Wiebe grapples with death.Fernando Morales/The Globe and Mail
Rudy Wiebe's writing has been called both "craggy" and "magnificent," qualities which are both found in his lastest novel, Come Back. A two-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award, and an officer of the Order of Canada, Wiebe is regarded as the founder of a new era of Mennonite literature (with the publication of his controversial breakout novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many, in 1962), and has become a champion of Prairie literary culture. Wiebe no longer has to work for his reputation. But work he does.
In a sense, Come Back brings Wiebe's work full-circle: its protagonist, Hal Wiens, was an eight-year-old boy when he appeared in Peace Shall Destroy Many. In Come Back, he's become a retired professor living in a kind of stasis following the death of his wife, Yo. Since her passing months before, Hal has not altered a single thing in their home – even her clothes hang untouched in the closet. One simple routine keeps him going: each morning, he visits a coffee shop in downtown Edmonton with his Dené friend, Owl, and watches the action outside the café window.
One morning, a man passes by wearing an orange, down-filled jacket – the very jacket that belonged to Hal's son, Gabriel. Hal suddenly perceives that the man is Gabriel, and launches himself out of the chair and the café in pursuit. But he cannot run fast enough. When he finds his way home, alone and distraught, he stretches out on the kitchen floor and begins, against his will, to remember. "His nothing control broke," Wiebe writes. "He saw the day cracked wide open to that remorseless memory always poised to strike."
Hal's dreaded "day of irreducible remember" is September 8, 1985, the day he learned of Gabriel's suicide.
For the first time in 25 years, Hal opens the boxes in the basement marked "Gabriel" and begins to read his son's journals and letters, written in the years and months leading to his death.
Wiebe is known for his ability to weave nostalgia with tragedy, to pose hard-hitting questions within the context of love. Come Back's questions are excruciating: how does one recover from the death of one's own child? What about when that death is a suicide? What do we retain of our loved ones after they are gone?
These questions are personal for Wiebe – his own son, Michael, committed suicide in 1985.
Despite its bitter subject, Come Back's tone is kind, and maintains an ethic of honesty. Even its starkest passages are underwritten with a kind of grave acceptance. Gabriel's private thoughts, recorded in his journals, are peppered with macabre lists ("1985 options: -continue as I am, -continue: leave next summer for good (where?), -end it") and obsessive reflections on his own downward spiral.
In a passage written at the family's cabin, Gabe's inner balance tilts from security to instability: "I scrape a few inside logs, sand smooth knots again. I love the long bulges of warm walls. The moon over the creek. Moving around in this empty house silence. Alone. With my futile dreams. Why am I?" Gabe's voice has a youthful proclivity to despair, but it shifts just as quickly to self-impatience. Because that private voice is unabbreviated, it gains both dignity and legitimacy.
Come Back's themes are markedly similar to those explored in Miriam Toews's latest, All My Puny Sorrows, which also deals with mental illness and suicide. But where Toews uses irony and dark humour to add levity, Wiebe's lyricism softens his material.
Wiebe, in Come Back, treats his characters' Mennonite roots with gentleness. In the grieving Hal, childhood prayers shiver awake in his memory when he is at his weakest, and offer something close to spiritual consolation: "Muede bin ich, geh zu Ruh / Tired am I, go to rest … Vater, moeg das Auge dein / Father, may your eye / Ueber meinem Bette sein. / Watch over my bed."
But Wiebe's principal achievement in Come Back is his avoidance of consolation. There is no cure for the pain of premature loss. Longing for the missing loved one will tug at the heart, call that command in perpetuity. Wiebe makes us attend to the beauty of the call.
Julienne Isaacs is a Winnipeg writer, and books editor for Rhubarb magazine.