[In the following review, Wylynko praises The Puppeteer for Kroetsch's examination of the ephemeral and the permanent.]

Like a pulp fiction murder mystery, Robert Kroetsch’s The Puppeteer leads a host of bizarre characters through a fast-paced chase for icons, money and one another. But the plot line is merely a disguise for Kroetsch’s mockery of this popular form, and a mockery of the human need for permanence that motivates these pursuits. As in all of Kroetsch’s fiction, the novel’s central task is to illustrate how sharply humanity’s approach to life conflicts with the ways of nature.

In a universe whose only true constant is change, we tend to surround ourselves with things. We buy products, and their apparent permanence allows us to see life itself as a product, a stable entity. The reality we fear is that life is a process, one of birth, maturation, decay and death, with no preconceived universal meaning. Kroetsch ridicules this fear, and encourages the reader to embrace the beauty of life’s cyclical quality.

The action is steered by the novel’s narrator, Jack Deemer, a millionaire Calgary oilman who uses his wealth to collect a wide variety of items. Deemer fancies himself a descendant of history’s great collectors—Hadrian, Phillip II, and of course, Columbus, who, in acquiring the so-called New World for Europe, was “perhaps the greatest collector of them all”. As a puppeteer uses strings, Deemer uses money to manipulate the other characters in aid of his passion for collecting.

The novel is a sequel to Alibi, in which Deemer sends his agent, the despondent middle-aged William Dorfen, to search through Alberta and Europe for a spa, symbol of youth and regeneration. Along the way, Dorfen becomes implicated in the suspected deaths of Deemer’s wife Julie Magnuson and her doctor/lover Manuel de Meirdos. The bodies are never found. When The Puppeteer begins, Dorfen, fearful of Deemer’s vow to gain vengeance for Julie’s death, has been hiding out in Vancouver for four years. Here he meets Maggie Wilder, a middle-aged writer who, having fled her husband, sits in the attic of a borrowed house in her wedding dress, typing.

Maggie’s wedding dress is representative of the sense of permanence humans seek in material goods. A wedding dress is typically bought, worn and stored in the attic. On a much broader level, Deemer sets out to collect all the natural and man-made attributes of the world, until he has “four warehouses crammed with collections from around this spinning top we call a globe”. The novel suggests that this is the human approach to all of nature, the planet having “become an attic” through which we “rummage”.

Intrigued by Dorfen, Maggie journeys to Deadman Springs near Banff to uncover his past adventures. There she finds Karen Strike, a documentary journalist employed by Deemer to photograph, piece by piece, the entire lake where Dorfen presumably was involved in Dr. de Meirdos’ death. Absurdly, he sends her back each season to photograph the lake all over again. The function of photography is central to the collection of products. In order to collect things and to assign them value, we must first delineate them from another. In taking pictures, we specify an object and separate it from the natural whole. This act facilitates the Cartesian subject-object dualism that is central to Western thought, the scientific classification and dissection that helps us to understand nature’s components and at the same time lose sight of its essential unity. Framed, the photograph captures the object in a permanent time and place, allowing us to believe that permanence exists.

In the narrative structure, Kroetsch attempts to break down this sense of permanence by showing novel writing, like life, to be a process. When Maggie returns from the Spring, she finds that Dorfen has moved into her attic and is making puppets that mimic the novel’s characters. Harrassed victim turned puppeteer, Dorfen’s rendition of events reveals Deemer’s version to be merely a contrivance, subject to the changing whims of the ultimate puppeteer, Kroetsch himself.

This brand of narrative trickery, common throughout his work, has claimed for Kroetsch the reputation of ultimate postmodern writer. Writing that acknowledges itself as contrived corresponds perfectly with Kroetsch’s effort to illustrate the contrivances of all of humanity’s constructs, and the impact these constructs have on nature. In the race to collect, to gather, to put under glass, we transform the natural community into something artificial, unnatural, a purely human playground.

Yet, as Kroetsch also realizes, words themselves function every bit as much as photography to delineate objects, give them a human meaning, and provide opportunity to foster the sense of permanence we crave. In the quest for icons that brings the novel to a tumultuous climax, tantamount to a cops and robbers television series with everyone rushing to get the money, Deemer sarcastically asserts that he would “put words themselves under lock and key” if he could, along with beaches, lakes and the very darkness he lives in. In like manner, the novel will be collected as a finished product and put on the shelf.

In The Puppeteer, Kroetsch the artist melds with the theorist to at once provide a brilliant depiction of the human need to make an ephemeral world permanent while acknowledging that his own written work will fall victim to this obsession. But for the same reason the collector collects, the artist must write. As Kroetsch notes in his essay, “Beyond Nationalism: a Prologue”, it is simply our nature that “(h)earing the silence of the world, the failure of the world to announce meaning, we tell stories. ‘Once upon a time there was …’”