Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman by Walter M. Miller Jr.

Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman Reviews

• 
  Bryn Hammond

  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.
  
• 
  Jason

  Walter M. Miller committed suicide before completing his sequel to his only other novel, A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ. Terry Bisson was hired to edit and finish the book from Miller's outline. That hybrid became SAINT LEIBOWITZ AND THE WILD HORSE WOMAN.
  This novel is more of a 'midquel', rather than sequel, because its events take place 80 years after CANTICLE's part two, called "Fiat Lux" (c. 3254 AD, and 600 years before CANTICLE's part three.
  SAINT LEIBOWITZ reminded me very much of Herbert's DUNE. They are both sprawling novels dealing with the political machinations of both Church and State, and they both center on the manipulations of the mysterious, isolated, less-civilized nomadic peoples whose loyalties will tip the balance of power.
  It is finely characterized and the battles and various landscapes are sufficiently detailed to place you within the action and setting without creating a leaden narrative.
  I listened to BOOKS ON TAPE's audio version narrated by Jonathan Marosz. He handled the character voices well, but Miller's names for the MANY characters in the novel became confused in my ears-head because of similarity in sound. It would be easier to distinguish on the written page.
  Recommended for fans of Miller & CANTICLE.
• 
  Doreen

  Oddly enough, I seem to be one of the few people here who enjoyed the sequel much more than its predecessor. I found A Canticle... devoid of much of the human suffering that pervades this book, which questions the conflict between faith and tradition, desire and happiness, and what it means to be a good human being. SLatWHW tackles some heavy moral issues of how best to synthesize your emotions with your scruples in order to lead a godly life, and admits that self-sacrifice, though good for your soul, sucks hard. I thought this was a good, challenging read that helped me understand better how weak people can be, emotionally, and how heroic it is when we learn to deal with how we feel instead of ignoring our inner selves.
• 
  Kevin Carson

  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.
• 
  Jon

  The sequel to A Canticle for Liebowitz was thirty years in the making, but unfortunately, Miller seems to have forgotten how to write a novel in those decades. Many of the moral and ethical arguments that made Canticle so brilliant are still present, as is the occasional bit of dry humor, but these are overshadowed by long and drug-out passages, poor plotting, and a conclusion that seems to have been hastily written the night before the book went to press (the "Wild Horse Woman" from the title, for example, virtually never appears in the novel; I'm still confused as to why her name appears so prominently on the book's spine). There is still much to gain from reading Saint Leibowitz, and there are passages that will haunt me for years to come (like the torturing of Esitt Loyte). The book's faults, however, made such gains painful and too-long-in-the-coming. My final opinion: Saint Leibowitz could have used a couple more runs through the typewriter.
• 
  Heather

  It was a bit of a slog. There were too many characters with multiple and similar-sounding names for me to keep them straight. I'm not sure what the point of the book was..? Maybe that no one wins in war?
• 
  Bernard

  I struggled with this book, an 'interquel' to Miller's previous novel,
  A Canticle for Leibowitz. The middle third of this mature-themed novel was difficult reading but I am satisfied to have finished it. At first I couldn't figure out what the book was supposed to be about. Then I realized it was really about one man, Brother Blacktooth "Nimmy" St. George, born a nomad but who joined the monks at the St. Leibowitz Abbey in the Southwest desert, but who through all his life struggled to find a balance between his culture and his vows, his duty to man and duty to God, and his human desires. Yes, he is the main character and so the book was obviously about him, but I kept waiting for the book to broaden into a story with broader implications. It didn't, as the conflicts and grand plans of the supporting characters in the book ultimately fizzled into a literal burnt-out state where almost all was lost, except the revelations in Nimmy's heart and the effects on the reader. In the end I was sad it was over. This book's imagery and philosophical issues now haunt me, as I try to figure out both the meaning of what Miller was trying to convey through the characters and situations in this book, and also how this book helps to expand the universe he laid out in his earlier Leibowitzian novel. It was not an easy read, but I think, a worthwhile read, especially for fans of the post-war survivalism genre and readers looking to challenge their views of the true meaning of faith, the Catholic church, and what it means to be a human in relation to both.
• 
  Perry Whitford

  What the hell happened to Walter M Miller?
  
