THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

In her commanding, at times riveting, second novel, Bush (Minus Time, 1993) explores the ageless duels of love and war among scarred souls living in contemporary Toronto and London.

When her sister Lux, host of a Toronto-based world music show, pays a visit to her flat in London, Arcadia Hearne begins the painful process of breaking from her role as a wary and shielded researcher at the Centre for Contemporary War Studies in order to confront the truth about the contradictions of war and a tragic moment in her own life. Asked by her sister to deliver a package to a Somali singer and war refugee, Arcadia entangles herself in the inexorable dilemmas of engagement facing those caught up in violence and dislocation in today’s war zones. The story is stitched together through flashbacks to Arcadia’s flight from Toronto and her brief period as an illegal alien in London. She becomes romantically involved with Amir, an Iranian passport forger whose illegal dealings compel Arcadia to sort through the shared risks demanded by love in times of war. Ultimately, she returns to Toronto to deal with her own demons. Dividing the novel in two sections, spanning from London to Toronto with some exquisite images and prose, Bush presents a chilling account of Arcadia’s fateful role as the love interest in a pistol duel carried out ten years before by two rather high-minded—and, on occasion, unnervingly pretentious—university students in Toronto. In the second part, unfettered by the war theory and undergraduate chatter that occasionally bogged down the opening chapters, we are finally given complete portraits of Evan and Neil, the duelists, and the emotional battlefield they shared with Arcadia.

Despite the operatic premise, Bush expertly shapes a compelling story of love and love lost in the era of Bosnia and Rwanda.