Sacred And Profane
Webber explores Media, Spirituality
by Greg Beatty
The Prairie Dog, July 13, 2000
Jennifer Webber's new book opens with high-powered Edmonton TV news producer Miranda Tyler being jilted by her musician boyfriend in a gift shop atop Whistler's Summit in Jasper. Moderately distraught, she contemplates returning to Edmonton to lick her wounds and rebuild her self-esteem. But before she can, fate intervenes in the form of Indrin, a Christian East-Indian from Calgary who is journeying to Vancouver to see an ex-girlfriend before joining a Catholic seminary.
With her holiday just begun, Miranda impulsively decides to accompany him. Cynical by nature, she is alternately frustrated by and envious of Indrin's self-assured spirituality. But as their distance from Edmonton grows, the appeal of her former life wanes. Her spiritual awakening accelerates when they pick up an enigmatic Tutsi refugee in Kamloops with the intention of delivering him to the coast for a hoped-for reunion with his brother, from whom he'd been separated during the Rwandan genocide.
Given that Webber is a CBC arts journalist in Saskatoon, it's tempting to read an element of autobiography into Defying Gravity.
The book's inspiration arose, she says, when, "I saw this woman in my mind on top of a mountain at a postcard rack, waiting around. I didn't know was, or why shew as there." Later, she had a chance encounter with a man named Bertin Muhizi on a bus from Edmonton to Calgary. Her first impression, she recalled, was that he was shy. "But as it turned out," she said, "he was embarrassed about his English. He spoke French, so I dug out some of my rusty French and what unfolded was this sweet gentle person telling me what he'd just come through in Rwanda. He was Tutsi, and had lost most of his family."
Still, Defying Gravity offers an undeniably insider's view of the news biz. As a TV producer, Miranda is somewhat of a media apologist. She concedes the validity of Indrin's claim that TV sensationalizes news stories to attract viewers, but argues that she and her colleagues do the best they can within the medium's prescribed format.
"There's validity in that defence," said Webber. "But it's important to explore what happens when so many of our perceptions [concerning] the world come from neatly packaged presentations of 'the truth'." The pressure to meet deadlines causes a "rush to judgment" by networks that often leads to an incomplete understanding of an issue.
The fast pace of a TV news broadcast leaves viewers with little time to reflect on what they have just seen. Thus, their level of engagement with the parties involved is minimal. Miranda, says Webber, "is very much out of touch with what it's [like] to actually deal with the healthy interactions of other humans. Real life completely confounds her. She can only deal with it when it's on the TV screen."
Travelling with Indrin forces her to confront the spiritual vacuum in her life. This is where Miranda and Webber truly part company. Inspired by her coverage of scandals in the residential school system, Miranda is disdainful of the Church, while Webber is a practicing Catholic.
"I was raised in a really questioning and lively intellectual household," she said. "One of the deepest impulses in me is to want to understand the universe. Warts and all, I do find the faith a core of faith [in the Church]. It isn't a meaningless ritual."
"That being said," she continues, "it's full of human beings who are flawed and have done terrible things. I don't close my eyes to that. There are things that I think are wrong! But there's still enough - I'm learning about little things like patience, putting one foot in front of another and finding out why we're here."
Interweaving musings on millennial angst and Nostradamus's prognostications with a peculiar branch of Catholic theology that holds apparitions to be harbingers of disaster, Webber constructs a semi-apocalyptic spiritual landscape that effectively foreshadows the novel's disturbing denouement.
At turns wistfully romantic, insightful and humorous (especially Miranda's caustic observations on her ex-lovers) Defying Gravity is a satisfying read.