[In the following excerpt, Deveson questions the hero-worshipping aspects contained in Sundog.]

Here, in one week, are two novels each of which is an exercise in a very American kind of hero-worship involving swimming at night in the icy waters of Wisconsin and the northern Michigan wilderness. In Jim Harrison's Sundog the narrator, a professional writer, travels beyond the Straits of Mackinac to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to seek out a man who is not only eccentric and remarkable but is clearly needed by the self-disguised writer as a superman before whom to demean himself. The narrator has been challenged: ‘You might try writing about someone who actually does something.’

Well, Strang, the man of action, has preached at tent meetings, has built huge dams in the jungles of Africa and Latin America, has left wives and mistresses and prostitutes scattered around the globe and dispenses casual macho erudition about machines, rivers, concrete, tropical diseases, fish, ‘wholeness, harmony and radiance’. His beautiful Costa Rican ‘daughter’ slinks around his remote log house wearing a minuscule bikini, practicing her dancing and arousing the lust and envy of the over-eating, voyeuristic, womanless ‘I’.

Strang suffers from epileptic seizures; he has taken Amerindian ground-root potions; he has been crippled in a fall from a dam in Venezuela; he is the son of his sister and an illegitimate blood relation of the narrator (an alter ego with a vengeance). Despite these handicaps, he manages finally to give a castrating ex-wife the slip by disappearing into the frozen waters, either to continue his unconquerable freedom elsewhere or to come to rest on the bed of Lake Superior, reunited (by the good offices of some pantheistic frontier mysticism) with the Wholeness of which he has always been a part in any case.

Nature is nearly at the centre of this novel, which creates powerful impressions of swamps and creeks, timber and rain, mosquitoes and blackflies, pink fog and the northern lights. But the book's real core is the narrator's hero-worship of Strang, and this is never properly subjected to scrutiny. Why is there an American need for supermen who stalk the wilderness? Why does Harrison seem at pains to avoid asking the question?