Frozen Formation

In the opening pages of her latest novel, Michelle Porter introduces readers to one of the main characters, a glacier. “A glacier’s a restless thing,” warns Doug, the uncle of Robbie, a young Métis man on a quest to find his father, who has disappeared on the ice. “Time moves differently when you’re out on a glacier,” the mountaineer explains to his nephew. “It’s possible for thousands of years of change to crack up in the ice in a sudden moment. Your father used to say the glacier’s cracks let the past catch up with the future.” With A Glacier’s Guide to Dying, Porter gives an inner life to the frozen formation, revealing its fluid, shifting nature. In doing so, she opens the door to another world, one in which Western notions of time collapse.

Like the “sparkling plumbing” and “icy tunnels” from which centuries-old material may suddenly emerge, the novel is structured around a series of flashbacks that surface throughout Robbie’s search. The story — which...