A shift in time
Rudy Weibe find the present in the past, and the past in the present
"Time," says Mr. Wiebe, "is a shifty thing in any of my novels. If you want to cover 450 to 480 years of history, you obviously cannot have a chronological, plot-by-plot, day-by-day sort of novel."
Sweeter Than All the World is hardly day-to-day. It is one man's journey to discovery, but more than this, it is a sprawling saga of the proud, variegated history of the Mennonites, people who remain pacifists in the face of prosecution and persecution by no less, at one time, than the Inquisition of 16th century Europe. From there the reader is hurled into 19th century Russia, to the terrors of the Second World War, to South America, and finally, to Canada. This is a kaleidoscopic history, chronicling the history of the Wiebe name from the genius engineer who invented the cable-car to religious martyrs to painters of the royal court of London.
"Basically it is an exploration of how we understand the past and time," says Wiebe, "because in a sense, we all live in the past." He waxes philosophical for a moment, his sharp eyes intent.
"In the instant I've spoken, it's already past. You remember it, but it's gone. So we live in a present where our own unconsciousness is memory. But the memory is flawed – because what does the memory contain? – portions of moments gone. If you focus intently on the past, however, it briefly becomes the present. And this can change you."
The protagonist of our tale, the fictional Adam Wiebe, living in the late 20th century, changes during his exploration of his past because he needs to.
"He's made a disaster of his own life," says Wiebe. "Not through any particular bad intention – he's just messed things up. And part of his search for his past is a search for structure in his own life. He needs focus, see, and he focuses on the past to place himself in this present."
Wiebe abounds with such observations – he seems a man constantly in search of spirituality in a world that often misplaces it, disparages it or commits unspeakable violence against it.
"You know, the Mennonites found a way of dealing with violence – by not responding to it." One senses his approval of this method in his voice, and then he confirms it. "Violence merely begets more violence."
Sweeter Than All the World contemplates the effect violence had on his Mennonite past, particularly on the engineering prodigy of Adam Wiebe. It was this great inventor who managed to build the walls that surrounded the city of Danzig, a bastion against even the powerful Swedish army of the Thirty Years' War.
"He didn't just protect Mennonites," reveals Wiebe, "but thousands of Danzigers, which is a kind of ideal action for a pacifist Christian to take. The last chapter is his revelation on how he came up with his solution for building the walls to repel the ever more powerful cannon of the Swedes.
"It's a kind of practical and brilliant example of how a pacifist should live in the world, to try and prevent violence from happening to yourself and your neighbour."
In the end, of course, history also contains many example that go against such grains of thought, as Wiebe recounts the 1573 torture and execution of Maeyken Wens: "The smith pushed the curled iron onto her tongue until the flanges spread her lips as wide and hard as possible. He screwed the vise down to the point of steady blood, and finally, ...with tongs he took from out of his fire a white-hot iron. He laid that iron on the tip of (her) tongue." |
