Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman - Hardcover

Walter M. Miller Jr.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553107046 ISBN 13: 9780553107043

Publisher: Spectra, 1997

Synopsis

It has been nearly forty years since Walter M. Miller, Jr., shocked and dazzled readers with his provocative bestseller and enduring classic, A Canticle for Leibowitz.  Now, in one of the most eagerly awaited publishing events of our time, here is Miller's masterpiece, an epic intellectual and emotional tour de force that will stand beside 1984, Brave New World, and A Canticle for Leibowitz.

In a world struggling to transcend a terrifying legacy of darkness--a world torn between love and violence, good and evil--one man undertakes an odyssey of adventure and discovery that promises to alter not only his destiny but the destiny of humankind as well. . . .

Millennia have passed since the Flame Deluge, yet society remains fragmented, pockets of civilization besieged by barbarians.  The Church is in turmoil, the exiled papacy struggling to survive in its Rocky Mountain refuge.  To the south, tyranny is on the march.  Imperial Texark troops, bent on conquest, are headed north into the lands of the Nomads, spreading terror in their wake.

Meanwhile, isolated in Leibowitz Abbey, Brother Blacktooth St. George suffers a crisis of faith.  Torn between his vows and his Nomad upbringing, between the Holy Virgin and visions of the Wild Horse Woman of his people, he stands at the brink of disgrace and expulsion from his order.  But he is offered an escape--of sorts: a new assignment as a translator for Cardinal Brownpony, which will take him to the contentious election of a new pope and then on a pilgrimage to the city of New Rome.  Journeying across a continent divided by nature, politics, and war, Blacktooth is drawn into Brownpony's intrigues and conspiracies.  He bears witness to rebellion, assassination, and human sacrifice.  And he is introduced to the sins that monastery life has long held at bay.

This introduction comes in the form of AEdrea, a beautiful but forbidden "genny" living among the deformed and mutant castouts in Texark's most hostile terrain.  As Blacktooth encounters her again and again on his travels--in the flesh, in rumors of miraculous deeds, and in the delirium of fever--he begins to wonder if AEdrea is a she-devil, the Holy Mother, or the Wild Horse Woman herself.

Picaresque and passionate, magnificent, dark, and compellingly real, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman is a brutal, brilliant, thrilling tale of mystery, mysticism, and divine madness, a classic that will long endure in every reader's memory.

About this title

About the Author

Walter M. Miller, Jr. grew up in the American South and enlisted in the Army Air Corps a month after Pearl Harbor.  He spent most of World War II as a radio operator and tail gunner, participating in more than fifty-five combat sorties, among them the controversial destruction of the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, the oldest monastery in the Western world.  Fifteen years later he wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz.  The sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, followed after nearly forty years.

Terry Bisson is the award-winning author of numerous short stories as well as the novels Talking Man and Voyage to the Red Planet.  

Reviews

Miller's episodic, ironic, deeply moving, and only previous novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), remains one of science fiction's enduring masterpieces. This quasi-sequel--the chronologies can't be reconciled--was, according to the publisher, ``85% complete'' upon the author's death in 1996; short-story expert Bisson (Pirates of the Universe, 1996, etc.) completed it. The Abbey of San Leibowitz, located in America's Southwest, has survived into the 32nd century, but various empires, hostile tribes, and ecclesiastical power struggles threaten to destroy the political stability of the region, and the Papacy along with it. Among the characters who will play crucial roles in this conflict- -which seems to invite allegorical interpretations--are: the disgraced and reluctant monk of Leibowitz Abbey, Blacktooth St. George; Father e'Laiden, a priest under interdict; Holy (Little Bear) Madness, a wild but aristocratic Nomad; seaman, warrior, and executioner Wooshin; the Red Deacon, Cardinal Brownpony; ’drea, a beautiful ``gennie'' (mutant) and nun, with whom Blacktooth becomes emotionally and physically involved; and Benjamin, the mysterious old Jew of the Mesa of Last Resort, who may be both the Wandering Jew and Saint Leibowitz himself. Dense, meandering, with a bewildering cast of thousands, and not very enlightening either: a book that almost every aficionado of Miller's masterpiece will want to attempt, but very few will finish. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The long-awaited sequel to the classic A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) was completed by Terry Bisson (Pirates of the Universe, LJ 3/15/96) from instructions left by Miller before his death in 1996. After World War III, America is divided into territories (Plains, Texark, Oregon, and others) struggling to reindustrialize. In this fragmented society, the papacy plays an important role in uniting the factions. In Texark, Nimmy Blacktooth regrets the vows he took to be a monk. While trying to get out of monastery life, he becomes embroiled in the search for a new pope. Unfortunately, despite its humor and social commentary, this book is a bit of a disappointment; the plot drags and seems pointless, and there is very little of the visionary sf that made the original so compelling. For larger sf collections and where the original book is popular.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Listen, my son, to your master's precepts, and incline the ear of your heart."
--The First Sentence of The Rule.

