Robert Kroetsch's But We Are The Exiles [shows no absence of emotional or imaginative structure]. Kroetsch has thought deeply about his characters and his theme, trying to merge them symbolically in a sort of Virginia Woolf way. Peter Guy is running away from a soured love affair, and chooses to run by sailing up and down the Mackenzie River as a pilot. Hornyak, the man who stole his woman, has now bought the boat on which he serves and, in a vengeful moment, Peter consciously arranges for Hornyak's accidental death…. (p. 47)

[An] amazing amount of corroborative detail gives verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. For though Kroetsch knows his Arctic, the river, the boats and the men, and has lived a long time in the setting he so vividly describes, he is also an academic…. So he imposes layer after layer of symbolism on his basic story. The aimlessness of Guy's life is contrasted with his pilot's skill on the river. The river is life, but it causes death—spiritual and physical death. After Hornyak's body is found, it becomes like an albatross round the necks of the crew of the Nahanni Jane. Closely paralleling some of the details of The Ancient Mariner, the story, like the barge, sinks under the weight of its triple symbolism. The style also gets more and more involved until the final expiation is a sentence some fifty lines long—almost a whole dense, unintelligible page.

Though there are great moments in But We Are The Exiles, it is too contrived, too rigidly controlled in its form to get to us…. In fact, one wonders, with all that symbolism, what the fuss is really about. (pp. 47, 49)