A Canticle for Leibowitz

A beautiful yet disturbing book. I did not expect to find new-to-me horrors in a nuclear apocalypse story, especially one written so early in the Cold War. It is an incredibly thought provoking book, one that will stick with me for a long time.

Contrary to another reviewer, I believe the lessons in this book are as timely and important today as they were more than 60 years ago. The threat of nuclear annihilation is still with us and will never go away as long as humanity tolerates their existence. Canticle highlights this danger more than any other book I have read.

Since finishing, I have read a number of reviews and analyses of Canticle and am a bit confused by the repeated critique of its lack of female characters. The story takes place almost exclusively in the context of a Catholic monastery where women aren't even allowed. So the absence of female characters for much of the book was not something that felt problematic. Even then, two of the most important characters in the final act are women. One of whom drives home how myopic the well meaning monks were from the everyday world and the other half of humanity.

It's split into three parts. Fiat Homo (Let There Be Mankind) follows Brother Francis, a young novice in the Albertian Order of Leibowitz in the 26th century. This is 600 years after a nuclear war. The human race very nearly died out and many are born with birth defects. In a backlash against technology and learning, the Simplification destroyed books and killed scientists, leading the world into a new dark age.

The monks preserve Memorabilia, relics of Leibowitz who they are trying to get canonized. As a reader you soon realise what these relics are, but the monks have no idea of their meaning. It shows the importance of preserving knowledge but also the context.

Brother Francis is a bit of a nervous, naive chap. He discovers a fallout shelter in the desert, in which he believes he's found a relic, a drawing made by Leibowitz himself. The Abbot isn't too keen on miracles right now, they'll only interfere with their petition to New Rome for Leibowitz to be made a saint. It pokes fun at the Catholic church but also ponders how religion and science co-exist. It's actually quite amusing in places and some of the characters wouldn't feel out of place in Discworld.

Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light) is set in 3174, where scholars are starting to take an interest in recreating the technology of the past. At the abbey, one monk has used the teachings of Leibowitz to generate electricity. Whilst some view this with suspicion, others see the potential.

Fiat Voluntas Tua (Let Thy Will Be Done) takes a much sadder turn. The year is 3781 and mankind has not learned from their mistakes. Perhaps the point is that as history was destroyed and forgotten, no one remembered how bad it was last time. It's very much a Cold War era book.

In what I imagine was quite shocking at the time it was published, it talks about the right to die. I found it quite upsetting how the Abbott resisted the state sanctioned suicide for those suffering with no hope of recovery. A mother just wants her daughter to not be in pain and the Abbott is forceful about how God wants her to suffer and they must carry on to avoid hell.

A satire that starts out with humour definitely ended on a much more sombre note. I'm glad I read it and I can see its influence on other, post-apocalyptic, works.

I read this because it was selected as the Book of Honor for this year's Potlatch science fiction & fantasy convention. I had read it before, when I was in high school or college, and had a vague memory of liking it at the time. The novel is set in a world where nuclear war happened sometime in the 1940s or 1960s, with the action opening after enough generations have passed that there is no one alive to remember the world before and literacy is almost zero. The book seems to be shaped by the Cold War, China's Cultural Revolution, and Miller's Catholic faith. It was inspired by his experience in WWII, bombing an ancient abbey. Miller was a short story writer, and this book came about by modifying two long short stories, and then adding the last third of the book. The action takes place in and around an abbey in the southwest, where an order of monks preserves knowledge from before the nuclear war -- books, blueprints, shopping lists, and any fragment of paper with writing on it.[return][return]This time, I did quite like the first two sections of the book. Earnest Brother Francis, the mad poet, and the desert pilgrim (or whatever he is) Benjamin were interesting. The abbot in the second section is tough, open-minded and humane. I didn't enjoy the last section, with the authoritarian Abbot Zerchi and lots of theological arguing. Ordering a dying woman to "offer up" her suffering, and when verbal orders fail, physically preventing her from seeking euthanasia didn't strike me as high-minded -- though I suppose it's possible that Miller intended this as criticism of the church, too.[return][return]MIller seems to be simultaneously of the opinion that man will inevitably destroy the world with nuclear war as soon as it become technically feasible, but at the same time he ends with people going into space to create new worlds with hope. The space ship seems tacked-on, though.