The Manhattan Hunt Club, by John Saul.
New York: Ballantine Books, 2001.
$25.95 - 320 pages.

John Saul’s The Manhattan Hunt Club is a fast-paced thriller marred by gratuitous scenes of sexual perversion and an ultimately ridiculous plot line.

Falsely accused of murder, college student Jeff Converse finds himself first in prison, then in subterranean Manhattan, a world of forgotten rooms, crawl spaces, and twisting tunnels. Inhabited by ferocious rats and homeless people, this world also serves as a jungle for hunters, men who hunt prisoners listed as escaped or released from police custody.

These hunters include a social worker, a priest, and a group called the One Hundred. They conspire with court officials and prison guards to release prisoners into abandoned or little known parts of the tunnels below New York, where homeless people hired as beaters and guards keep the prisoners from escaping back onto the street during the hunt.

In this story, the hunters are pursuing Jeff Converse and another prisoner, a dangerous twisted man named Jagger. As the hunters close on Jeff and Jagger, who are also beset by rats, other criminals, hunger, and fatigue, Jeff’s father, Keith, and his fiance, Heather, have become convinced that Jeff is somewhere below the streets of Manhattan. Eventually they also enter into the pursuit beneath the streets.

The Manhattan Hunt Club is an exciting story, but the premise to the story is absurd. The Hundred is a group formed to allow “society’s elite” to wield power in a way that might offend the public if done in the open. The Manhattan Hunt Club is formed within The Hundred, a group within a group whose initial purpose is to track and kill a man who raped and murdered one of the group’s daughters. As they indulge their taste for vigilantism, the members of the Manhattan Hunt Club begin a game of tracking and shooting their prey in the tunnels, then mounting their victim’s heads like game trophies on the wall of a secret room within the headquarters of The Hundred.

Here the story falls apart in much the same way that so many other stories in this genre fall apart. How would it be possible that so many people  members of The Hundred, the hired guards and beaters — would keep quiet about such an endeavor? Why would the members not expect eventually to be apprehended? Would there really be people sick enough — or even foolish enough — to mount their victims like stuffed animals?

Simply put, The Manhattan Hunt Club is bubblegum for the brain.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller.
New York: Bantam Books, 2001.
$19.95 - 368 pages.

First published 43 years ago, Walter Miller’s A Canticle For Leibowitz continues both to attract new readers and to satisfy those who are returning to the book for a second or third time.

A Canticle For Leibowitz begins 600 years after a nuclear holocaust. Except for a few patches of civilization, the world is dominated by “Simpletons,” people who attack and kill anyone who may have helped cause the catastrophe — scientists, rulers, professors.

One oasis of relative civilization is an abbey in the American Southwest, and it is near this abbey that Brother Francis discovers some important documents while on a retreat in the desert. The documents — technical papers, some notes, a baffling grocery list — are clearly the work of I. Leibowitz, the founder of the abbey whom many consider a saint.

Through the rest of the story, we see the slow rebuilding of civilization, a reconstruction that will eventually result in more bombs and more wars. Yet despite the dreariness of his message in Canticle, Miller gives the reader many reasons for visiting this book. His characters are wonderfully made — the bumbling and loveable Brother Francis; the old hermit who appears frequently in the text, perhaps as the Wandering Jew; Dom Paulo, the wise abbott; the poet with the glass eye and the weary, biting wit.

A second reason for Canticle’s success is Miller’s transposition of early medieval imagery and sensibilities onto a post-nuclear scene. His descriptions give the reader a sense of revisiting the Venerable Bede’s England, of witnessing the end of centuries of barbarian invasions and the slow emergence of the civilizing force of faith and human ingenuity.

Miller may also be read simply for the joy of his prose. Opening Canticle to any page, the reader will discover masterful writing. Here, for example, is a random sample, a description of booklegging in which books and papers were smuggled past the Simpletons:

Leibowitz, while taking his own turn at booklegging, was caught by a simpleton mob; a turncoat technician, whom the priest swiftly forgave, identified him as not only a man of learning, but also a specialist in the weapons field. Hooded in burlap, he was martyred forthwith, by strangulation with a hangman’s noose not tied for neck-breaking, at the same time being roasted alive — thus settling a dispute in the crowd concerning the method of execution.

Though seemingly a dirge to man’s inability to handle his own inventions, Miller also gives us a hymn to civilization, its fragility and the beauty of the love which undergirds it.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)

 

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