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The Man from the Creeks

by Robert Kroetsch

Gold makes men dizzy, it stirs crazy dreams, and then come the hasty books explaining why it never was and how everybody should have seen through it from the start. That, anyway, is the Bre-X experience, all over now except for the litigation and the books. Robert Kroetsch’s ninth novel won’t be mistaken for one of them, even if it is a lesson in the bad ends you can come to when you go looking for gold. For one thing, The Man From the Creeks is a tale of times long bygone, a tale firmly planted in the Klondike where, 100 years ago, men actually did get rich from digging the ground. For another thing, it isn’t nearly as complexly coiled a story as Bre-X, it travels in a more or less straight line, which means that you can see the end coming from the first chapter. That’s not in itself a fatal flaw. What is? The Man from the Creeks is a novel about gold fever and all its attendant danger and excitement, adventure and dash. Sorry to say, none of it’s contagious.

It is the story, set in 1896-97, of our 14-year-old narrator, a scamp named Peek. He and his mother hear of the gold up Dawson City way and, as stowaways, find a ship to take them there. Along the way, son and mother (name of Lou) hook up with a fellow called Benjamin Redd who’s going the same way. In the Yukon, Ben aims to buy into a claim staked by one Dan McGrew.

If this is starting to sound as familiar as, say, a poem of Robert Service’s, well, bingo, the decisive stanza of “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” is exactly where this story’s headed. That would be the one where “pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew, / While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the lady that’s known as Lou.” (This we know because it serves the book as an epigraph.)

Chronicling a death foretold isn’t, of course, taboo. And you have to hand it to Kroetsch, he keeps his characters on the move, speeding them from one cartoonish incident to another, so the novel feels quick in its pace. And yet there’s nothing to really hold you to it. Certainly not Peek, who’s true-hearted and loyal, perhaps, but also terminally plain of phrase and a seer only of surfaces. If it’s the grip of gold fever you’re after, or the push and pull of compelling drama, you’re better off with Robert Service.

 

Reviewer: Stephen Smith

Publisher: Random House Canada

DETAILS

Price: $29.95

Page Count: 320 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-679-30917-9

Released: Apr.

Issue Date: 1998-3

Categories: Fiction: Novels