Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

Rating:
Summary: Bad
Review: This book was a poorly written sequel to Canticle, if you want something worthwhile read that. I borrowed this from a friend knowing about the first book, both he and I thought it was about Leibowitz's search for Emmma, whcih would have been more worth while

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: This is the most allegorically complex and refreshing Sci-Fi novel that I have encountered out of the last thousand or so novels that I have read.

Rating:
Summary: Miller knew what he was doing when he left this unpublished.
Review: What a disappointment! I was so excited when I received Amazon's glowing review of this book that I immediately ordered it in hardback! Save your money and re-read A Canticle for Leibowitz. Reportedly, Terry Bissom finished this book after Miller died. If so, he must have done so without touching the parts already written, which could generously be described as a very rough first draft, complete with clumsy sentence and paragraph construction, errors in grammar, and repetition. The world in which the book is set is confusing, and the map in the front doesn't help much, nor does the fact that each territory seems to have several names. The many characters also each have about three names in several languages, and it is almost impossible to keep them apart (Mad Bear, Half-Breed, etc.). A Dramatis Personae in the front would have helped a lot! The characters don't seem to have much ,and I wearied of the plot, which involved political/religious intrigue mixed with murky references to some pagan religion which may or may not have parallels to Native American or Oriental practices. And lots of sexual references. I was surprised at the positive critical reviews, and I was disappointed at their inaccuracy, e.g., Kirkus said that A Canticle for Leibowitz was Miller's only other novel, but I have another sitting on my shelf. If they can't even get their facts right, how can I trust their opinions?

Rating:
Summary: SLWHW a Disappointment
Review: When I saw that A Canticle For Leibowitz had been followed up forty years later with a sequel, I couldn't wait to find out what happened to those intrepid travelers who had escaped the second Flame Deluge. Unfortunately, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman would just as well have been left to suffer the fate that they were escaping. Whereas the first work had a driving spirit which affirmed all that is good in humanity -- and gave a picture of monastic life which was refreshingly free of Hollywood-driven caricatures -- the sequel is a long-winded, meandering plunge into contemporary formulaic fiction. Brownpony as a cardinal just had to be corrupt; genital sexuality just had to be supplied in (somewhat) graphic detail as a neccessary, missing element in Blacktooth's life. Granted that ACFL was written in an age when sexuality was not nearly so graphically depicted; do we really need decriptions of a mutant's genitals to tell a story? ACFL didn't need such things. If Miller was writing out his own personal struggles, perhaps the book bears the mark of a certain kind of honesty. Nevertheless, the honesty of an author does not a readable or fresh sequel make. ACFL showed us a future that was at once a somber reminder of humanity's hubris, yet at the same time full of a hope that was free of Roddenberry-esque indifferentism. It had a soul. And it was a page-turner. What could have been a development of a unique and inspiring science fiction story in SLWHW turned out to be a facile, disappointing deconstruction of the first book; finding out that SLWHW is imbedded in the midst of the Canticle is like finding out that the delicious apple you just took a bite of has half a worm in it. And a plodding, cliche-ridden, hackneyed worm at that.

Rating:
Summary: Not the Canticle, but still good
Review: _Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman_ has a core story that is just as powerful as any in _A Canticle for Leibowitz_: that of the monk Blacktooth St. George's spiritual journey. Blacktooth first came to the monastary as a teenager, leaving his tribe of settled nomads in an attempt to join the wild nomads. After the wild nomads rejected him he went to the monastary of Saint Leibowitz (which was obliged to give hospitality to travelers) and stayed. When the book opens he's a young man with spiritual leanings, but with problems conforming to organizational life and a personality conflict with his abbot. He asks the abbot to release him from his vows; the abbot refuses. This refusal is echoed by several other superiors throughout the book, people who see that Blacktooth is actually cut out for the spiritual life even if he doesn't understand it yet himself.

What Blacktooth really needs is enough experience to knowingly choose between the spiritual life and the wordly one. And in this book he gets it. Serving Cardinal Brownpony gives him a good look at both church and worldly politics. He sees preparations for war, then the battlefield, and is even forced to kill. He travels what is by his culture's standards a large geographic area. He sees different customs, and even visits his distant cousins among the wild nomads. He falls in mutual lust with a beautiful mutant woman named Aedria, and may even become a father of twins by her. On the spiritual side, he receives wise Zenlike counsel from the holy hermit (and Pope) Amen Specklebird. Both Amen and Blacktooth's abbot suggest that be become a hermit. And, in fact, that is the life Blacktooth eventually settles into.

However: During the middle of the book Miller wanders into a different story, or perhaps several. I think he is partly trying to tell Cardinal Brownpony's story, of trying to achieve worldly success and ultimately failing. As a counterpart to Blacktooth's story, this might have worked if told sparely enough. But Brownpony is involved in electing popes, forging alliances among nomad tribes and arming them for a war he is trying to start, then running the war, and then . . . And Miller describes the customs of every group Blacktooth or Brownpony encounters, which adds to the richness of his world but is done in ways that really bog down the plot. Every time Blacktooth seems close to some revelation, Miller switches to a meeting about complicated military strategy. Then Miller feels obliged to discuss everything that the enemy is doing and _their_ military meetings and . . . well, the intensity of Blacktooth's story is much diminished. As other reviewers have noted, it also becomes confusing that all the major characters have at least two names, which are used indiscriminately.

It is also odd that some major questions are left unanswered. For example, the fate of Aedrea's and Blacktooth's twins. The Wandering Jew confirms that she delivered them and that they were taken to the local orphanage. Blacktooth goes to the orphanage, only to discover that someone has already adopted them. I expected to meet them again in the book, or at least hear news, but they just vanish.

Other times what could be significant moments are, essentially, passed over. When Blacktooth meets the nomad cousins who rejected him as a teenager, this time they invite him to stay. And he casually refuses. I expected some emotional depth here, but it's more like he's stayed at a second-rate bed-and-breakfast; it was OK, not great, now it's time to move on.

The pity is, use of the delete key during much of the middle, followed by some minor rewriting throughout the book, would probably solve most of these problems and create a book that does stand up to _Canticle_. Apparently Terry Bisson either couldn't do this or wasn't permitted. But: _Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman_ is still worth reading.