  In the 1950's he was a fairly consistent writer of short-stories who ended the decade producing one of the kite-marks of "literary" post-apocolyptic science fiction, A Canticle for Leibowitz.
  
  Then, all of a sudden, he produced precisely nothing until this follow-up novel 40 years later - and this was only published posthumously, after he blew his own brains out with a gun and an editor whittled down a sprawling 600 page manuscript by a third.
  
  I had previously read Canticle and it deserves the reputation that led me to hunt it out. It's witty, erudite, unusual and appears to be written by a very smart and funny man with an extensive knowledge of latin. Yet that was it for Miller, and he only left this frustratingly disappointing sequel before committing suicide. That's really sad.
  
  This novel is not exactly a straight sequel either because Canticle featured three connected novellas that spanned a millenium, and this is story is set somewhere between the second and third novella from that earlier volume.
  
  That means firstly that all the characters are new (except one, I won't go into that). although figures who featured in the previous novel are referenced. Tt means that you already know how things turned out after this, so it better be a cracking good yarn.
  
  But it was far from cracking. Most of its 400 pages were taken up with complicated exposition detailing the political machinations between the church, the controlling state, and a multitude of independent clans, and it was largely pretty dull.
  
  When Miller focused on the more narrow human travails of his characters, most notably Brother Blacktooth, it was much more interesting, but everyone seemed swamped by the wider issues, and appeared only indistinctly against the sprawling backdrop.
  
  A shame, in every way.
• 
  Myriad

  My reaction in one sentence: What the eff was the point?
  
  There’s a problem if I finish reading your book and I have no idea why you wrote it. And I honestly have no idea why Miller wrote this. What did he think he was discussing? Did he think he actually made some kind of point?
  
  I wanted this to be good; it started out with so much potential. Since the main characters are primarily Nomads who have chosen service to the Church, I figured there would be a great exploration of the tension between and conflation of pagan/tribal/animist/polytheist/psuedo-matriarchal worldview and christian/civilized/theist/monotheist/patriarchal worldview. Which could have been awesome, but Miller chose to beat it up, strangle it, draw and quarter it, and then bury it under six feet of overly-complicated arcane Catholic political garbage. By the end of the book, the reader feels rather like zie has been subjected to the same series of tortures.
  
  A longer review may be found
  here
• 
  Mike

  Miller's first (and only other) novel, A Canticle for Liebowitz, is rightly regarded as classic. This posthumously published sequel is, in my opinion, just as good as the first (a minority view, I think). The story takes place around the same time as the second part of Canticle, and is an engrossing story with vivid characters. The symbolism and themes are often similar to Canticle's, with similar pessimism & dark humor, but Miller meanders into eastern mysticism too, and we even see heroism in some characters (tragic more than comic, but still heroic!).
• 
  Paul

  Okay, I had to read "A Canticle for Leibowitz" for a Medieval History class when I was in college. My professor thought that, even though it takes place in a dystopian future, that it really showed what life might have been like in medieval Europe. Well, I absolutely loved the book. How come no one ever told me it had a sequel (written forty years after the original). This book is long and dense and difficult, and of course, I really liked it. It's not for everyone - read the other one first, for sure.
• 
  Jay Wright

  There were times I hated the book, but in the end I did enjoy it. I enjoyed it as much as the first. I know Miller did not finish the book and the ending is perfect, so who gets the credit. It is a pity that he suffered so, but his mind was an original. There is not much more I can say without revealing too much.
• 
  loupgarous

  The last novel written by Walter M. Miller before his death in the 1970s (with considerable posthumous rework by science-fiction author Terry Bisson at the Miller family's request), Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman is a sequel to Miller's classic postapocalyptic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz.
  
  This time, the action all happens within the lifespan of Brother Blacktooth "Nimmy" St. George of the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz, a hundred years after the action in the "Fiat Homo" chapter of A Canticle for Leibowitz.
  
