Tim Welsh’s Ley Lines presents Canada’s Yukon Gold Rush as a captivating Ouroboros. The novel’s gilded stretches and calcium-laden mines are painted with absurd characters and events which echo through the waning days of the frontier—and the rise of the twentieth century’s supposedly civilizing hegemony.

The story commences at the Dog Dick Inn, with Sasha and Steve Ladle reminiscing on Sawdust City’s prosperous days, exchanging stories of deceased or departed miners, vanishing fast as a gold vein. Early on, Welsh introduces Steve Ladle. He is the unluckiest sourdough in town: “the town’s oldest loser, the earliest sourdough to arrive too late. A Southerner of middle age, Ladle was back in Sawdust City empty-pocketed, fresh off a fruitless week at his claim, sipping from a small bottle of 40-rod whiskey and feeling sorry for himself” (p. 3). Enter notorious gap-toothed bunko man, Lyle Bone, with the perfect opportunity for a desperate man: climb the summit of Mount Magda for two hundred dollars. Why? Bone won’t say. Even the mission’s financier, Professor Zong, hasn’t told him why.

But the money’s good, so Ladle and Bone set out for Mount Magda with a box of donuts from Sasha and other supplies. Their trip up Mount Magda, short as it is in the narrative, is full of interesting events. The characters face freezing temperatures, and Welsh reveals Ladle’s young family, left behind as he pursues a gilded mirage in the Yukon; but most relevant for later is an intriguing whistle they use to find each other if the mountain separates them. Ultimately, their trip up Mount Magda is less important than what follows them down the mountain: the Ear.

As Ladle and Bone descend the mountain, returning to the Dog Dick Inn to celebrate their success, the narrator stresses that neither spoke on their journey. But the reader knows that a benevolent, hovering, seven-foot-tall monstrosity trails behind them. When they arrive, they enter the inn, and the alabaster ear waits outside. Until it doesn’t.

Ladle and Bone are “sheepish in their reluctance to introduce the visitor. Perhaps they suspected the Ear was a high-altitude hallucination that had been conjured up between them, and to speak of it aloud would shatter the fragile shared reality it lived in” (p. 18). Sasha is the first person to point out that this isn’t a fever dream. But where Ladle sees madness and Sasha sees novelty, the inn’s proprietor Emil “Pood” Roodle, sees “the big strike we’ve all been waiting for!” (p. 18)

And it is a big strike. The Ear sweeps Sawdust City into another golden age. People flood into town, all for an audience with the Ear. Bunko man Bone starts a lucrative racket, forty-rod whiskey runs free as water, and the tourist boom is so great that “rooms were in such short supply that a large city of tent hotels sprung up outside the ferry docks and along the path to Twentymile Creek” (p. 20). But these good times are not perpetual. Just as the Gold Rush had its time to shine before dwindling into copper, the Ear must, eventually, go deaf.

When Zeb “Lightning Rod” Dingle arrives in town, he manages to avoid Bone’s scams and rents a cramped broom closet at the Dog Dick Inn. Zeb is a Californian on a quest for his missing uncle, Portus Mayo, and he thinks the Ear may have answers for him. But something sets Zeb apart from the other pilgrims seeking the Ear: He can’t see it. Even when it floats in front of him, even when Sasha touches it, he cannot see the giant floating ear. This prompts the reader once again to question if this is some psychosis that’s strangled the town. With his hopes for an audience squashed, Zeb searches for his uncle alongside Portus’s former associates, Professor Zong and Reginald Bweebe. But after that path bears no fruit, Zeb resigns himself to his lodging at the Dog Dick Inn, where a party has erupted, celebrating the town’s newest millionairess.

The ensuing night is a piano-playing, folk music-singing, alcohol-guzzling clamor. Time becomes unstable, people seem to teleport, but most critical for the narrative is this: When Zeb Dingle at last sees the Ear, he shoots it; he has no idea how, but it happened. “He had never fired a gun before—never even held one, until that moment, when he opened his eyes and found himself back in the Dog Dick Inn, coiled over a hot musket” (p. 63). In a single moment, the town’s ready to lynch Zeb. With the help of enforcer-for-hire Don Fontanelle and Ladle, he avoids mob justice in Ladle’s claim.

Despite the Ear surviving the attack, as months pass the town ebbs towards collapse and obscurity. This is the first occurrence of the novel’s recurring argument: that time is a cycle of great highs and even greater lows. The town had already been fading into irrelevance, and the Ear’s arrival gave it only a temporary popularity spike, for it now to decline further. All the while, Zeb roughs it out in the unforgiving wilds, searching for gold that, by all rights, is Ladle’s. When he succeeds, Zeb considers his luck to Ladle’s: “When it was done, he looked at the cleft in the land and the bags he’d accumulated. A lifealtering strike, right there before him. He thought of Ladle—how the promise of his claim had finally been realized, and how a twist of geography gave up more in an instant than did days, weeks, months and hours of effort” (p. 104). There’s a fascinating cruelty in this. In order to be rich, Zeb had to reach his lowest point; in order for Ladle’s claim to produce gold, it had to be mined by someone other than him. Amidst this great strike, and the town’s approaching doom, Bweebe and Zong make a discovery: a massive Nose frozen in ice. It offers far more malevolence than its cousin, the Ear.

