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 interpretation of Anabaptist teaching…. Wiebe already alludes to what later becomes a major motif in The Blue Mountains of China: "they were a religious nation without a country. They were driven from Switzerland to America, from Holland and northern Germany to Prussia, then Russia, finally to North and South America."…

The story Wiebe tells of the Mennonites in The Blue Mountains of China—although the details make it a mixture of...