  The empire of Texarkana, under the virulent Hannegan dynasty, is expanding in all directions and even asserting authority over the Roman Catholic Church by pressing its own Cardinal, the current Hannegan's pederast uncle, as a candidate for Pope at a conclave held in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains after the previous Pope's death.
  
  Nimmy St. George is drafted (because of his origins among the fierce nomadic plains tribes who stand between Texarkana and Hannegan dominion over the West) to be secretary and translator to Cardinal Brownpony, a lay lawyer appointed Cardinal to oversee the Church's secret plans for defending humanity against the Hannegan dynasty, and so travels a roundabout route with Brownpony to the conclave by way of meetings in the plains with mysterious nomads, turncoat Texarkana officers, and little communities of mutants deformed by the radiation left after World War Three nine centuries earlier. And there the action begins.
  
  Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman is a rich book, with wry humor and genuine pathos, and endless twists and turns... in many ways, it's different from A Canticle for Leibowitz, more of a contemporary novel than that earlier work of Miller's. I can recommend it both for those of us who read and loved and for those for whom this will be their first taste of Walter Miller, Jr. It's an absorbing read.
• 
  Veronika KaoruSaionji

  Story of two men, simply monk and noble (charismatic) arcibishop, later pope, from future middle-age-like (plus in some aspects renaissance-like and 19. century-like)world about finding way to God, love and hapiness.
  I thought for first time about dogmatica and spiritual confussion in middle age. It must be terrible! I feel so sorry for the poor people...
  But, all this is so interesting! Very good book.
  And there are some gay stories, too :o), some nice, some cruel ones: poor sweet (gay young unhappy monk, later succesful gay priest) Torrildo (I love him and wish him happiness!), other (bad) arcibishop (uncle of ruler of Texark), who likes young boys (as Torrildo - he rape him and want to kill him), the terrible rape of poor first main hero (monk) as boy by soldiers (he fears soldiers his all life because it), terrible rape of mother of second main hero (arcibishop), which led her in lesbian relationships only (she was probably bisexual, also she can love women, when men hurt her so much) and to hate her child (arcibishop) born from this rape, "manly" behaviour of brave barbarian nomads who wiill always rape all women (from little girls to old women) and all boys, and so on... Surprisingly a lot of it.
• 
  Ethan I. Solomon

  I really enjoyed this book, way more than I thought I would. An interesting take on the post-apocalyptic genre, which often times finds itself shying away from religious storytelling as it can be difficult to justify its existence in science-fiction in general.
  
  I find myself wanting to give this book four stars and yet I am held back by one crucial factor; the ending. In A Canticle For Leibowitz, a few ugly points about society and religion are faced and I was left feeling changed, as I believe a good novel can do. This book however, seemed to have no point to it other than being a further examination of a society whose heritage is nuclear war.
  
  Recommended for fans and students of post-apocalypse novels only, though some religious merits are to be found as well.
• 
  Erik Graff

  I'd read Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz as a kid. Post-holocaust novels were quite popular then when the threat of global thermonuclear war was much discussed. Unlike most other such books, Canticle was touching, wryly amusing, even hopeful. Civilization had not quite collapsed and the Church, as in the Dark Ages, maintained fragments of culture and learning.
  
  This book was intended as a sequel, being set many years after its predecessor. Unfortunately, Miller did not live to see it through to completion. That was done by another. For Miller's sake and for the sake of childhood memories, I would like to think that the reason it's so inferior is because of its dual authorship.
• 
  Sander

  This book was somewhat underwhelming to me. I read it immediately after I finished Canticle (which I love) for the third time and it just does not live up to the standard of the first book.
  
  The focus of the book on politics is an interesting choice. I enjoyed the parts about the conclave. However, the 'human side' of the story was not fleshed out. Many characters felt like cardboard to me.
  
  The book was wel structured though. I would recommend it to someone who really enjoyed Canticle but with a caveat. I don't think I wil re-read this book.
• 
  Mike

  I am ashamed to admit that this book was so bad that I stopped reading it half way through. This is very out of character for me.
  
