Ploughmen of the Glacier is an undisguised, sometimes clumsy attempt to say something cosmic about what Ryga's stage directions call "the elemental loneliness of the protagonists." Most of the dialogue is between Lowery, a fly-by-night journalist, and Volcanic, a stereotypically crusty prospector. We can gather that these two are supposed to function as existential icons partly because we are told that their conversation unfolds in a setting which "is possibly surrealistic to suggest a mountainside, up and down which POOR BOY struggles in his eternal, groping quest." Poor Boy himself acts as the folksy Canadian equivalent of a Greek chorus chattering on about Life and Death. At the same time, he doggedly carries a leaky bucket of water up the mountain in order to fill a leaky trough.

In case we miss the significance of this, hard-bitten newspaperman Lowery steps out of character for a moment and draws...