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A delightful new voice on my radar
Book Review
By Derryll White
Farrow, John (2001). Ice Lake.
Trevor Ferguson is a Canadian author of six novels before he took the pseudonym John Farrow for the series featuring his Montreal-based Sergeant Detective Émile Cinq-Mars. This is the second novel in that series and you don’t need to have read the first to quickly clue into Cinq-Mars.
I like stories about big pharmas because they always seem to me to be the corporate giant looming up from afar. This story is set in the 1990s with AIDS a full-blown epidemic. The pharmaceutical companies are doing surreptitious live testing on human lab rats who are only too happy to volunteer their bodies for a potential cure.
The Oka crisis and the Mohawk Warriors and the Kanesetake Reserve take the reader back to a time not talked about much anymore in Canada. But the issues still remain. And there is talk of cosmology and time. John Farrow throws some real surprises into ‘Ice Lake’. His historical analysis of old Montreal is as creative and interesting as any interpretation of religion and greed I have read recently.
‘Ice Lake’ is not your typical mystery/detective novel, although it is all about detection. Cinq-Mars is, perhaps, the kind of individual the reader might like to be. He is fully engaged in both his work and his mind, while relishing the surprising delights of a mindful wife 17 years his junior.
Farrow’s is a delightful new voice on my radar, and I will look for more of his work. I have a soft spot for engaging novels set in Canada.
****
Excerpts from the novel:
PERSONAL RIGHTS – The senior Cinq-Mars, Albert, had argued his way out of hospital, demanding the dignity of death in his own house, in his own bed. Imagining the scene did bring a rise to his son and caused the corners of his lips to curl upward. He sympathized with the doctors and administrators trying to reason with his father, only to be rebuffed in no uncertain terms.
BURN-OUT – As usual, Émile Cinq-Mars struggled up to answer.
He refused to keep a phone by his bed these days, having learned that the violence of calls in the middle of the night rattled him too deeply. He did not want the callous world in which he lived to also snooze alongside him.
TIME – “Do you know how a star – our sun, for instance – sinks into the time-space continuum?”
“Yes,” Cinq-Mars said. Which was true. He did.
“I believe that we haven’t come to terms with what this really means, with how it confines us to a condition in which we live out of time. That warp, that gravitational bend in time – that’s the realm we inhabit. It pulls us into the past, keeps us there. What will be will be, I suspect, because it has already been. We don’t have a future, only the perception of future. The secrets of the cosmos are being revealed, Detective, the secrets of the biological sciences are rapidly being discovered, more or less in tandem, because the time has come – we are passing through the appropriate space – for such revelations. It’s inevitable. All these things are already known, and have been known ahead of time. It’s just a matter of stumbling across the appropriate information, of catching up to time.”
HISTORY – Nine years before the Mayflower landed on Plymouth Rock, the future city of Montreal existed as a fur-trading post founded by the French explorer Samuel de Champlain. He wanted to make the island a centre of commerce, to exploit the trade in beaver pelts with Huron tribes to the west while driving the Iroquois far enough south that they could neither disrupt his trade routes nor sabotage his flank. Unwittingly, he was interacting with the geography and the natives in a way that would inscribe the nascent borders between Canada and the United States.
MONTREAL – For the most part, Montreal was a pleasurable city – fun, peaceable, pleasant.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
