Book Review: "The Shepherd of Princes" by Mike Bonikowsky
Reviewed by Liv Ross
The Shepherd of Princes by Mike Bonikowsky (Solum Literary Press, 2024)
Reviewed by
In the late aughts and early teens, post-apocalyptic stories became a cultural trend, and I got caught up in it. I made my way through countless end-of-civilization narratives. Zombies, warfare, vampires, disease, famine – whatever the cause of the downfall, it was all interesting to me. As I made my way through the films, books, and video games, I noticed that all of the societies formed in the aftermath of these imagined devastations were terribly broken. It was as if these storytellers could only imagine that the strong and the exploitative would survive. In a post-apocalyptic world, there would be no room, no hope, for anyone else. I could not find one story where kindness and care for “the least of these” was entertained, let alone allowed to prevail.
Later, I discovered The Road by Cormac McCarthy, whose main character wrestles with generosity and goodness even as he is surrounded by hostility. Similarly, the video game The Last of Us imagines a compound in Jackson, Wyoming, where gentleness and openness prevail within its walls if not without. However, in Mike Bonikowsky’s 2024 novel, The Shepherd of Princes, I finally found these principles taken further and set at the heart of the story.
The Shepherd of Princes chronicles the fate of a village built around the care of the physically and developmentally disabled. A young man, Micah Gault, is born into the life of helping to care for this flock. Through the character of Micah, Bonikowsky captures the difficulty of genuinely loving persons who can be, at times, hard to love. Affection and frustration vie for supremacy, and the tension is compounded by the villagers’ existence in a world deprived of many modern comforts and necessities, such as electricity, running water, and medicine. The community, called The Fold, is distant from help and lacks the infrastructure to receive even basic goods from outside sources. Everything must be found in and recycled from their immediate surroundings.
In the first half of the novel, Bonikowsky deftly weaves the contradictory strands of beauty and hardship. He writes, for example, “Each new morning found two scents fighting for possession of the air: the morning’s fresh bread, and the last night’s accidents.” In a single sentence, he neatly frames the sense of provision and waste. I was familiar with Bonikowsky’s poetic chops, having already read his earlier volume of poetry, The Red Stuff, and was pleased to see his skill equally applied to prose.
There is a beauty and a simplicity to life in The Fold, but the challenge remains to care for those who cannot care for themselves. Bonikowsky approaches the difficulty and frustration Micah faces with the assuredness of someone who knows something about what he writes. For every beautiful vista and every moment of genuine connection, there is an answering moment of soiled clothing or violent outbursts that must be handled carefully. Micah both loves his life and longs to be free of it. Bonikowsky makes it easy to understand the young man’s conflicting feelings.
Having grown familiar with the tensions at the heart of The Fold, midway through the novel, we learn that signs of electricity appear to be returning to a nearby city. Micah is chosen to venture out in search of help for The Fold. And so we follow his crossing of the barren lands between The City and The Fold and witness the work he must do to earn his way into The City for a chance to plead his cause. Along the way, he meets a lonely young woman named September Burrows, who warns him against holding too much hope for what he will find there. She has seen her own family torn apart because most chose the stability of The City over loyalty to an elderly family member who could not contribute enough to find a place there.
Within a few days of arriving, Micah discovers the truth of September’s words. The City is organized as a setting where only the strong or worthy can find a place. Refugees must work to earn food and entry. Quotas must be met. Given Micah’s intelligence and bodily strength, prepared as he was through long years of service and labour, he makes his way through the tiers quickly, and gains notice and acceptance of the people in charge. He finds that he fits in well, and enjoys the privileges that his capabilities earn him. It is not as if his contributions went unnoticed in The Fold, but The City rewards him in far more tangible ways. He also finds that the people he meets there, although different from those at home, are kind and supportive. He even connects with Sarah, a young woman nearly his age, who seems enthusiastic about his arrival. This connection takes him even deeper into The City where he eventually learns of the sacrifices made to ensure the stability and progress of its rebuilding efforts.
The Shepherd of Princes is an overtly Christian novel. The founders and Shepherds of The Fold bear a resemblance to monastic orders, and Christian beliefs inform the subtext of many of the characters’ conversations. As such, it would have been easy to strawman The City and its denizens as evil and irredeemable, but Bonikowsky took the time to convey the struggle and fears that plague both societies. Ultimately, he writes a story about the Wisdom of God and the wisdom of man, rather than a story of good versus evil, or spiritual versus material. This is a far trickier and more nuanced tack, and I feel that Bonikowsky mostly succeeds.
Although the chapters that record life in The City lack some of the depth and texture of those that explore life in The Fold, The City’s citizens are not dashed off as careless caricatures either, as we discover that the primary motivation behind their ultimately immoral actions is not mere greed or power, but fear. Bonikowsky allows narrative sympathy for The City’s inhabitants, who make bad decisions for the right reasons. This sympathy, however, can only stretch so far. Neither the place nor its people, had the same depth as The Fold.
But perhaps I am wrong. As the passage quoted earlier demonstrates, life in The Fold is characterized by darkness and light, waste and provision – a sort of literary chiaroscuro that provides the depth The City lacks — The City that sought light without darkness, provision without waste. How could such a place be anything but flat and rootless?
God could have written a story where our personal and global dawns need no preceding darkness, but he didn’t. Better theologians than I have tried to answer why that is. I do not think Bonikowsky gives an answer here either, but what he does is show us what we can do with the tale in which we find ourselves. And isn’t that what the best stories are for?
Liv Ross is an urban monk, a poet and writer, a birder, and a student of Christian Spirituality. She has been engaged in creative writing more or less consistently for two decades, and her primary mediums are essays and poetry. When she’s not writing, Liv practices gardening, pipe-smoking, leather-working, and mischief. She has been published in The Way Back To Ourselves, Silence and Starsong, Solum Journal, The Amethyst Review, andVoeglinView. She can be found on Instagram @liv_ross_poetry, twitter @je_suis_liv, or her substack, https://substack.com/@theabbeyofcuriosity.
Mike Bonikowsky lives in Melancthon Township, Ontario, with his wife and kids and chickens and rabbits. He works as a caregiver for men and women with developmental disabilities. In 2022, he published his first book of poems, Red Stuff, with Solum Literary Press.
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