After the ice has melted
An Arctic eco-thriller loses its lightness of touch at the midpoint.
It says much about the pace of climate change that The Ice’s drastic vision of a future Arctic saddens rather than shocks. British writer Laline Paull’s ecothriller is set a few years in the future, when the summer sea ice has vanished, opening a new shipping route, sparking territorial disputes and providing a bonanza for cruise operators.
A shrinking glacier disgorges the body of Tom Harding, lost in an ice-cave collapse three years earlier, and the coroner’s inquest turns the spotlight on Sean Cawson, Harding’s guilt-racked business partner who was the last person to see him alive.
The inquest becomes a moral reckoning for Cawson and a venue for larger concerns about the plight of the planet, but the book abandons its lightness of touch as the players reveal their moral positions and allegory gives way to parable, with a late, unsubtle swerve into more violent territory.
The action shifts back in time to follow the 30-year friendship of the two polar obsessives from different social realms. Real-life anecdotes of polar exploration scattered through the novel stress the Arctic’s brutal unpredictability and the extremes of behaviour it provokes.
The Ice never quite matches or sustains a sense of important things lying in the balance, either morally or dramatically – although the stakes it’s dealing in could hardly be higher.