"Whoever you are, therefore, who are hastening to the heavenly homeland, fulfill with the help of Christ this minimum Rule which we have written for beginners; and then at length under God's protection, you will attain to the loftier heights of doctrine and virtue which we have mentioned above."
--The Last Sentence of The Rule.

Between these two lines, written about 529 A.D. in a dark age, is Saint Benedict's homely prescription for a way of monastic life that has prevailed even in the shadow of the Magna Civitas.



As he sat shivering in the gloomy corridor outside the meeting hall and waited for the tribunal to finish deciding his punishment, Brother Blacktooth St. George, A.O.L., remembered the time his boss uncle had taken him to see the Wild Horse Woman at a Plains Nomad tribal ceremony, and how Deacon ("Half-Breed") Brownpony, who was on a diplomatic mission to the Plains at the time, had tried to exorcise her priests with holy water and drive her spirit from the council lodge.  There had been a riot, and an assault on the person of the young deacon, not yet a cardinal, whose shaman ("witch doctor") attackers had been summarily executed by the newly baptized Nomad sharif.  Blacktooth was seven at the time, and had not seen the Woman then, but his boss uncle insisted that she had been there in the smoke of the fire until the trouble began.  He believed his boss uncle, as he might not have believed his father.  Later, before he ran away from home, he had seen her twice, once by day riding bareback and naked along the crest of a ridge, and once by dim firelight when she prowled as the Night Hag through the darkness outside the settlement enclosure.  He definitely remembered seeing her.  Now his ties to Christianity demanded that he remember them as childish hallucinations.  One of the less plausible accusations against him was that he had confused her with the Mother of God.

The tribunal was taking its time.  There was no clock in the hall, but at least an hour had passed since Blacktooth had testified in his own defense and been excused from the meeting hall, which was really the abbey's refectory.  He tried not to speculate about the cause of the delay, or the meaning of the fact that pure chance had cast that deacon, now Cardinal ("Red Deacon") Brownpony, in the role of amicus curiae at the hearing.  The cardinal had come to the monastery from the Holy See only a week ago, and it was well known, but most certainly not announced, that his purpose in being here was to discuss with the Abbot Cardinal Jarad the papal election (the third in four years) which would be called soon after the present Pope finished dying.

Blacktooth could not decide whether the eminent Half-Breed's participation in the trial was favorable or unfavorable to his cause.  As he remembered the night of the exorcism, he also remembered that in those days Brownpony had not been friendly to the Plains Nomads, either the wild or the tamed.  The cardinal had been raised by sisters in the territory conquered by Texark.  It had been told to him that his mother, a Nomad, had been raped by a Texark cavalryman, then had abandoned her baby to the sisters.  But in recent years, the cardinal had learned to speak the Nomad tongue, and spent much time and effort forging an alliance between the wild people of the Plains and the exiled papacy in its Rocky Mountain refuge at Valana.  Blacktooth himself was of pure Nomad blood, although his late parents had been displaced to the farming settlements.  His mother owned no mares, and thus he had no status whatever among the wild tribes.  His ethnic background had been no handicap during his life as a monk; the brethren were tolerant to a fault, except in matters of faith.  But in the so-called civilized world outside, being a Nomad would be hazardous unless he lived on the Plains.

He heard raised voices from the refectory, but could not make out words.  One way or another, it was all over for him but the final break, and that was proving to be the hardest thing of all.

A few paces from the bench where he was supposed to wait was a shallow alcove in the corridor wall, and within it stood a statue of Saint Leibowitz.  Brother Blacktooth left the bench and went there to pray, thus disobeying the last command given to him: Sit there, stay there.  Breaking his vow of obedience was getting to be a habit.  Even a dog will sit and stay, his devil reminded him.

Sancte Isaac Eduarde, ora pro me!

