A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

TEN stars. A book that would NEVER EVER make it through to a small-time SF magazine let alone a major publisher today, far too Catholic (and unapologetically so) and one of the greatest books I've ever read. I think it's fortunate that I waited until my middle age to read this as I'd likely not have had the depth of understanding to fully appreciate all the layers of this. Unfortunately it's the kind of book that also makes me question why I even try to write at all, it's shown me again that the art has already been mastered and to "abandon hope all ye who enter here"... !

A sampling: “The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.”
( )

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a classic of science fiction and considered one of the best novels to be written about nuclear apocalypse. Its central theme is the cyclical nature of technological progress and regression depicted in a narrative that spans centuries.

Read because of my interest in apocalyptic literature (1990s). ( )

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a well-known science fiction novel that anybody who’s familiar with the genre has probably heard of; for some reason I’ve always associated it with Flowers For Algernon (possibly because of the title?) which I’ve never read. I also assumed, because it was relatively old and remained a well-known title, that it was one of those books that blurred the line between science fiction and literature.

The novel takes place in three parts, all revolving around a Catholic abbey somewhere in the deserts of the American south-west many centuries after a nuclear war. The first is about 600 years later and roughly corresponds to the Dark Ages; the second is about 1,200 years later and roughly corresponds to the Renaissance; the third is about 1,800 years later and has the nations of mankind once again threatening each other with nuclear war.

I was surprised, given that I’d assumed this was a novel with literary pretensions, by Miller’s style of writing. I mean, it does have literary pretensions, but that’s exactly what they are – pretensions. He reminded me of his fellow mid-century science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein, in that his writing was littered with a weirdly comic sense of humour among ostensibly serious subjects, and that he occasionally got a little preachy. Much of the third act, for example, revolves around a battle of wills between the abbot and a government doctor tasked with euthanising people suffering from terminal radiation sickness. I don’t know if Miller was himself Catholic – not that it should matter, since the character is – but the section is told from the abbot’s point of view and, while certainly not verging on Heinlein levels of preachiness, doesn’t quite do a fair and balanced job of presenting the opposite opinion.

I actually enjoyed that segment nonetheless, though, because it was the first part of the book that seemed to touch on anything weighty. The novel is saturated in Catholicism, but it’s mostly skin-deep references. I was expecting such a well-regarded book to tackle big subjects like faith, nuclear war and the struggle between religion and science a little more skillfully. Instead, I was mostly left wondering what Miller was trying to accomplish.

Overall, though, the problem I mostly had with A Canticle for Leibowitz was that it was dull. Miller is a wordy writer and doesn’t create particularly memorable characters – not helped by the fact the novel is really just three novellas, introducing a new set of characters each time. Nor is his imagined world of the future very interesting, existing mostly to serve the morals and allegories of the plot, mirroring fairly obvious stages in real history – and it shouldn’t take 338 pages to spell out the tired old axiom that history repeats itself. A Canticle for Leibowitz may be considered a science fiction classic, but my advice is to skip it. ( )

Well, if I wasn't ALREADY depressed this week... ( )

I've been meaning to read this for, literally, years. I'm glad I finally got round to it. I was expecting something a bit more dry, I think, but actually A Canticle for Leibowitz is full of humour. There's a lot of dark themes, yes, but there's also a sort of understanding of human nature. A wry smile at our own expense.

How convincing you find it might depend on whether you believe the underlying idea: that we are more or less doomed to repeat history over and over. I don't believe that, not really, but there is something painfully true in Canticle as well. It might also depend on your relationship to religion, which is very much central to the book -- centred as it is around a monastery -- although it treats that fairly lightly in some ways, and notes the ironies that creep in. The veneration, for example, of a man for all the wrong reasons.

One part that really made me uncomfortable is in the last section, which is a lot darker. Suddenly I was forced to question what the characters stood for, whether I stood with them. The whole debate about euthanasia for a child with radiation sickness -- that made me feel ill, because I do believe in euthanasia, I don't believe that pointless suffering should be prolonged and I don't believe that any deity worth believing in would think so. But that, on reflection, is no bad thing -- because despite the light touch, the wry smile, there's a lot to think about here. ( )