chest. (I'm a very sensory reader--I have to feel a book somewhere in my torso to really like it.)

At this point, you might like to get one for yourself from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com Books, or for your Kindle. Excellent idea. But first, read on--because I have this special bonus Q&A!

Amazon.com/.ca: Lily Piper is one of the most fully alive heroines I've ever encountered. Was she your own invention, or were you inspired by someone?

Joan Thomas: I had the spine of a true story to start with. When my aunt was 16, her father took her out of school and sent her to England to look after his mother. All on her own, she took the train two thousand miles to Montreal and boarded a ship, and went to live with people she had never met. I was amazed when I heard about this.

Yet my aunt never talked about her excellent England adventure. None of my older relatives talk much about the past—they’re actually a little suspicious of people who dramatize their experiences or dwell on their feelings! So I had to make sense of this story with my imagination. I sent Lily to a different part of England than my aunt had visited, and I invented her experiences there. Lily is the result of my desire to create a character I could understand and relate to, one who experienced adolescence with the intensity that I experienced it. I think of her as a contemporary character living in the past. As a first-time novelist, I had no idea whether I could pull this off, but by the end Lily was so real to me that the final chapter pretty much wrote itself.

Amazon.com/.ca: The story of the Isaac Barr's ill-fated Canadian prairie colony is a fascinating historical component of the story. Did your family have a personal connection, or was this just a story that captured your imagination?

Joan Thomas: I never knew my grandfather, but I was told growing up that he had come from England with the Barr Colonists, so I read what I could find about that movement. I went to the archives and poured over the passenger lists, where the names of everyone arriving in Canada by ship in any year are written in ink in someone’s crabbed handwriting. I never found my grandfather’s name. But by then I was hooked by the story of the Barr Colonists, the megalomaniac Isaac Barr and the naïve immigrants who were so sure their English superiority would carry them through.

Amazon.com/.ca: There's irony in how the aspiring paleontologist George "tried, finally, to evolve, to fit into a different world, but couldn't do it fast enough," while Lily, raised in an evangelical Christian community with a mother who's powerfully fearful of change (especially changes in Lily's body), undergoes dramatic personal transformation before she finally feels at home in her world. Your next novel, Curiosity, due out next spring, also has evolution at its center: an intact skeletal fossil of a prehistoric dolphin-like creature, the first discovery of its kind, is unearthed by a 12-year-old cabinet-maker's daughter, who goes on to become a paleontologist well before Darwin publishes The Origin of Species.

What makes the scientific story of evolution such a potent metaphor for exploring the lives of your characters, as well as the evolving relationship between science and our concept of ourselves?

Joan Thomas: I never studied science but I’m intrigued by fossils, those millions-year-old bits of the past. My decision to send George to Dorset for field school turned out to be a fateful one (for me—if not for George!). It was while I was researching the Dorset coast for Reading by Lightning that I discovered Mary Anning, the amazing young woman you mention, who found huge fossil remains at Lyme Regis back when no one had any sense of what these creatures were. I've since made three research trips to Lyme Regis, and have had a fantastic time walking that coast and writing a novel about Mary Anning and her sidekick, the geologist Henry de la Beche.

So evolution (in a literal sense) is more at the centre of Curiosity than it is of Reading by Lightning. When Mary Anning found the first ichthyosaurus in 1811, the townspeople thought she’d dug up a dragon, and the scientists coming down from Oxford thought it was the bones of a creature drowned in Noah’s flood. Mary Anning’s fossil finds were a huge challenge to their beliefs about nature and humanity’s place in it. Ideas of extinction and an old earth, concepts so important to evolution, were in the air.

Evolution is on my mind at the moment because of the crisis we face on the planet. Whether we can transform fast enough to avoid full blown ecological disaster—I see this as the major question of our age. As a novelist you approach such big ideas with caution. You’re writing stories, not political discourse. With Curiosity, I was really happy to have stumbled upon a story that, although it’s set in the early 19th century, raises ideas that are so timely.

As you suggest, I did see evolution as a metaphor for how the characters in both books develop. Fiction loves those moments when a character sees that the way she thought about herself and her world is faulty. As the title of Reading by Lightning implies, this awareness may come the way a lightning bolt illuminates the landscape in a storm, although the process of actually transforming the way you act in the world is often slower and subtler, as it was with Lily. As for George, his changes hurt me as I was writing them, because I really like George. He was so open and in love with the world, and he becomes less optimistic, more cynical. It was an evolution forced by brutal circumstances, and maybe it’s just as well that we don’t see what the war would have made of him in the end.

Recommended for fans of The Forgotten Garden, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and Helen Humphreys.