'Polar Vortex' Pulls Memory and Identity Apart, then Together Again
Image courtesy of Book*hug Press
Priya wants nothing more than to retreat to her Lake Ontario island town with her wife Alex, but she can’t escape her past entirely. One day she gets a message from her estranged classmate Prakash—more than an ex-friend, but never quite an ex-boyfriend—who wants to come for an overnight visit. Throughout the decades Prakash always seemed to want more, but Priya was only interested in women. Then on the morning of Prakash’s visit, he appears in Priya’s sex dream.
All of the relationships in Shani Mootoo’s Polar Vortex are enigmatically complicated. Priya loves Alex, but Prakash’s visit is a point of contention: Alex is jealous of this stranger from Priya’s past, with Priya compelled to hide the truth from both Alex and herself. Prakash supported Priya after a devastating breakup, but is that enough to justify seeing him again after so long?
There are no easy answers as Mootoo reveals layer after layer of Priya’s memories ranging from Prakash’s unwelcome advances to his desire to marry Priya to disguise her sexuality. Impressively, some of Priya’s most vital memories emerge in the last twenty pages where, instead of weighing the reader down with backstory, they unlock her most resounding revelations. “Perhaps it’s possible to shelve the full memory of such a situation,” Mootoo writes, “but not to erase it.”
Like sexuality itself in the novel, race and culture too defy easy classification. Both Priya and Prakash are diasporic Indians—Priya’s family moved to Trinidad long before her birth, and she came to Canada during college in search of a new life and identity. Prakash’s family, meanwhile, left India to settle in Uganda before fleeing to Canada as refugees. He remains more outwardly connected to his heritage, entering an arranged marriage and continuing to speak Gujarati with his wife during a meeting that leaves Priya feeling estranged. While Priya and Prakash’s initial connection stems from their racial similarities, their cultural differences—which Mootoo explores with superb complexity—only deepen an already complicated entanglement that distances them from both the novel’s other Canadian characters and each other.
This distance is seen most clearly in the novel’s third section, narrated by Alex, which unfortunately lacks the intensity of the other three. I say this not because the section itself is weak—every sentence of Prakash’s story about escaping Idi Amin’s purge of Asian Ugandans in 1972 is absolutely nerve-racking—it’s because Mootoo has wound the tension and mystery of the Priya-Prakash-Alex triangle so tightly through Priya’s narration that stepping away from her perspective had me impatiently turning pages tot where I could again see her story reach its climax.
Still, Mootoo would have been amiss to leave Alex’s perspective (along with her tone-deaf response to Prakash’s experiences) unexplored since it adds depth and tension to an already multilayered story. In merging a novel about refugees with a novel about decades of relationship tension, Mootoo has created something special that, much like its namesake, merges identity, friendship, sexuality, love, culture, race, and desire. Far from leaving readers chilled, Mootoo’s vortex will drive them on their own desperate searches through memory.
Thank you to Book*hug Press for providing Shrapnel with a media copy of Polar Vortex.
Polar Vortex is available now for purchase at Book*hug Press’ website and in bookstores across Canada.
Price: $23.00 CAD
ISBN: 9781771665643
Pages: 288
Genre: Fiction
Pub date: March 3, 2020
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Book Review
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August 31,
2020
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Ian Rogers
is originally from New Hampshire, USA, and lives and works in Toyama, Japan. His short fiction chapbook "Eikaiwa Bums" was published through Blue Cubicle Press's Overtime series, and his other short fiction and essays have appeared in The Millions, Eastlit, The Drunken Odyssey, Four Ties Literary Review, and elsewhere. He blogs about balancing creative work with keeping the bills paid at butialsohaveadayjob.com.