reviewed by Sarah Slim, September 10, 2020
Since its inception, literature has used tales and legends orally passed on from generation and later the written forms to highlight the everlasting conflict between good and evil. It is, therefore, important means to reflect on the human’s feelings and thoughts since they have lived on Earth. This conflict, which has been the theme for many literary works in the form of poetry and fiction, creatively and meticulously addressed various topics such as wars, conflicts, class and societal differentiation, colonialism, slavery, freedom, as well as diseases and epidemics that have dispersed the lives of million people including the current COVID virus. Recently, I have read The Gold Hunter fiction by Philip Atlas Clausen. This novel is about the eternal struggle between the good and evil, but the writer marries fantasy with reality. The gold hunter is the first part of a four-part series called “The Gold Discoverer.” The novelist took the idea from the fever of exploration for gold in California so that the story could have a moral dimension. It depicts the greed that afflicts man and makes him in a constant and determined quest to reach everything without consideration for others. In the novel, the main character Peter discovers a path down a lake and takes us to an amazing place full of surprises and more like a Ali Baba’s Cave. Of course, because Peter wanted to fulfill his family’s dreams, he took what he wanted in gold so that he could realize his family’s dreams, such as building a steam-powered wooden mill for his father, a house for his mother and a horse for his sister. But all his hopes were in vain when the king of the mountains heard about gold and wanted to seize it for himself because he was the king and he had the right to do so. Through this interesting narrative, the writer was able to get his readers involved and make them a part of his work by adopting an easy and simple way of conveying his idea, so that we the readers have no difficulty in tracking events and characters. The writer also relied on symbolism and spirituality to reaccount many things such as religion and the dreams that Peter saw. I found this wisdom in the novel: ” There was no time for pain or sickness, or adventure there was a work to do “” In this particular phrase, it is a reverence for the value of work, which can overcome all difficulties, however painful. The author has based the novel on many stories and references in which man played an important role in destroying others in order to gain wealth, as happened to the Native Americans. The novel also digs into the past of human beings to keep pace with the present in an attempt by the writer to link time and raise a question regarding the changes that have taken place and what will happen to us at the present time. The novel depicts how the human plants within him the seeds of evil as we can see everyday. The Gold Hunter combines imagination with fascination to tell a real world in which the man was and is still the main and perhaps the only source of all the miserable conflicts that occur in it.
Sara Slim
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