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 themes probed by the fiction. Wiebe's characters, exiled in the wilderness, search for the Promised Land that will transform existential chaos into meaningful form. The novel itself, multiple and fragmented, highlights the absence of such integrative vision and engages the reader in his own struggle in a narrative wilderness. Working through dissonance and disjunction, Wiebe subjects the reader to a process of relentless disorientation. The senses are assaulted by disconnected images—a cow's bulging eye, a coruscating chandelier, a leg oozing black pus—and the mind struggles to assimilate the sharply differing settings—a sand-assaulted well in the desert of Paraguay, a silent snow-covered street in Moscow, a crowded lice-infested basement in China. As the novel's disparate voices succeed one another, point of view switches abruptly. Dramatic shifts in narrative distance and mode typically accompany these alterations of perspective, so reinforcing the general sense of unpredictable and unstable narrative process.
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