A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

This book is a masterpiece. It leaves you with so much to consider and process. It's filled with hope and despair, of brokenness and restoration, and of a multitude of other ways to be conflicted. ( )

This may be the third time I've read this story in the last 50 years, but only now did the full import of it penetrate. Yes, the writing style and action made enough of an impression on me for me to recommend it to people over the years; but maybe I've finally I've grown up enough, emotionally, to understand the plot. And the cry for help. These are scary times we're living in, and now, more than ever, people need to read "A Canticle for Leibowitz". Maybe if enough of us read this book and recommend it to friends it might reach the nightstand of someone with influence in government. If you haven't read it yet...please do! It offers no solutions--and yet it doesn't suggest that there are no solutions. Even though the story involves a seeming doomsday, it's not a doomsday story: the cliff-hanging ending gives us room--and hope--for salvation. ( )

I confess it took me a long while to get into this book, putting it down and then coming back to it several times. I was unprepared for the severe discontinuities between the three sections. But, once I found the rhythm, the experience was rewarding. This is a tale of living both in the shadow of past nuclear holocaust, and under threat of future ones. In tone it seemed to echo the contemporary On the Beach.

The thread that was of primary interest was the preservation of knowledge in such extreme circumstances, and the responsibilities of those who retained these shards of former civilization. The book is full of Roman Catholic imagery, and it helps if you know Latin. This reared its head especially in the third section with the extended debate about euthanasia in conditions of dire and irredeemable suffering such as radiation poisoning (he's against it, believing one should suffer through the agonizing death as an offering to God; in this he may well have been directly responding to On the Beach.). ( )

A Canticle for Leibowitz is, I think, similar to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Both books deal with the aftermath of a society that has taken conscious steps to reject knowledge and learning, and both deal with the value of books and those who would protect knowledge in an anti-intellectual and anti-learning environment.

The story is organized in Triptych format, and opens up in a "new dark age of man", after a nuclear apocalypse has caused massive devastation and led to a culture of willful ignorance and anti-intellectualism (since it was the smart people who led to the nuclear disaster being possible in the first place--smart people and the inevitable desire for power). A few pockets of learning have survived, though, one of them being the monks of St. Leibowitz, who was a 20th century (pre-apocalypse) engineer. The good monks have preserved, sometimes at the costs of their own lives, a few scattered writings and diagrams, which they lack the knowledge to understand anymore, but which they faithfully copy and preserve. Not unlike what actually has happened with monasteries in the past, which preserved and translated scientific and cultural texts with great effort and labor and oftentimes without full understanding of the meaning of the texts.

From there, we move to a Renaissance 2.0, where humanity is still stuck in a feudal state, but there seems to be less of a backlash toward intellectualism, and there are a few dedicated scientific and cultural researchers starting to emerge.

And from there we move back into a new modern era, where, unfortunately, humanity has not learned from its mistakes, and again becomes embroiled in nuclear war, leading to a number of medical and ethical conundrums. This section is especially valuable to me because of the ethical questions that arise. The book ends on a depressing note, as I would have expected, but maybe a note that hides some hope for humanity as well.

While "A Canticle" is very well written, I can't help but feel it's a depressing read. It seems like Miller is of the opinion that humanity will never overcome our innate brutish nature, no matter the consequences and we're stuck in the cycle of destruction --> backlash --> rebirth --> advancement -- destruction. While this may indeed be true (as a casual glance at the news shows), I am slightly more optimistic that we are not headed for a breakdown in anti-intellectualism, and hopefully not for a nuclear apocalypse. With the current political discourse in America, though, my flicker of optimism may in fact be poorly placed.

It's very interesting seeing the parallels between the monastic orders post-apocalypse, and the monastic orders that existed in the middle ages. Much the same seems to have happened--(relatively) advanced texts in arabic or greek were translated, and the translations were laboriously and artfully copied by monks with little understanding given to them. It took a few great minds and access to these translations to kick-start the renaissance and scientific learning and development again. And the same happens after the apocalypse, with the Monks of St. Leibowitz.

An exceedingly well written book, and one that needs to be read by everybody. ( )

Wonderful epic about the circularity of time and movement of belief over the generations. ( )