Marooned at an all-inclusive

This hugely intriguing novel portrays a Canada of extremes. At one end there’s the resort culture of the title, where planeload after greedy planeload of northerners spew into Mexico, intent on acting out their holiday fantasies. At the other are life’s haunting absences, the after effects of tragedy and loss.

All Inclusive is Canadian writer Farzana Doctor’s third book; her second, Six Metres of Pavement, won multiple awards.

In this book, our main player is Ameera, a “half-South Asian, halfwhite” 20-something. Named for an Indian aunt she has never met, raised in Hamilton, Ont., by her mother, Ameera is a conundrum. By day, neatly clad in her resort uniform, she embodies the model employee, expert at hustling crocodile farm excursions at Atlantis, a “makebelieve town” and all-inclusive resort near Hualtulco, where she works.

By night, dressed in revealing sundresses and frequently tanked on the bartender’s latest concoction, her antics with certain guests give “allinclusive” a whole new meaning.

Has she been “sexually inappropriate” as an anonymous complaint has it, or is she the victim of a smear campaign?

Interspersed with explorations of Ameera’s erotic life and her acerbic observations of turistas, is the story of Azeez, a young PhD student leaving McMaster University for his Mumbai home in 1985.

The structure is puzzling at first — the two voices are so very different, the girl confused, yet very modern, the boy old-fashioned and diffident with a vocabulary that includes words such as “thrice” and “unmannerly” — their paths eventually dovetail and we (and Ameera) learn some surprising details about her life.

These two unlikely narrators, each marooned in different ways, form a truly satisfying pair. Ambitious, original, mysterious, sensual, All Inclusive is all that — and a terrific read to boot. Nancy Wigston is freelance writer and critic in Toronto.