2001 short list:
The Rules of Engagement
by Catherine Bush
Published by HarperCollins Canada
The Rules of Engagement
In The Rules of Engagement, Arcadia Hearne's past rushes up to meet, her and her future almost leaves her behind. Despite her hatred of physical violence, Arcadia is a researcher who studies contemporary war. Specializing in issues of risk and military intervention, she methodically surveys the rich arsenal of current global conflicts available to her dispassionate intellect. Ironically, she can't seem to come to terms with her own inner conflicts, desperately trying to balance the scales of emotional risk and emotional pain.
Arcadia is haunted by a violent episode in her past, an incident involving two university students, both her lovers, who resort to an old-fashioned pistol duel in a Toronto ravine to decide who will win her love. Hidden in the trees, Arcadia can't bring herself to intervene. Guilt-ridden and confused, she flees to London, England, as she says, looking for protection from violence through knowledge, through explanations, but not through love. Only when she meets Amir, her new lover, whom she discovers to be an idealistic passport forger, does she begin her reconciliation with her past.
Born in Toronto, Catherine Bush has also lived in Montreal, New York, London and Provincetown, Massachusetts. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Comparative Literature from Yale University, has taught creative writing at the Humber School for Writers and at Concordia University, and has attended the prestigious Yaddo and MacDowell writers' colonies. Bush's first novel, Minus Time, was short-listed for the 1994 City of Toronto Book Awards and the SmithBooks / Books in Canada First Novel Award. A film adaptation of Minus Time is currently in development with Five Senses director Jeremy Podeswa. Her second novel, The Rules of Engagement, was released in hardcover by HarperCollins Canada in March 2000 and in the USA by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in August 2000. Dutch rights have been sold to Het Spectrum. Catherine Bush's fiction, non-fiction, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The Globe and Mail, The New York Times Book Review and the Village Voice Literary Supplement. She lives in Toronto.
Rules of Engagement - excerpt
I met Evan when I was eighteen, the autumn of my first year at university in Toronto. I chose him. I picked him out by sight even before we'd introduced ourselves.
One afternoon, as I walked along Hoskins Avenue, I spied a figure bolting up the steps of Strachan College in the rain. At the top of the steps, he heaved over breathlessly, hands on his knees, feet in orange running shoes-oblivious to everything but the residue of his own propulsion. His hair was matted to his scalp, sweatshirt drenched, the skin beneath his flimsy gym shorts-the sinuous muscles of his exposed thighs-wind chilled and red.
Two days later, in sunshine, I saw him again. This time he was kneeling, locking a bicycle to a wrought-iron fence outside Strachan. Light caught in his hair, turning it wheaten, then even brighter, nearly white. A yellow canvas knapsack rode up his shoulders. What caught my attention was his hands, as they shunted the lock around the fence and clasped the bike frame to it-how small they were, how birdlike. What touched me was some suggestion of vulnerability in the way he moved, something not quite balletic, grace mixed with abruptness. He gave off a sense of compressed energy, honed purpose, as if each gesture carried the weight of some interior thrust.
From The Rules of Engagement by Catherine Bush, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2000 by Catherine Bush.
