You Can't Get There From Here … [focuses on] the freedom of societies, and the problematic survival of indigenous cultures assaulted by Western technology and by the cultural package of ideas and attitudes which necessarily accompanies this technology.

You Can't Get There From Here is a very sophisticated novel. It should firmly establish Hood's place in the top rank of Canadian writers, confirming the promise in earlier novels and in short story collections such as Flying a Red Kite (1962) and The Fruit Man, the Meat Man and the Manager (1971). Hood's latest novel is simultaneously black comedy and a profound philosophical comment on human nature and societies; at once slapstick, tragic farce, and a sparkling parody of academic rhetoric and the classic disciplines of politics, economics and anthropology—a tonic, in short, for all academics. It is both a story of international intrigue and a parody of spy thrillers. All...