Finding the Enemy

June M. Blurton is a retired speech/language pathologist.

Finding the Enemy is a story about the cruelty of civilization. Stewart
Rice, a bright young Canadian physicist, is working in New Mexico when
the United States drops a pair of atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. In the
ensuing years, his disgust at the thought of nuclear destruction
intensifies; eventually, he moves his family from California, where he
is engaged in war-oriented research, to Montreal, where he is able to
work in theoretical physics. Dorothy, his wife, personifies the North
American housewife of the 1950s. Her early academic career cut short by
marriage and motherhood, she begins drinking to assuage her feeling of
incompleteness. This eventually leads to her spectacular death.

The four children are all influenced by their father’s antiwar
feelings. Gordon gives up an engineering job in California to return to
Canada during the Vietnam War, and the other three also hold strong
views on peace. But all of them realize, in one way or another, that
nuclear warfare is not the only form of violence to which the world is
prone. One suffers from dreams featuring the rape of Poland; another
experiences tanks and guns in Bucharest and anti-Semitic demonstrations
in Montreal.

Despite the seriousness of its theme, Finding the Enemy comes across as
somewhat insubstantial. Readers who prefer a straightforward storyline
will be irritated by the constantly changing point of view and style of
writing. The book does, however, give a wide-ranging view of world
events in the latter half of this century.