Rudy Wiebe's unique contribution to Canadian literature has been to articulate an intense and comprehensive vision of human experience rooted in his Mennonite Christianity. For his seven novels, three volumes of short stories, and one play, Wiebe has...
Penny van Toorn, Rudy Wiebe and the Historicity of the Word. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1995. Pp. 256. ISBN 0-88864-265-2. Popular western Canadian historians have long claimed Rudy Wiebe as one of their own. His novels, The Temptations of Big Bear, The...
WIEBE, Rudy. The mad trapper. Red Deer Press. 1860. illus, map. c1980, 0-88995-268-X. $9.95. SA The vast and lonely frontier of northern Canada and Alaska has always seemed to justify all kinds of strange and unusual tales. Certainly the far northern wilder ness...
Rudy Wiebe's The Blue Mountains of China centres upon the problem of belief—the sustaining relationship of the self to something beyond itself. As a Christian, Wiebe perceives this problem primarily in terms of the relationship to the divine, and his task is to convince the contemporary, secular reader that this relationship must be taken seriously. (p. 79) Questions about plot, structure and point of view embodied in Wiebe's narrative strategy serve as mediations for the spiritual them...
Rudy Wiebe's Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962) and The Blue Mountains of China (1970) function within the Canadian literary context not only as works of Prairie fiction, but also as documents that illuminate Mennonitism, a peculiar religious and ethnic orientation which has impressed itself upon the Prairie landscape for the past 100 years. In each novel the material used is Mennonite, and the thematic framework in which it is cast is a theological one, tempered primarily by the author's own int...
[The Blue Mountains of China] is an impressive achievement. Although the problem of didacticism and the "syntactical awkwardness" in Wiebe's style—which leads to some very murky writing in places—are … obtrusive weaknesses …, they are more than offset by the novel's strengths. In The Blue Mountains of China Rudy Wiebe not only vividly recounts the history of a segment of the Mennonite people, but, more importantly, he presents a complex judgment of the...
