[In the following review, Scheick compares and contrasts Green Grass, Running Water with Trevor Ferguson's The True Life Adventures of Sparrow Drinkwater.]

In the beginning there was only water, begins Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water. Human life emerged from a swamp, begins Trevor Ferguson's The True Life Adventures of Sparrow Drinkwater. What is aqua pura in King's narrative is aqua regia in Ferguson's novel. The result is two works as different as day and night.

Green Grass features four timeless natives, at once male and female, who represent mythic forces. If these four escapees from a mental institution seem in their odd way driven by some cosmic purpose, the Canadian Blackfoot family with whom they interact seems adrift in time. This family and its acquaintances are characters in search of a theme, for a life-plot that truly includes them; for as natives, they find themselves playing minor, barely observed parts in another culture's version of reality. Their own story, the life-narrative in which they had major roles, has been lost, at least temporarily. In the scheme of things that version still exists, apparently submerged in the reservoir of mythic lore that comprises humanity's collective memory. And shards of this sunken heritage surface in the variation of reality presently “dreamed” into existence by Anglo-American culture.

The hope King's book offers his culture resides in the perception of existence life as “running water,” as an incessant flow of uncontainable possibilities. Even if Anglo-American culture seeks to obstruct this originative fluidity, to make adamantine its present version of reality through “power and control,” in fact (as the escapees, the re-edited video western, the resistance to filming the Sun Dance, and the rupture of a damn in the novel mutually suggest) reality is as unconfinable and as mutable as gushing water. Everything has been and will always be “potential” or imagination.” Since, accordingly, “there are no truths … only stories,” then narratives like King's novel may contribute to a revision of the present that better includes native experience and better fulfils their search for a theme, a purpose.

In the meantime/mean-time, King prescribes benign humour in response to “more than [one's] fair share of bad luck.” Humour is gentle resistance; it is also tolerant hope. Just wait and remember, he implies, and the present rendering of reality will eventually burst its imaginary bounds. Possibly the next life-narrative will integrate Native-American and Anglo-American cultures into a richer life-story for both.

I have spent the space allotted to me here not to divulge the plot of King's book, but to intimate its profundity. Nor is this book only a novel of ideas; it is an intricately textured work of art. In Green Grass, Running Water Thomas King has given us a wonderful/wonder-full books, as timeless as the mythic vision at its heart.

In contrast, Ferguson's Sparrow Drinkwater is heartless in its corrosive parody of the rise and fall of infamous Canadian businessman Norman le Blanc. Most of the story centres on the unsound protagonist's search for his demented mother and paedophile father (who sired the boy while disguised as great black bird). The chronicle is a long one full of cul-de-sacs, including blind-alley allusion to myths. Such a manner may represent the narrator's deranged mind, but (if my experience is typical) it also undercuts the reader's alertness, which eventually collapses into tedium.

The publisher's promotional commentary promises a “tale peopled with endearing” characters. Hardly. The swamp world, as reflected in this book, is indeed “unfit for human habitation”; it is a place where “without greed, we humans could never ascend from chaos, we'd be stuck in the mud of our bestiality forever.” A witch, who may or may not be reliable, makes this point in the novel; but everything in the book, especially given the absence of even a hint of an alternative vision, in effect makes this Ferguson's statement as well.

In Sparrow Drinkwater, in short, human sentiment is displaced by the author's acidic and nearly Calvinistic temperament. Attitude predominates, plenty of attitude, profligately disseminated in a superfluity of style. What purpose, one wonders time and again, is served by such an excursion? Finally, I did not care even about this last question.

Ferguson's undertaking may be someone's cup of tea, but it is not mine. I prefer grace rather than gall, and the company of human warmth. I found both in the aesthetic splendour of King's Green Grass, Running Water.