A good novel should have, so the dictum goes, depths, and Kroetsch's Badlands is suitably multidimensional. The bulk of the action tells the story of William Dawe, a domineering, hunchbacked man who abandons his family in Ontario and sets out on an ambitious journey on a flatboat down the Red Deer River into the Badlands of Alberta. In search of dinosaur bones, Dawe dreams of scientific fame, hopes to take up where his predecessors, eminent paleontologists, left off, hopes in fact to surpass their efforts by uncovering a perfect and unique specimen….

There are at least three overt levels of meaning in the book, all of which work at once and reinforce each other: the main action as it unfolds; Dawe's brief and often misleading entries in his notebooks; and summaries of events, based on these notes, made many years later by Dawe's daughter…. With the latter concern Kroetsch develops yet another level of significance—the problem of language, reality, and literary structure. The notes are selective, sometimes deliberately and even melodramatically contrived by Dawe for effect; they record, but also falsify experience.

Underlying the whole and providing its special impact are the mythic dimensions of the novel. Dawe's voyage westward is a quest for the past which, carried far enough, becomes an epic descent, a trip into hell. In a sense the men are graverobbers, scavengers of bone, probing the underworld for the derelict remains of prior life. Yet such an effort becomes at the same time a search for the source, the origins of existence. Considerations of time and space, and traditional images of light and dark, river and cave, sexuality and death add to this quality of the work, but Kroetsch's mythopoeia operates on a precise locale, and the archetypal echoes evolve naturally out of a particularity of detail and scene….

If there is a drawback to the novel it is Kroetsch's handling of language. The style reads like a deliberate and sustained parody of Faulkner, the more disturbing because so consistently employed and yet so apparently unnecessary. In his other novels Kroetsch cultivated an authentic manner of much energy and vitality. Here, the effect is somewhat dissipated by the interposition of a well-known, but under the circumstances, an alien voice. Still, with his particular blend of the comic and the serious, the actual and the mythical Kroetsch manages to make Badlands a narrative of considerable metaphorical density and literary appeal.