A Discovery of Strangers

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

The fiction of Westerner Rudy Wiebe has always been concerned with the
northern quality of our land and the various cultural heritages of our
people. His own Mennonite roots increased his sensitivity to other
cultures and to Canada’s Native peoples.

A Discovery of Strangers (Wiebe’s first novel in more than a decade)
is a master work. It deals with the first Franklin expedition to map the
Arctic coastline in 1819-22. Like many of Wiebe’s earlier novels, it
is written from several points of view, with more than one “voice.”
Wiebe considers the far North to contain the spiritual essence and
psychological bedrock of the country. The book also deals with the first
contact between an indigenous northern people and the ill-fated
Englishmen, and involves a romantic triangle composed of two members of
the expedition and the teenage daughter of a Dene elder.

A Discovery of Strangers won the 1994 Governor General’s Literary
Award for fiction, and deservedly so. The judges called it a work of
“primal intensity, touched with redeeming compassion,” one that
explores Canadian roots “with moral seriousness and great feeling.”