Breaking the Silence

An elderly relative of a friend committed suicide last year. The family put out that it was an accident. The silence at the heart of his life—the depression he never spoke of—proved too massive to shatter.

Nobody could say that Rudy Wiebe does not understand silence. His childhood in a tiny, isolated Mennonite community in Saskatchewan has shaped his perspective and his books, which have won the highest accolades in Canada, including two Governor General’s fiction awards, are full of the silences of the northern landscape. The protagonist of Come Back is Hal Wiens, who first appeared as an eight-year-old boy in Wiebe’s literary debut, Peace Shall Destroy Many, growing up like Wiebe in an isolated Mennonite community in Saskatchewan. Now in his seventies, Hal is a professor of literature retired from the University of Alberta, as is Wiebe.

Hal lives alone in Edmonton, recently widowed, his adult children moved away. He drinks coffee every...