Ever since his now infamous 1989 Harper’s manifesto on the state of contemporary American literature, Tom Wolfe has been hammering away at his thesis that today’s writers are too caught up in the tedious psychological traumas of their protagonists to give two hoots about society. Social realism of the kind mastered by Dickens, according to Wolfe, has gone the way of the dodo bird (Wolfe’s own fiction being the exception). What better answer to rebut Wolfe than Ice Lake, John Farrow’s excellent sequel to his Dickensian 1999 debut, City of Ice.

Once again Farrow draws readers into the snow-blown city of Montreal, lacing his tale with murder, intrigue, and intertwined layers of organized crime, linguistic tension, and socio-historical anxieties. Montreal detective Émile Cinq-Mars returns as Farrow’s protagonist, this time chasing a crime that involves multiple murders, international pharmaceutical companies, the Mohawk Warriors, the Hell’s Angels, an order of monks, and a highly secretive and ethically challenged race to find the cure for AIDS.

Binding the story’s multiple threads are the enduring historical realities of Montreal and Quebec. Farrow writes: “From the dawn of [Montreal’s] conception, then, commerce and religion were the quarrelling progenitors of the unborn city…. What had also commenced was the enduring friction between religious orders and the mercantile class, between secret societies and, if not a savage, then an obstinate public.” Farrow’s protagonist then summarizes over 300 years of intervening history with the remark: “Not much had changed.”

Ice Lake certainly achieves the goals set down by Wolfe’s essay. Farrow puts the current organized crime war in Quebec into historical perspective, offering readers a new way of looking at the world, a new way of understanding the realities that shape our lives. Perhaps we should not be surprised that he does not offer much hope.