FACTS IN FICTION
RUDY WIEBE DRAWS ON REAL LIFE AND DEATH EXPERIENCES
You’d assume a CanLit icon would gravitate toward the indie café. Somewhere hip and local and probably overpriced, the kind of spot frequented by the beardy tattooed cool kids.
Not Rudy Wiebe. For the past 15 years, the distinguished Edmonton writer has sipped his cuppa joe at the Second Cup on the corner of Whyte Avenue and Calgary Trail, one of the busiest intersections in the city. The two-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and officer of the Order of Canada enjoys the people-watching, the anonymity.
“You get more privacy here,” says Wiebe, who is beardy but not visible tattooed. Here, he can think and observe strangers bustling by outside the window, perhaps scribble down a thought on a napkin. “People say hi and recognize me, but you don’t have to talk to anybody. I don’t want to talk to anybody.”
Wiebe’s coffee haunt is the setting for a haunting, pivotal scene early in his new novel, Come Back (Knopf Canada). Protagonist Hal Wiens, an old Mennonite man, is sitting in the café (fictionally named Double Cup) when he sees his dead son, Gabriel, walk past the window in his signature orange down-filled coat. It is thrilling and disturbing for Hal, who then begins a journey searching for answers to the unanswerable: Why did his eldest son commit suicide at age 24?
That very question is something Wiebe has asked himself for nearly 30 years. His eldest son, Michael, ended his life in 1985, at the same age.
“Every writer writes about the basis of his own experience to an extent, and dear God I wish this weren’t part of my experience,” the 79-year-old writer says. His voice, like a fresh cup of coffee, is warm, a comfort, something you want to cup your hands around. “Out of it can come a story. What would happen if ...”
But this doesn’t mean fiction is just a true story with the names changed (as some will assume with Come Back). Think of it as a catalyst, a starting point. “Fiction is what you make of a fact. Fiction is an imagined construct which may be triggered by fact. This is what imagination does.”
Come Back is Wiebe’s 10th novel and 25th book. His most recent work to earn national acclaim was Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest (2006), a stunning, intimate memoir about Wiebe’s early life as the child of Mennonite immigrants in Saskatchewan that won the prestigious Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction.
In fact, Hal Wiens is a character we first met long ago, in Wiebe’s first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962). Wiebe felt a natural curiosity about the fate of the character, who has been in his mind for more than half a century. “He was a little boy in that novel and what happened, and how could it happen he is this now? Stories never end, you know. They never do!” He continues, “A life can end but it does not conclude. Life continues on in the minds and personalities of those around it.” In other words, a dead child can live on through the love of his father, fictional and factual.
Writing a novel that draws on the pain Wiebe has experienced losing his son “was good, really good,” he says. “Three decades you’ve been dealing with this, it’s there, you have thoughts like, ‘He’d be 45 now, he’d be this, that.’ You keep coming back to it.”
Yet closure, Wiebe knows, will always elude him: “You never get over that, ever.”