The kneeling rail was too close to the image for him to look up at the saint's face, so he prayed to the saint's bare feet, which stood on a pile of fagots.  Anyway, by now he knew the wrinkled old countenance by heart.

He remembered when he first came to the abbey, the abbot of that time, Dom Gido Graneden, had already ordered the statue removed from his office, its traditional place of repose, to the corridor here where it now stood.  Graneden's predecessor had committed the sacrilege of having the fine old wood carving painted in "living color," and Graneden, who loved it in its original condition, could neither bear to look at it, with its painted simper and impossibly upturned irises, nor put up with the smell and noise of having its restoration done in situ.  Blacktooth had never seen the full paint job, for upon his arrival the head and shoulders of a man of wood emerged from what appeared to be the chest of a plaster saint.  A small area at a time was being treated with a phosphate compound concocted by Brothers Pharmacist and Janitor.  As soon as the paint began to blister, they painstakingly scraped it clean, trying to avoid any abrasion of the wood.  The process was very slow, and he had lived a year at the abbey before the restoration was complete; by that time, a filing cabinet occupied its space in the abbot's office, so here it still stood.

The restoration was less than complete even now, at least in the sight of those who remembered its original condition.  Occasionally Brother Carpenter stopped to frown disapprovingly at it, then to work on the creases around the eyes with a dental pick, or caress between the fingers with fine sandpaper.  He worried about what the paint remover might have done to the wood, so he frequently rubbed it with oil and lovingly polished it.  The carving had been done nearly six centuries ago by a sculptor named Fingo, to whom the Beatus Leibowitz--not yet canonized--had appeared in a vision.  A close resemblance between the statue and a death mask which Fingo had never seen was used as an argument for his canonization, because it seemed to confirm the reality of Fingo's vision.

Saint Leibowitz was Blacktooth's favorite saint, after the Holy Virgin, but now it was time to go.  He crossed himself, arose, and returned doglike to the bench to "sit and stay." No one had seen him at prayer except his devil, who called him a hypocrite.

Blacktooth remembered clearly the first time he had asked to be released from his final vows as a monk of the Order of Saint Leibowitz.  Many things had happened that year.  It was the year the news came that his mother had died.  It was also the year that the Abbot Jarad had received the red hat from the Pope in Valana, and the year Filpeo Harq had been crowned as the seventh Hannegan of Texark by his uncle Urion, the archbishop of that imperial city.  More to the point, perhaps, it was the third year of Blacktooth's work (assigned to him by Dom Jarad himself) of translating all seven volumes of the Venerable Boedullus's Liber Originum, that scholarly but highly speculative attempt to reconstruct from the evidence of later events a plausible history of the darkest of all centuries, the twenty-first--of translating it from the old monastic author's quaint Neo-Latin into the most improbable of languages, Brother Blacktooth's own native tongue, the Grasshopper dialect of Plains Nomadic, for which not even a suitable phonetic alphabet existed prior to the conquests (3174 and 3175 A.D.) of Hannegan II in what had once been called Texas.

Several times Blacktooth had asked to be relieved of this task before he asked what he really dreaded, to be released from his vows, but Dom Jarad found his attitude peculiarly stubborn, obtuse, and ungrateful.  The abbot had conceived of a small Nomadic library he wanted created as a donation of high culture from the monastic Memorabilia of Christian civilization to the benighted tribes still wandering the northern Plains, migrant herdsmen who would one day be persuaded into literacy by formerly edible missionaries, already busy among them and no longer considered edible under the Treaty of the Sacred Mare between the hordes and the adjacent agrarian states.  As the literacy rate among the free tribes of the Grasshopper and Wilddog Hordes who ranged with their long-haired cattle north of the Nady Ann River was still less than five percent, the usefulness of such a library was a thing only dimly foreseen, even by the Lord Abbot, until Brother Blacktooth, in his initial eagerness to please his master before the work began, explained to Dom Jarad that the three major dialects of Nomadic differed less to the reader than to the listener, and that by means of a hybrid orthography and the avoidance of special tribal idioms, the translation could be made understandable even to a literate ex-Nomad subject of Hannegan VI in the South, where the Jackrabbit dialect was still spoken in the shanties, the fields, and the stables, while the Ol'zark tongue of t...

Edition details

• Publisher: Spectra
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0553107046
• ISBN 13: 9780553107043
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 448