Wiebe, Rudy - Come Back

 

Wiebe, Rudy. Come Back. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014

First, a disclaimer: for me to critique either the quality or the content of any of Rudy Wiebe's work would have to be considered presumptuous, what with fully a page-length of titles of literary work behind him, much of it publicly and critically acclaimed. So this is not about evaluating, but about the experience—by only me—to the reading of Come Back.

                A good friend gifted me with Come Back as we celebrated a "Thompson United Mennonite Church alumni" Christmas in Winnipeg recently. I was half way through it by the time we reached home in Rosthern and puzzling about the Author's Note that precedes the novel: "The 'Hal' in this fiction was a character in my first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many . . ." Was this necessary to prevent its being read as autobiography, possibly as a bookend complementing his 2007 Of this Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest?" I couldn't think of any other reason for the note; Come Back certainly doesn't depend on a reread of Peace Shall Destroy Many for coherency.

                But inasmuch as the primary setting in Come Back is territory on which I've walked a lot myself—roughly the Old Strathcona, Whyte Avenue section of Edmonton—and the fact that this is the same ground which both "Hal" and the author consider home, distinguishing the novel from the author was a challenge for me. Those who know Wiebe know that it's not only the setting that he and his fictional Hal Wiens have in common; tragedy very similar to that which gives rise to the central motif of the novel visited the Wiebe household in the early '80s and the existence of Aspen Creek also has family resonances.

                A writer's life quite obviously provides the grist from which a novel is milled. I recently read and reviewed Miriam Toews' All My Puny Sorrows and it shares with Come Back the portrayal of that excruciating pain that is in-family suicide. Is the experience of losing a son, a father, a sister to voluntary, untimely death comprehensible only to those who've gone through it? I've wondered. And is the surviving family by implication invariably guilty of failing to prevent such a tragedy? I too have lost a child—in my case in a highway accident—and that experience has taught me that the stone-in-the-shoe of regret (guilt?) will linger, subside, recur for a lifetime but never disappear. This is a theme worthy of exploration and sharing and it's possible that novels like Toews' and Wiebe's fill a void, one made more poignant in our time by the reconsideration of voluntary death, abortion law and the postmodern climate's permission to rethink older, assumed paradigms regarding life and death.

                Come Back is far more complex than the above would suggest, however. Hal Wiens' "stone of regret" is reawakened 25 years after his son Gabriel took his own life at age 23. Hal and Dene friend Owl are having coffee on Whyte Avenue when through the window, Al sees an orange down-filled parka and the long-hair and walk that is exactly his long-dead son. He rushes out in pursuit, causes a traffic accident by running across the street against the red light but doesn't catch up to the person or apparition. The sighting drives him into his basement where his recently-departed wife, Yolanda, has stored all Gabriel's effects, particularly day planners, coil binders and scraps of writing that he compulsively filled  with thoughts and impressions in his final few years. It's this story within Hal's story that grips and stings: the despair, the hopelessness, the fatalism of a young man inexplicably and increasingly devoid of all joie de vivre.

[Day Planner: 25 July 1984]

8:00 why does it go on and on, self-inflicted. Dear God where are you  Man and alone  both sets of parents have cars  they must both be somewhere close  close only counts in horseshoes XH4U

5:30 DM fuer a Whopper and coffee

End this—

I can do it. To hell with money  here I go.

In bed by 9:45 p.m. Wednesday  o sweet sleep of the dead. be dead  (p. 61)

This excerpt from a diary entry posted while backpacking through Europe is typical of the stream of consciousness style of Gabriel's writing. He jots down a partial thought, something else occurs and the first thought breaks off. As reader, I found I had to do some work to grasp the flow of Gabriel's thinking while allowing the disconnectedness to live as representative of a disjointed, sad state of mind that would eventually lead to suicide.

                Why are we depressed? Why are some people chronically bipolar and others not? There's no certain explanation and Come Back suggests none. In Gabriel's notes, however, it becomes clear that there's stuff going on in him that's probably symptomatic of some pathology.  Particularly striking in his behaviour is his infatuation at 23 with the 13-year old daughter of family friends. Her name is Ailsa and he obsesses about her to the point of writing her letters and declaring his love for her repeatedly in his notes and diary. Memories of Nabokov's Lolita come to mind easily but Gabriel's obsession is that of a man just barely past boyhood and although he recognizes cognitively the absurdity of his unusual attraction (he is also infatuated with Nadia Comeneci and Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas, both females with little-girl-like characteristics), the fantasy of Ailsa as lover persists against all reason, including his own:

June 17, 1985

Well, I look at (in my mind's eye) A[ilsa]'s family and they are nothing special. Middle-class ordinary. And let's face it, what I've observed is that A is physically beautiful but otherwise nothing at all special either—I'm being very cruel—lousy school marks, Christian (?) rock, clothes clothes—why have I created her (with those incredible green eyes) into this legend? All of us, me in particular, are nothing special / I love her, I love everything about her, the things she likes, does, wears, I love every part of her body I have ever seen.

    What does one do with love, emotions, tenderness what stops me

    As the old joke goes: I refuse to worship a god who creates a pathetic lump like me. No way. (178)

                And then there must be some mention of his relationship to church, Christ and God beyond what is telling in his "old joke" above. The Wiens family has apparently been regulars at the generic Edmonton Mennonite Church and it becomes apparent in the latter part of the novel that Gabriel has spent considerable time perusing his Bible, even underlining passages that have struck him, but in a kind of "reverse proof texting" way. Gabriel is disappointed in both the church and the God who is adulated there. "So okay, God, you create a world, a world we have to exist in. Why?" (184) Those who attribute beauty and joy to the benevolent hand of God will adore him; those who experience their lives as tedious, often painful, always meaningless may attribute their reality to God as well, and despise him for it. Gabe's self-loathing generalizes to the one who made him.

                But Gabe's ennui and the tragic end to which it leads is essentially a sub-plot. We come back to those who live on with that stone of regret, of "if onlys." In this story it's Gabriel's father, Hal, the novel's protagonist and the one who can only barely abide the excruciating pain of a tragic past that can't be undone. Wiebe masterfully evokes his dilemma in the imagery of the orange down-filled parka flashback, the ravens that circle the intersection near the old Strathcona Hotel, the dizzying height of the High Level Bridge over which Gabriel used to pass (and from which, Hal realizes, he could have jumped at any time), the search for the wearer of the orange down-filled parka up and down the right bank of the North Saskatchewan.

                As readers, we empathize with Hal's longing for a chance to do over what causes us pain; the man in the parka is never found; the lost never Come Back.

                Come Back doesn't set out to propagate an idea or teach a lesson. It's neither an apology for faith nor for its opposite, doesn't paint a smile on the face of sorrow. What it does, though, is depict courageously and skillfully a significant reality in human life in a way that seems honest . . . at least to me.

                Does it succeed as art?  My test of that is simple: if it moves me, if it carries me along and lingers well after I've put it down, it's probably art. But such judgments end up being moot considerations most of the time, tangled up in questions of taste, literacy and whether or not what's read as a book, seen as a visual representation or listened to as speech or music supports our current and preferred worldview.

                Would I recommend it if asked? Yes, of course. I'd recommend it partly because it's a "hard read;" Wiebe's work has always assumed thoughtful effort on the part of his readers, and literary workouts are probably as good for us as physical exercise.

                If a "work of art" happens to provide insight into the life with which I personally am seeking to come to grips, well that's a bonus.