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kevin_carson's review against another edition
5.0
Apparently many consider this sequel a letdown from the previous book, but I don't know why. Miller did an amazing job of world-building, obviously putting a lot of anthropological reading into his development of the Plains Nomad culture and the political geography of North America. The mysticism and heterodoxy of Nimmy and Amen Specklebird are also interesting, considering Miller was probably going through his own crisis of faith when writing them.
gcb2008's review
challenging
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
brynhammond's review
4.0
Hard to rate, even when I discount the last hundred or so pages written by another hand. If I also posit that Walter M. Miller (rest in peace) left an unfinished book behind him, whose first four-five hundred pages still needed his hand – and if I don’t blame the book for that – then it’s a definite four stars. It was very interesting to follow Miller to this, forty years later, which I did out of curiosity and respect for the writer who gave us Canticle. This one seemed to me a case of half-realised potential, with the loss of its author’s hand in the end product evident.
To call this a sequel sets up expectations of it being like Canticle. But he’s lived forty years between. He’s changed his views. Often – since I re-read Canticle this same month – I thought I saw him putting in the things he now believes he left out of Canticle. Revising its ideas. It was, at times, like a commentary on the early book – from which, I thought, he must have felt quite distanced himself.
Where Canticle has been experienced, including by me, as a hymn to the Catholic Church in history, the Saint and the Horse Woman (I don’t know how to abbreviate that title) is frequently church criticism and satire. Where, in a group read, we spoke of an absence of women, here women and also sexuality are very present. With loose ends: I’ll never know what he meant by his running theme of androgyny. A complaint of mine in Canticle, that his Plains Indian-inspired culture is out of a cartoon, is well fixed, with half the book’s attention on the Plains Nomads’ unhappy interactions with a conquering state and church. The other half is church politics. Church politics, Nomad politics: I too feel the book can get bogged down in scenes of politics, to uncertain end. Because we begin with Blacktooth, an ex-Nomad monk, questioning whether he belongs in the old monastery, his visionary search as he blurs Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman of his people; I’ve seen Blacktooth understood to be Miller’s spokesperson for his own loss (although it’s not a simple loss) of faith. A pity, then, that we lose sight of Blacktooth’s inner journey for interminable sections – and that his story is resolved by another hand than Miller’s.
There’s almost no science fiction left. It was much more like reading a (burlesque) historical fiction on the medieval church, muddled up with the American West. Canticle’s concerns with science aren’t pursued, and the post-nuclear-war setting becomes accidental.
To call this a sequel sets up expectations of it being like Canticle. But he’s lived forty years between. He’s changed his views. Often – since I re-read Canticle this same month – I thought I saw him putting in the things he now believes he left out of Canticle. Revising its ideas. It was, at times, like a commentary on the early book – from which, I thought, he must have felt quite distanced himself.
Where Canticle has been experienced, including by me, as a hymn to the Catholic Church in history, the Saint and the Horse Woman (I don’t know how to abbreviate that title) is frequently church criticism and satire. Where, in a group read, we spoke of an absence of women, here women and also sexuality are very present. With loose ends: I’ll never know what he meant by his running theme of androgyny. A complaint of mine in Canticle, that his Plains Indian-inspired culture is out of a cartoon, is well fixed, with half the book’s attention on the Plains Nomads’ unhappy interactions with a conquering state and church. The other half is church politics. Church politics, Nomad politics: I too feel the book can get bogged down in scenes of politics, to uncertain end. Because we begin with Blacktooth, an ex-Nomad monk, questioning whether he belongs in the old monastery, his visionary search as he blurs Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman of his people; I’ve seen Blacktooth understood to be Miller’s spokesperson for his own loss (although it’s not a simple loss) of faith. A pity, then, that we lose sight of Blacktooth’s inner journey for interminable sections – and that his story is resolved by another hand than Miller’s.
There’s almost no science fiction left. It was much more like reading a (burlesque) historical fiction on the medieval church, muddled up with the American West. Canticle’s concerns with science aren’t pursued, and the post-nuclear-war setting becomes accidental.
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