A Canticle for Leibowitz

I love reading old science fiction! Finding out how people in the past thought about how the world would be in the future is often a great window into the preoccupations of the day. You learn about the things they thought would be forever, and how the technologies and progress they haven't been exposed to changed their world view. Through this lens, A Canticle for Leibowitz is an interesting insight into the 1950s and the beginnings of the Cold War.

The central strand running through the book is that even if you send humanity back to a pre-technological state through a nuclear war, it would redevelop along similar lines to how it did the first time. We are introduced to a world that is a post-apocalyptic wasteland and follow humanity as it re-establishes itself in the new world. In a series of vignettes we see three points in time in this re-development - loosely, a "Dark Ages", "Renaissance" and "Modern" story, all focused on a Catholic abbey that has made it its mission to preserve pre-apocalypse knowledge.

It was an interesting choice to make the Catholic Church so central to the tale. Seen from the 2020s this seems quite incongruous - while the church is still a key part of many people's lives, it does not have the same centrality to public life that it perhaps used to (certainly to me a lot of the Latin phrasing and way of thinking felt quite alien!). In a more modern retelling you might expect that the beliefs espoused by the "church" would be altered beyond recognition (or at least, only the faintest outline of the original would remain), whereas here the Christian stories come through with only minor alterations. Perhaps the author could not imagine a world without Christian thought?

The spectre of the Cold War hangs heavily over the book, both in terms of the anxiety surrounding nuclear weapons and the way that states in the "Modern" section end up coalescing into a similar situation. It's quite a common trope that seems to dominate science fiction from the period - perhaps understandably if you view science fiction as a genre as an attempt to isolate and distil particular aspects of the present in ways that allow you to discuss them in an more interesting way.

There's a degree of helplessness in the way that the author describes how information about impending nuclear war is shared that felt quite different from how such a story would be told today as well. The point of view makes it clear that it is understood that what people are being told is propaganda, but there is no way for them to discern the underlying truth. I wonder if this way of looking at the world has been shattered by the advent of social media - now there is more information than you could possibly sift through rather than one authoritative story you must choose to believe or reject, and the problem is very different.

Overall I felt that the writing was quite uneven across the three stories. The middle one was definitely the best, with well developed characters and an interesting plot. I felt that the first and final stories were a bit lacking in that respect, particularly the last, which devoted a lot of time to debating the morality of euthanasia in a manner that felt like a thinly veiled abortion debate (although I suppose it's interesting to see someone's point of view from the 50s on the matter).

I found it worth reading to try and get that reflected glow of 1950s thought, but I probably wouldn't recommend this to someone unless they enjoy old sci-fi or have an interest in the Catholic Church. I understand it's quite an influential book (and I could believe that in 1959 this was pretty groundbreaking!), but there have been many other post-apocalyptic novels written since that are tighter and tell a more coherent and interesting story. Nevertheless, an interesting experience to read!

Wow. I feel like I need to pull up Google Calendar and set aside an hour or to so I can just think about this novel. As a lapsed Catholic, an approximate man of science, someone who peers at my own mortality quite closely every day, Canticle was grippingly relevant.

The 3-part story opens several centuries after a 20th century nuclear apocalypse, where monks in New Mexico are preserving Christianity, some science, and the mere written word. The plot spans out past the year 3000, but stays centered on the Abbey of St. Leibowitz.

The tightest rope binding me to Roman Catholicism, after family ties, was the sense of continuity in a human institution stretching back almost 2000 years. 3 out of my 4 grandparents were German Catholic so presumably I had ancestors saying the same prayers for a millenium or more.

In the book, the monks survive Flame Deluge of the 1900s. They become "bookleggers," copying and recopying any surviving texts through the centuries. This is one of the reqsons communities of men leave human society and say the same prayers over and over. Monastic orders have ridden out the waves of wars, plagues, and the falls of empires. In the novel, they continue to do so after the Fallout devastates the planet.

The monastery, the church, civilization, none of these are presented as wholly good or wholly evil. Modern questions of science vs. church vs. state are presented but not answered. Like I said, I will need some time to think about this.

