SLADE'S GLACIER

by Robert F. Jones

Simon & Schuster; 205 pages; $10.95

In his third and best novel, Robert F. Jones tracks the elemental grandeur of Alaska from feral Eden to pipeline ruination. In 1950 Bush-Pilot Buddies Jack Slade and Sam Healey are forced to land their aging C-47 in the icy outback. Charlie Blue, a Tlingit Indian shaman, appears and assists them through a surpassingly beautiful valley to rescue. The pilots promise to return, but before they can, Healey leaves Slade holding a smoking pistol and a murder rap in the wake of a saloon brawl. End of partnership. Slade settles down to homestead the secret valley. Thirty years later Healey ruthlessly claims a lake of high-grade petroleum that lies beneath the glacial moraine.

Jones' cast are rawboned archetypes. Debts to Hemingway and Jack London are duly paid. But a peculiar vein of mysticism transforms the tale. Exerting his territorial imperative, for instance, Slade is aided by a transubstantial raven, a platoon of aged Japanese marines (survivors of a 1940s infiltration of the Aleutian Islands), and the icebound corpses of prehistoric mammoths. But the grand gesture proves as impermanent as the ice.

In the end, nothing can withstand the relentless oil thirst of the "Outside." Yet the Pyrrhic stand has its effect: progress is stopped long enough for the reader to appreciate the value of natural Utopias--and a fiction that salutes them.

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