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Sweeter than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

Rudy Wiebe’s status as an important Canadian fiction writer is, to put it politely, puzzling. He has won two Governor General’s Awards (for The Temptations of Big Bear in 1973 and A Discovery of Strangers in 1994). He was a founder of the Writers’ Union of Canada. He has a considerable reputation abroad, particularly in Germany, perhaps because of his concentration on native Canadian stories and his German-speaking Mennonite background.

But when critics look carefully at Wiebe’s writing, as opposed to his subject matter, the adjectives that crop up repeatedly are “difficult” and “challenging.” There is little to love in the pages of a Rudy Wiebe novel. While his great strength lies in meticulous research, passion for his subjects, and a powerful narrative sweep, his weaknesses include a leaden moral earnestness, an inability to create believable characters or dialogue, and a streak of sentimentality that undermines whatever serious fictional goal he might set himself.

Sweeter Than All the World demonstrates all these strengths and weaknesses. It is Wiebe’s ninth novel and his third to concentrate on his Mennonite family and heritage. Although to call it his family is problematic, since Wiebe has created a fictional hero named Adam Wiebe, a doctor who bought enough IBM and Xerox stock early on to allow him to retire young and spend his time travelling the globe and researching his roots.

Adam Wiebe dives deeply into European history to tell tales of his ancestors back to 1527, while in parallel chapters we hear his personal story, from his birth in northern Alberta, through his Mennonite and medical education, to his marriage and its attendant complications and tragedies. This is a queasy mix of material, because the reader is never sure whether the material is factual or invented. It’s a technique Wiebe has used in many of his novels, partly, one suspects, to stir the pot among conservative Mennonites who cast a cold eye on the slippery ingenuities of fiction. But it may leave other readers confused.

The historical chapters are fascinating, ranging from female Wiebes being burned at the stake in The Hague and Antwerp, to the family’s escape to Danzig (Gdansk) in Poland, where the first Adam Wiebe makes his mark by building that city’s great earthen fortifications and inventing the prototype of the cable car as a primitive earth-moving machine. One branch of the family follows a mad millenarian preacher onto the Russian steppes, another heads for Turkestan, one group ends up in a Czarist invention called a Judenplan village, where a handful of Mennonite farmers are compelled to teach dozens of urban Jewish families how to work the land. As the 20th century closes in, a few lucky ones escape to Alberta, to Oklahoma, to Paraguay, while others are sucked into Stalin’s gulag, their fates rumoured, undocumented, contradicted.

All of this material Wiebe handles with aplomb, particularly when he zeroes in on telling details, such as the mechanics of the tongue-screw that was applied to the Anabaptist martyrs on their way to the stake, or the brilliance of the Frisian Mennonites on Europe’s north coast, miraculously turning sea into arable land. His description of the Chinese custom of female foot-binding, which some of his characters encounter in a 19th-century marketplace in Samarkand, is gruesome and compelling.

But these are the skills of a non-fiction writer. In his main story, Wiebe stumbles again and again. His hero, Adam, marries a girl he presumes to be WASP, but they both discover, two decades later, that she was really a Mennonite all along. What a coincidence! His wife leaves him after he starts in on the predictable midlife affairs, only to crawl back into his bed (after a family funeral, if you please). As a lover, Adam thinks he’s pretty hot stuff wooing his girlfriend with quotes from Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” followed by a Mennonite hymn.

Truly disconcerting is Wiebe’s treatment of a lost child, Adam’s daughter Trish, who simply vanishes one day while
travelling. Her father roams the world, fruitlessly searching, and becomes obsessed with all the Mennonite children who have died on relentless treks through hostile lands. Then, one day, Trish suddenly returns, reaffirming Wiebe’s sentimental belief that families can heal all wounds.

Robert Fulford has written that one problem with many Canadian writers is that they are solemn but not serious. In part, this applies to Rudy Wiebe. He is serious about history, especially about shining light into its dark and neglected corners. But the serious job of fiction – following human behaviour to its natural ends, without moral pointers or escapist plot twists – eludes him.

 

Reviewer: Bronwyn Drainie

Publisher: Knopf Canada

DETAILS

Price: $34.95

Page Count: 408 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-676-97340-X

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2001-10

Categories: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Novels

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