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A review by brynhammond
Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman by Walter M. Miller Jr., Terry Bisson
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.