Throughout all this, the narrator treats the reader to a series of character-focused chapters. We delve deeper into Don Fontanelle’s personal life with his young wife, Molly; we explore another town, Skagway, alongside Ladle; Zeb books passage on a “coffin ship” where he nearly dies; and Pood boards up the pink doors of the Dog Dick Inn. Menace threads itself through these chapters: The haunting specter of the Nose waiting, its potential thundering through its icy prison. Unfortunately, Bweebe succeeds in freeing the Nose and then “there was nothing—nothing that ever was and nothing that could ever be again. All history was brought to the very outer station of its death cycle, and the Klondike, as it existed before, was cleaved in two” (p. 158). The following chapter details the destruction the Nose leaves behind: A shock wave kills the men working at the Nose’s glacial prison, a Yukon mine explodes, Bweebe’s glass mansion shatters. The Nose destroys the ferry docks, small businesses, and homes in Sawdust City, before heading straight to the town’s focal point—the Dog Dick Inn, where it “detonated itself, razing every remaining tree and building within a two-mile radius” (p. 162). Where the Ear brought hope for prosperity, the Nose brings destruction, and the narrator goes as far as to state this:

The violence of the Ear was the violence of hope—it was the possibility of another world emerging from what was lost. The Nose was the cold reality; it was the reminder that these cycles of death and rebirth would continue to repeat in progressively more destructive iterations, until there was nothing remaining to consume. (p. 163)

This recurrent boom and bust cycle rings true through the remainder of the novel. Indeed, it is Welsh’s chief argument: that the greatest highs inevitably have their even greater lows; but that, despite the insistence on destruction in these bust cycles, something remains to rebuild, and usually that’s people. One such example is Zeb Dingle’s rise from near-death.

In the aftermath of the Nose’s rampage, Zeb Dingle goes from a fugitive of mob justice to a mine-owning tyrant, who beats his workers and holds them against their will. One of these slaves is Steve Ladle, without whom Zeb would not have a cent to his name.

During a blizzard paralleling the icy stretches of Mount Magda, Ladle gets lost, seeking out Don. He fishes out a pea-whistle, the same type he had used on that mountain, and presses his blued lips to it. “He felt nothing, but still, somehow, a thin toot of air pierced the wind. There was a pause, then, from near, an echo in response,” but Don Fontanelle isn’t the one responding. “‘Ladle, buddy, we almost lost you,’ said a voice. It was Bone” (p. 219). After downing some forty-rod, Ladle stresses that he wants to go home. Bone promises him that he is going home. The subsequent paragraph is heartbreaking. “The ride back to the mine was short—Ladle hadn’t moved nearly as far as he thought. There was no punishment. There was some paperwork, but he was free to leave at any time. They’re nice here. Where else would he go?” (p. 220).

If I were to explore all instances in the novel of this type of inversion of the past, I would be here forever, but one more is notable. Near the corpse of Sawdust City, out of that kernel of survival, the newly built Arcadia flourishes. Most of our cast moves here and builds new lives, including mine-owner and Arcadia’sMayor Zeb Dingle. He continues to experience inconsistent fortune, and his fate is inscribed in a bar song.

Then out from a shack the stranger came back, and ran up behind the spot;
He pulled out a musket from a strap on his back, pressed it at Dingle and shot
… Dingle got up and ran after the man, bleeding from out of his ass.
And I know that it seems bizarre, to be sure, but I swear that I’m bein’ sincere;
All that was left was a stain on the floor: a blood-dark blob like an Ear. (p. 295)

This scene’s parallels grip me. I hadn’t expected Zeb’s fate to mirror the Ear’s, including the shooter not knowing why he shot Zeb; but it is certainly delightful to watch lightning strike twice. One difference between their shootings, however, is the fatality of Dingle’s, mirroring a sentiment from earlier in the narrative: “From that original sin, an endless cycle of decay and rebirth would continue to repeat, each iteration growing more death-driven than the last—each generation clawing for smaller and smaller scraps of the great parceled-out lode” (p. 108). While this refers to natural resource exploitation, this is a consequence of the boom and bust cycle. Every great strike has its come-down. Because Zeb harmed the Ear in a less death-driven time, the Ear survived; because the attacker shot Zeb years later, at a time long removed from the good days of the Ear, and in the middle of a great come-down, Zeb dies with the Ear’s mocking emblem reappearing one last time.

This narrative describes itself as a “psychedelic odyssey” and it certainly was a “trip,” both temporal and spatial. There is no overarching achievement the characters seek. The reader is there to follow these characters through their lives as they transition from so-called “frontier” rough-and-tumble to the constraints of urban spaces. I’m excited for Welsh’s next title.