[In the following, Turbide offers high praise for Green Grass, Running Water.]

Last year, Thomas King wrote A Coyote Columbus Story, a sly tale for children about Coyote, a traditional Indian trickster figure, and a greedy Christopher Columbus. Coyote, who loves baseball, sings and dances the whole world into existence—and accidentally conjures up the explorer. Columbus is searching for gold, chocolate cake, computer games and music videos while his companion sailors covet "a four-dollar beaver," "a fifteen-dollar moose" and "a two-dollar turtle." When Columbus enslaves Coyote's native friends, she tries to undo the damage. In Green Grass, Running Water, King's second novel for adults, Coyote—and the anarchic spirit that it embodies—turns up again in small-town Alberta. Playful and droll, Green Grass is a sophisticated satire on relations between natives and whites. But it is the freshness of voice that sets the book apart, an exhilarating blend of the real and the magical, the sacred and the profane, working themselves out in the lives of five Blackfoot Indians.

Like Coyote, King has been busy creating fictional worlds. One of them is the script that he wrote for a CBC movie, scheduled to air this fall, based on his first novel, Medicine River (1990), about a native man who returns to his home town to set up a photography shop. King, 49, is part Cherokee, part German and part Greek. Currently at the University of Minnesota, he taught native studies for 10 years at the University of Lethbridge, near a Blackfoot reserve. The main characters in Green Grass reflect his familiarity with that world: they are real and varied, defying stereotypes. At one point, a white man complains: "You guys aren't real Indians anyways. I mean, you drive cars, watch television, go to hockey games."

The plot defies summary. In part it traces the lives of five Blackfoot Indians whose paths intersect in the town of Blossom or on the reserve. Lionel Red Dog, a mild-mannered underachiever, sells TVs and stereos. He is in love with Alberta Frank, a university professor of native studies who wants a child but not necessarily a husband. Alberta also dates Charlie Looking Bear, a slick lawyer who represents a company that owns a massive hydroelectric dam. The company is involved in a 10-year lawsuit with Eli Stands Alone, Lionel's uncle, whose small property blocks the dam's spillway, keeping it from operating. And there is Latisha, Lionel's sister, who runs the Dead Dog Café, a tourist trap that purports to sell dog meat as a "traditional" native meal. In fact, the "Houndburgers, Saint Bernard Swiss Melts and Deep-Fried Puppy Whatnots" are beef. The tourist buses roll in daily.

Weaving in and out of those individual stories is a wildly surreal account of four aged Indians who have mysteriously disappeared from an asylum. Their many previous escapes have coincided with several real-life disasters, including the stock market crash of 1929. Each of the Indians, called Hawkeye, the Lone Ranger, Ishmael and Robinson Crusoe, takes a turn as narrator, often with Coyote interrupting.

The storytelling is strewn with puns, literary allusions, tongue-in-cheek asides and comic revisions of Western religious beliefs. In one segment about the Garden of Eden, an Eve-like figure called First Woman brings home food from a talking tree: apples, melons, bananas, hotdogs, fry bread, corn, potatoes, pizza and extra-crispy fried chicken. But God is upset. He objects to talking trees and says: "Wait a minute. That's my garden. That's my stuff." First Woman packs up and leaves—as do all the animals, refusing to live with such a stingy neighbor. Meanwhile, God shouts, "You can't leave because I'm kicking you out."

As that and other Christian myths get mangled in the retelling, the cumulative effect is not so much disrespectful as distancing. By portraying biblical stories from a native point of view, King shows how illogical and foreign the natives found the Christian religion. And without resorting to polemics, he illustrates how white culture misinterpreted, ridiculed and even outlawed native beliefs.

King deftly handles the complex plotting, using short chapters that frequently shift the point of view. It is disorienting at first: the fast rhythm and sudden detours keep the reader off balance. But the technique works, creating suspense about how all the disparate story lines will come together. And King's sense of glee is infectious as he indulges in a form of literary and historical name-dropping: everyone from Susanna Moodie to Nelson Eddy shows up.

Much of King's subject matter is darkly tragic. The self-pity of Alberta's drunken, abusive father and the degradation that Charlie's actor father felt when he was forced to wear a false nose in the movies are part of the same burden of prejudice. And underneath lies a legacy of betrayal: the title's "green grass, running water" refers to a standard phrase in land treaties that was supposed to guarantee Indian rights in perpetuity.

Still, in the spirit of Coyote, King maintains a light, mischievous touch throughout. Tellingly, one of his characters remarks, "There are no truths, only stories." Green Grass, Running Water offers several stories, all original, witty and stylishly executed, and all adding up to more than a little bit of truth.