A review by opheodrys
Polar by T.R. Pearson

5.0

Local police officer Ray Tatum is the ostensible main character of Polar, but it’s hard to tell at times, given the outsized (nameless) narrator who commands most of our attention. Yes, there’s a missing little girl and yes, there’s a weary local cop who is compelled for both professional and personal reasons to find out what happened to her, and yes, there are colorful local characters and side-stories galore. If you’ve read Pearson in the past, you know what you’re in for. For context, however, Polar follows Blue Ridge, the second novel that features Ray Tatum as well as his cousin Paul Tatum. In Blue Ridge, there are counterpoint narrators, a third-person who tells Ray’s story and Paul who tells his own, creating a balanced duality both in form and character that serves to both enrich each character and sustain the delicate architecture of the narrative. The details of the narration of Blue Ridge are relevant only in the fact that Polar offers a further departure in narrative form, in that our first-person narrator is nameless, a self-important and often mean-spirited auteur who tells the story, it seems, not for the details of the missing Dunn girl or for the insights he has to offer about Ray Tatum and the local color, but because he is directing his own creative vision. The result is a tapestry of transformation, with each of the major characters undergoing some deep and fundamental change, for better and worse, in the context of an indifferent and self-interested media-driven society more interested in exploiting the vulnerable and the foolish than in fully comprehending the implications of a missing little girl. As is typically the case with Pearson, there are plenty of laughs, but reader beware: Polar is dark, cynical, and biting. Indeed, there’s little redemption and even less warmth between these pages than you might otherwise expect. Aside from the narrator’s tentative attempt to tidy things up, the end offers little resolution. Polar is, nevertheless, wholly satisfying, shot through with melancholy and loss, tweaking, in the end, perhaps a little transformation if not redemption for the determined reader.