Hiero's Journey (1973)

2.5 stars

I really wanted to give this book a higher rating. There’s a lot here to love and Lanier has a very fertile imagination: Psychic Canadian warrior-priest? Check; also psychic Moose destrier? Check; psychic mutant bear pal and assorted demi-human mutant creatures? Check; travelogue through post-apocalyptic North America? Check. It's like the coolest campaign of Gamma World ever that you never got to play as a kid. I fondly recall seeing the far-out Darrell K. Sweet cover on this book during nearly every trip I took to the library as a kid. I always looked at it wistfully, wanting to dive into an adventure so obviously cool, but my own snobbishness kept me away. Well, I finally broke down and took the plunge.

Unfortunately it appears that some of my snobbishness may have been justified. The first part of the book carried me along with the narrative at a fairly quick pace and despite the somewhat clunky prose and more! Exclamation! Marks! than you! can shake! a stick! at!!!! (maybe William Shatner should read the audio version) I was certainly entertained. Somewhere around ¾ of the way through, though, I completely ran out of steam and aside from a few pages here and there I left the book unread for months. I really wanted to finish this book, though, and it did improve somewhat towards the end.

Lanier’s post-apocalyptic North America has some interesting locales: from the expansive pine forests of the north to the miasmic swamps and irradiated buried cities of the south, all of them populated by the mutated descendants of our modern wildlife as well as the ‘Leemutes’, or semi-intelligent human-animal hybrids, most of which are under the control of the nefarious Unclean Brotherhood. Amongst this colourful background Lanier gives us many memorable scenes, especially Hiero's psychic battle with the Dweller in the Mist, his various confrontations with the pompous leaders of the Unclean, and the final confrontation with a living hive-mind fungal-slime. I’m a bit of a sucker for stories with PSI-elements as well, so I enjoyed the psychic aspects of the book: whether it was Hiero’s scrying of the future with the aid of his trusty bag of symbols, his inner battles with other intelligences, or the possession of an animal’s eyes to see the wider landscape.

That being said, the prose really didn’t do the story any favours and despite the intriguing aspects of Lanier’s story I found myself slowed down at many points in the narrative and moving on to other things from time to time, so it took me quite awhile to finish this. Hiero is also a very simplistic hero (the pun certainly isn’t my fault) who is basically almost always right, his enemies always wrong…there’s very little room for any grey in this world. My biggest stumbling blocks, though, were the stilted prose mentioned above and the superfluous romance subplot that added nothing to the story and was cringe-inducing in its puerility and simplicity. Overall there is a lot of awesome here, buried in bad prose and simplistic plotting.
( )

Hiero Desteen, Secondary Priest-Exorcist and Senior Killman of the Church Universal, is chosen by the Science Committee to travel from the Abbey Central in Sask to the Lost Cities of the southeast, in search of the computers that hold archives of the time before The Death. (He is one of six chosen to travel in different directions.)

It is the post-apocalypic world of the year 7476, thousands of years after human civilization destroyed itself with nuclear weapons and artificial disease. The Kandan Confederacy consists of Metz Republic in the west, the Otwah League in the east, city states of the southeast such as D’alwah on the coast of the Lantik, etc. The evil Unclean seek domination, and in recent years have been closing in, ambushing convoys and colonies of the abbey. The Unclean are assisted by the Leemutes, animals with lethal (non-reproducible) mutations, invariably disgusting in appearance: furhoppers, hairy howlers, man-rats, slimers, were-bears. In the background, observing and stepping in as needed, are the Eleveners, adherents of the eleventh commandment: “Thou shalt not destroy the Earth nor the Life thereon.” The Unclean and Eleveners are both alliances formed by scientists after The Death. The Unclean were psychologists, biochemists, physicists. The Eleveners were ecologists.

Hiero travels on the morse (mutated moose) Klootz, through the boreal forest and swamp to the Inland Sea (formerly the Great Lakes), to the port of Neeyana (possibly once Indiana), around a desert of lingering radiation, into the land of the Vilah-ree, onward to the site of an ancient city. Along the way he is joined by the intelligent bear Gorm, the runaway D’alwah princess Luchare, the Elevener Brother Aldo, merchant ship Captain Gimp and crew. He battles the Unclean wizards S’nerg and S’duna and S’carn, collecting technologically sophisticated devices from those he slays. He seeks guidance by casting and interpreting the 40 symbols, which warn him about the House... Communication by mind is the norm, though the relatively primitive societies of the southeast communicate vocally; Luchare has to be taught. As he encounters enemies, Hiero strengthens mental powers of shielding his own mind and penetrating others.

My reading experience was perhaps influenced by a poor electronic version, 837 pages (it’s not nearly this long, the numbers skipped) with no chapter divisions (they exist, but were not linked separately) and mental dialogue unmarked by punctuation or italics; the journey often felt like a mishmashy trudge, episodes strung together rather than an overarching story or character development. I was unaware of the glossary until I reached the end, and it would have provided coherence. There are some cool bits, especially the fungi. I’m curious enough to continue on to the second book.

(read 28 Jan 2013)

When I was 15, this was my favorite book.

Lanier’s most distinctive gift as an author is an enthusiasm for his stories. Even if you are not a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction or adventure fiction you cannot help but be caught up in the frenetic eagerness of the narrative. The sheer number of expository sentences that end in explanation points is staggering. He may not be the most gifted author out there, but he obviously had a lot of fun writing Hiero’s Journey and I found it a bit contagious.

The “Hiero” of this story is a priest in a future Catholic order (as is typical of many post-apocalyptic stories) who sets out on a quest across a drastically changed North America looking for technological relics of vanished civilization. Mutated animals and people (and iterations of the two) abound. Do not try to look for scientific accuracy in this tale; it is “soft” science fiction resolutely and unapologetically. There is nothing really innovative or genre-busting about Hiero, but it was not a waste of my time. One minor complaint I have is how Lanier constantly relied on metaphors about radio and other technologic trappings when describing how telepathy worked in this story. Considering the main character had never heard of radio or seen anything like it these descriptions broke the fourth wall a bit. ( )

A fascinating post-apocalypse fantasy about a ranger and his moose. Nothing complicated, but a good story in the style of Paul O. Williams. ( )