  I don't know if Miller's interests changed over the intervening 30 years or if the substantial differences between Canticle and Wild Horse Woman reflect the thoughts and interests of Terry Bisson, who completed the book after Miller's suicide. Either way, I do know that this book ought not to have been written.
• 
  Martin Moleski

  I loved Canticle for Liebowitz when I was younger--I read it three or four times.
  
  I was shocked and saddened when I heard that the author committed suicide. I've never used the book in my courses as a consequence.
  
  Some day, I hope to stumble across the sequel and see how it goes.
  
  May God have mercy on Walter. May his soul and the souls of all of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
• 
  Keith

  This was extremely disappointing for me, considering how much I enjoyed the first book. There was really not much depth in this one or even interesting character development. I was actually falling asleep trying to read it because it wasn’t engaging at all.
• 
  Christopher

  A sequel of sorts to Miller’s ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’, this novel takes place between parts 2 and 3 of Canticle, following the life of Brother Blacktooth St. George of Leibowitz Abbey during a struggle between the Church and the Hannegan Empire.
• 
  Jim Davis

  Gave up at the 15% point. It was a big disappointment after "A Canticle For Leibowitz". It didn't seem to be going anywhere or if it was it was talking way to long to get there.
• 
  David Mills

  Favorite Quote = “…one should be embarrassed to speak of God in the third person.”
• 
  Mitch

  It'd been years since I'd read Mr. Miller's classic, and on the strength of that memory I reread it then followed it up with his sequel.
  
  Well, not so much a sequel as a thinly-connected discontinuation, with little in common with what made the first book so great. That's unfortunate because you can tell the author spent a lot of effort writing it but...
  
  He didn't play off the first book's strengths.
  
  The title works well as the two are symbols of the fractious union between the Catholic Church and the beliefs of a far less regimented local culture. However, neither of the two actually play much of a role in the actual story.
  
  Instead of focusing on a single character, this novel throws in a very complex menagerie of people along with their beliefs, changing alliances, interactions, etc... The book focused a great deal on Church hierarchies and intrigues, then switched over to very earthly and bloody battles for power- neither of which caught my interest. As a result, the book was a continuing struggle to finish.
  
  It is also a dark, disillusioned work overall. It doesn't diminish from its rightly more famous predecessor, but suffers even more as a disappointing follow up.
• 
  Nathan Buxton

  It's certainly not the masterpiece that Miller found with Canticle, but still an interesting journey nonetheless. This is hardly a book of science fiction; it's more a story of losing and finding faith, and it's a more powerful work because of this. If you're looking for a second verse to the hymn of the enduring Church from Canticle, it won't be found here. The same gripping humanity is here: all the characters are trying to make the best life they can with what the mid-33rd century has given them. Overall, an interesting exploration of the world of Canticle, but with a significantly different focus.
• 
  Ketan Shah

  It started out well but became too much of a chore to finish.When the story is initially told from the viewpoint of Blacktooth St George it's great ,but once the political intrigues become too deep the story gets too confusing and just doesn't hold interest anymore.Definitely not as good as a Canticle for Leibowitz.If you like the highly detailed,non technological world presented here,you might enjoy Keith Robert's Pavane,set in a backward 20th century molded by the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I and the triumph of a militantly antiscience Catholic Church.
• 
  Robert Wallis

  A book that rewards the concentration I didn't give it. Set within the same post apocolyptic world of it's predecessor. It follows a man spun by his own failings across a tale of complicated high church politics and secular conflict. With a lot of things going on you will need to set aside a couple of full Sunday's afternoons to keep a grip on it all, and the momentum for the story to grab you. Not a book to do in fits and starts as I tried if you want to appreciate and enjoy it fully. If I had, I suspect it would have scored higher.
• 
  Tharen

  This book has quite a different focus than Canticle for Leibowitz. The emphasis was on one life in a period of war and turmoil in between the first two sections of the first book. I really struggled to get through it as there were many depictions of war, battles and lot of crises of conscience in the main character, a Leibowitz Monk named Blacktooth St. George. Parts were interesting, but overall I was disappointed and the ending didn't really satisfy.