“My Lovely Enemy” by Rudy Wiebe

All of Rudy Wiebe’s novels are, in one way or another, thoughtful, frequently ponderous meditations on the four last things, Death, Judgement, Hell, and Heaven. This is another way of saying that they concern good and evil, God and the Devil: believing in the latter, Wiebe has no difficulty in conjuring the former. He is a profoundly serious writer whose anguished ruminations over ‘la condition humaine’ penetrate every corner of his fiction and threaten to undermine his intriguing situations and sometimes lively characters.

In My Lovely Enemy, his eighth novel, Wiebe’s protagonist—a middle-aged historical researcher, “world expert on western Canadian Indian and fur trade history”, who lives in Edmonton with his wife and daughter—confronts the moral dilemma of adultery. James Aaron (Jasch) Dyck, the narrator of this novel, falls in love with another researcher, a vibrant young woman with quick eyes and dark hair named Gillian Overton. And not unlike earlier Wiebe heroes, David Epp in The Blue Mountains of China and Louis Riel in The Scorched-Wood People, Jasch Dyck is concerned with—and perplexed by—the contradictions of human minds and souls, particularly the contentions of spirit and flesh. “I like the way my wife feels in my arms after fifteen years,” he says, “and I like the way you feel after two days…but I will not speak such contradictories.”

Such a sentence promises riches, promises to take us to the heart of modern suburban experience.

In this sense it marks a departure for Rudy Wiebe, whose previous works have explored social and moral choices in the isolated Mennonite communities of Canada and Russia (Peace Shall Destroy Many, First and Vital Candle, The Blue Mountains of China), and the ethical implications of the white man’s conquest of the Indian (The Temptations of Big Bear, The Scorched-Wood People). On the surface, at least, My Lovely Enemy appears to break new ground, promising to chart the vagaries and anguishes of modern love in that most modest of Canadian climes, Alberta.

As the novel opens, Jasch Dyck is busy dredging around in fur-trade documents. “Accumulating, sorting, matching and cross-referencing,” he is hotly pursuing the trail of one Maskepetoon, a nineteenth-century prairie Cree. Jasch’s base is the Micro-materials Room of the university, from where he returns home each night to the supportive domesticity of his wife, Liv, and daughter, Rebecca. Together they take invigorating walks with the pet dog and prepare everting meals to the clatter of dishes and bourgeois conversation. Into their world of lettuce salads, stoneware, and pressed wild-flowers comes nubile Gillian, wife of Dyck’s colleague, and herself a researcher—into English literature.

When she plunks her voluptuous body, “woman, definitely woman,” onto Dyck’s lap in the Micro-materials Room, she inverts his world of ordered routine and solid predictability. “It is like stepping through a mirror,” he says: “We will never again feel so innocent inside an accepting innocence we did not know we had and which we are already committed to leave without question.” From this point on we are prepared for the refinements of lust and deception that gild the modern romance; and knowing Rudy Wiebe, we anticipate heavy doses of guilt (“I sit here feeling guilty that I cannot feel guilt”) mixed with agonizing re-appraisals (“the certain temptation of Gillian drives me to the possible temptation of the personal Jesus”).

Dyck and Gillian travel to Calgary where he has research to do. Here they consummate their love. It is a weekend filled with lovers’ phrases and, for Jasch Dyck, respectable Mennonite, “an abrupt loosening I have known only a few times in my life.” Sexual joy, unaccustomed sensations of freedom, fugues of ecstasy alternating with remorse, unacknowledged desires: these are all anticipated as the lovers discover each other and themselves, first in the Palliser Hotel, and later at the site of an Indian medicine wheel where Jasch and Gillian unite with their primitive ancestors at the symbolic centre of the universe. “I have never been so fearfully, fathomlessly, naked,” Jasch says; “such awesome presence surrounds us, we have to close our eyes.”

Jasch knows that his idyll with Gillian must end. And he knows, too, that he must face the consequences of lust, of divided loyalty, both in his wife, Liv, and his own raw soul. For ecstatic couplings at the hub of the universe notwithstanding, he has a problem with “love”.

What is not anticipated is the resolution to this problem. It begins in the Palliser Hotel when Jasch is visited by none other than Love himself, in the guise of God the Son. In response to Dyck’s fears he offers some interesting observations on human and divine love. Jasch asks,

“Did you ever love anyone with your body?”
“Do you think God gave you passion without having any himself?”
“Did you?”
“What kind of eviscerated human being do you think me?”
“Weren’t you a virgin?”
“Virgin? Heavenly Father, what does ‘virgin’ have to do with anything?”

The conversation is interrupted at this provocative juncture, but it resumes some time later when Jasch is still wrestling with flesh and spirit. Here the point is made more heatedly: “God is passion; he is hopelessly, endlessly in love!” When Jasch resists, quibbling on the semantics of “passion” and “love”, his heavenly interlocutor spells things out this way: “God is other all right, beyond humanity certainly but not incapable of anything mankind can do, I mean why should God deny himself any of humanity’s greatest blessings?—that sexuality is now connected to all the worst possible sins, especially for people like you who reject the so-called old-fashioned morality of their parents.”

It is thus with God inspiring him that Jasch Dyck takes his first tentative gulps of the heady air of modern, open-ended, “free” love. In a rush he learns about dispossessing himself of both wife and lover, of mortifying jealousy, of love within as well as between the sexes. Some of his new knowledge comes to him during dream-like exchanges with his loved ones; at other times he is firmly rooted in the world of realism, with a dying mother, inquisitive daughter, and pesky dog. He seems more comfortable as James Dyck, and the visitations from above lead him to affirm Liv’s claim that “Love is trust beyond all possibilities.”

My Lovely Enemy concludes with such positive tones, and it seems important to note that Wiebe intends the novel to confirm the profundity and resilience of love. In the final paragraphs his characters stand together in a circle, and their union is both a testament to love’s power and a prayer for its continuance.

This is the novel’s finest quality, and it serves to remind us that Wiebe has not come such a long way from the various affirmations in his earlier works: of the divine in sinful man in Peace Shall Destroy Many; of the unity of soul in The Temptations of Big Bear. In other ways My Lovely Enemy reflects Wiebe as well. He is still fascinated with rotund sentences and pompous diction—”Philosophers sometimes speak of us as living in a wider ‘fictive’ or ‘specious’ present in which we continually try to remember past facts so that we can create a sound present understanding of character and world in the light of an unexpected future, but we still have only our one, particular, point of view and we are inevitably subject to the ‘anthropocentric illusion’, we ourselves are entangled in these memories and expectations, we always are.”

And my Lovely Enemy demonstrates, despite its suburban setting, its racy subject matter, that Wiebe remains preponderately a novelist of ideas. Whether through or in spite of his characters he lectures, he muses, he philosophizes, he hectors. Authorities from Plato to Rilke are cited chapter and verse to make abstract and intellectual points. Conversations between otherwise lively characters become entangled over semantics and die in a colloquy of quoted sources. There is more than the residue of the Sermon left in Wiebe’s style. Entire passages of the novel take the form of lectures on modern love. (Is Wiebe aiming these at his audience? Or are these passages more accurately perceived as fragments of an on-going discourse between Mennonite conservative Wiebe and his modern self?) In either case, the novel shows that whatever subject matter comes to his hand, Wiebe will always be found contem-plating the agonies of human choice and yearning for resolutions at once satisfying to mind and gratifying to desire. ♦

Wayne Tefs is a Winnipeg novelist and critic.