After a celebrated debut with Minus Time, Catherine Bush throws down the gauntlet to readers in her second novel, The Rules of Engagement. Rules is striking in its deliberateness and restraint, an intricately choreographed duel. Through the revelations of her protagonist, Arcadia Hearne, Bush sets two equally powerful opponents back-to-back — Arcadia's torrid past versus her torpid present. Then, in a narrative characterized by elegant, civilized violence, these rival forces pace off their appointed distance in opposite directions. With each step forward — and backward — Arcadia reveals a hint more of the extent to which she isolates herself from emotional entanglement in her contemporary London life and a glimpse further into the tragic circumstances that forced her to leave her home in Toronto. The novel itself is divided into two equal parts – the first set in London, the second in Toronto – with the two neatly linked by dual Trans-Atlantic flights. In the first pages, Bush ceremoniously sets forth her own rules for engaging the reader. Then, with discipline and delicacy, she unfolds a story of passion restrained and violence ritualized. Nothing can happen, no salvation can come to Arcadia, and no epiphany can come to the reader until the inherent conflicts are resolved with decisive action — until the duelists fire their pistols.

In Part I of Rules, Bush sculpts a detailed, three-dimensional figure of Arcadia Hearne, whose apocryphal name promises a lost Eden and a journey all in one. This haunted girl holds life at arms' length — from her passive involvement in the most violent of world conflicts via computer terminal to her vicarious observations of and secret theories about the strangers who pass through her daily life. Arcadia amuses herself with daydreams in which she is the ultimate aggressor.

On the North London railway line…a man in a blue linen jacket sat across from me. I imagined myself kissing him — more curiosity than lust, for I'll do this with all sorts of people…. How would his surprise transform him?

But this sort of decisive action, intimate and spontaneous, is the very sort of action that Arcadia cannot take. Her present paralysis stems from a fear that perhaps all intimacy leads to violence. She is plagued by a series of questions that play over and over in her head: "Are wars inevitable?" "Is every man capable of violence?" "What would you be willing to risk for love?" She is caught in a cycle of self-abnegation because she once failed to act with decision when the stakes were far higher, when the players were not strangers but lovers, and when the outcome was as uncertain as life or death.

One sleepless night, Arcadia reveals to her lover that the tragedy in Toronto has left her searching for "an explanation…expiation." Yet, the reader is keenly aware that instead of an active hunt for one or the other, Arcadia has so far settled for static, risk-free philosophizing and theorizing. Until the visit of Lux (Arcadia's sister) and the brush with danger and precipitous entanglement with Amir that result from the visit, Arcadia's borders remain inviolate. Her life in London is a microcosmic mirror of the Post-Somalia American policy she attempts to unravel in her professional research — a policy in which "the fear of casualties [win] out," leading to a policy of "'force protection,' in which one's first priority must be to protect oneself." This is the language of Arcadia's career and of her personal life. Terms like "intervention," "conflict," "engagement," and "minefields" drip with delicious ambiguity when the woman who uses them with such scientific precision bleeds them within, as her "interior war" of lost love and failed intimacy rages on. The beginnings of her theoretical studies could just as easily be the darkest confessions of her diary: "For most of the world, wars have grown fiercely personal again — devastatingly intimate" and "Rules of engagement exist not only to create just wars, or fair conditions, but to level the playing field."

Thus, Arcadia contents herself with maintaining a passive and detached existence. In effect, she levels her own "playing field" by withdrawing from life altogether. Arcadia is like a small-town Horatio, or a not-so-Ancient Mariner, torn between shameful secrecy and a perverse desire to 'tell the story.' She confides in the reader:

When I tell people about the duel, I choose my moments carefully, and I do not tell everyone. Yet I've grown to yearn for this instant, for all that is exposed in people's faces when I tell them.