This is a book whose premise is its most interesting contribution. In 1959, it was, as the reverse blurb says, "an extraordinary novel", but no longer. Anyone who is interested in the lineage of post-apocalyptic fiction should consider reading it, but it is both heavy and heavily outdated, both in social sensitivity and in technology. The latter is understandable, as the silicon integrated circuit was invented in the same year as the novel's publication; the former less so, and I caution anyone who is not willing to read extensively on such topics as the religious justifications for denying people euthanasia against reading much of the third act. By the time you get there, it is fairly clear what will happen.

The core argument of this novel is that the Catholic Church is the vehicle of humankind's material salvation in the face of Armageddon, which is certainly an uncomfortable notion. That said, I found it interesting and mostly enjoyable.

"Blasphemous old cactus."

I am neither religious enough nor science-y enough to get the most out of this book. I feel like the author was trying to be too coy at burying a message about mankind being doomed to repeat the past and morality and other dense topics, but forgot to include a cohesive story to tie it all together.

The book takes place in post-WWIII America, after a period of time when books, learning, and science was rejected. Monks in monasteries gather what's left of knowledge, painstakingly record it by hand in books, and quietly file it away in libraries to be recovered later. If this sounds familiar, it's because the author was trying to get you to see early on that history repeats itself. You'll see this theme again and again and again. The book follows one of these monasteries through the years, the Order of St. Leibowitz. Important, key knowledge is recovered (I guess, science-y terms are used liberally throughout this book), and we track what changes are wrought by this discovery. Technology slowly comes back, and we keep our eye on this monastery and how it changes (or doesn't) with the times.

The author makes liberal use of time jumps throughout the story, making it hard to remember who was who when looking back through the years, and also giving the story a layer of complexity it didn't really need. I was lost for large parts of the middle book, where the author takes a long period of time to not explain science-y things and also establish some conflict within post-apocalypse America. There's lots of references in here that went over my head, presumably because I'm not quite as up on my religious doctrine as maybe others might be.

It's kind of a convoluted mess I didn't really enjoy. The beginning had promise, but then we time jumped and I lost what interest it had built up. By the time we got to it, the ending was fairly predictable. Lots of people like this book, but I guess I just wasn't one of them.

I really liked this book, it is bleak, funny (and a bit slow). But it is also quite deep, as an observation on civilization and how humanity never learns.

spoilers ahead


A canticle for Leibowitz is divided into 3 sections, each ending rather abruptly and each next section continues hundreds of years later.

We start out a few hundreds of years after a nuclear apocalypse, and something called the 'simplification', the survivors blaming knowledge for the destruction of the world; we follow a novice of the monastic order of Leibowitz and how he discovers a schematic of some complete random and unimportant electrical circuit (which nobody can anyway understand or do anything with, because of the 'simplification'), and how it it leads to some seemingly not-so-important events regarding the church.

The next two sections of the book are set in a time when society starts developing again, and then later again when there is a war ongoing.

The book has many interesting and often funny characters, but sometimes their stories suddenly turn tragic.

"A wind came across the ocean, sweeping with it a pall of fine white ash. The ash fell into the sea and into the breakers. The breakers washed dead shrimp ashore with the driftwood. Then they washed up the whiting. The shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in the old clean currents. He was very hungry that season."

This is a big novel grappling with big ideas. It probes and ponders and sets its characters in pursuit of intense contemplation. What flaws the novel has are an ironic blindspot to a project dedicated to finding meaning in a sweeping examination of humanity's intersections of science, faith, and self-destruction: no women. No intimate relationships. No parenthood. Seriously though, there are no women in this novel (excluding a single, mutant mother Mary figure).

Walter Miller, Jr. never healed from his own PTSD after WWII (he blew his brains out in 1996 after living like a drug addled shut-in most of his adult life). That pessimism shades much of this novel. Of course, the tragedy of such a life is the prolonged and desperate searching for help. This novel longs for something reliable and long-standing to believe in and that longing infects the reader, who might be willing to look past Miller's disappointing conclusions. I'm sympathetic. During the war he took part in the bombing of Monte Cassino, killing hundreds of civilians taking refuge in the monastery.