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Book Review: A Canticle for Leibowitz
I’ve had A Canticle for Leibowitz in my consciousness for years and years now, probably since way back in junior high or high school when I was getting catalogs from the Science Fiction Book Club. It’s a recognized classic of the genre, a Hugo winner, but my knowledge of Walter M. Miller Jr.’s storied story was pretty well limited to the back-of-the-book blurb: “The atomic Flame Deluge was over. The earth was dead. All knowledge was gone. In a hellish, barren desert, a humble monk unearths a fragile link to 20th-century civilization. A handwritten document from the Blessed Saint Leibowitz that reads: pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels—bring home for Emma.” From that (I’m sure I’d seen basically the same thing before I even owned a copy of the book), I expected this to be a novel of human misunderstanding, a story of creating mistaken religious significance from the mundane details of a mysterious age.
Instead, it’s first and foremost a jeremiad against human hubris, stupidity, and, well, evil and a celebration of human perseverance, reverence, and goodness. Structurally, it’s almost like three related novellas, because we get these slices of life and characters centuries apart: first, the dust-jacket-mentioned relic is found a few hundred years after the atomic war; then, we see the world just beginning to rediscover science and more advanced technology; finally, a world that has all but recovered and at the same time exceeded our current technological levels is poised on the verge of bombing itself into a new dark age as nations vie for dominance and their leaders put the interests of power above people.
It’s a testament to Miller’s craft that we gets us to empathize with these characters to the extent that we feel their story arcs are all-too-brief. And that leads to a bit of dissatisfaction, because—gosh darn it—we leave each era before we’re quite ready. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to imagine this as a trilogy, with each third of the novel expanded into a novel in its own right, and the result might be more satisfying (certainly, it would be more satisfying to the modern publishing industry where stand-alone fantasy or sci-fi are anathema and trilogies are almost a minimum).
The entire novel is centered around monks of the Order of Saint (well, eventually he’s canonized) Leibowitz, an order dedicated to the preservation of knowledge from the past (even if they often don’t understand that it means). It shouldn’t have been a surprise then, when the end especially seemed pretty heavy on Catholic ethics/theology. I’m still trying to puzzle out my own reaction to it: I kind of resented it, because it seemed to have been a privileged perspective (and—I think—not just because it’s the POV characters’ perspective). You see, a central question at the end is [only a minor spoiler, really] about suicide/euthanasia in the context of what amounts to a hopeless situation. I don’t agree with the Catholic prohibition; at the same time, Miller does manage to bring in some thoughtful consideration of our culture’s relationship to pain (i.e. that it’s something to be avoided at all costs, when in fact it may be valuable), but on ultimately I couldn’t buy what Miller seemed to be selling.
At the same time, I really can’t say that this was a case of the “message” getting in the way of good storytelling—this wasn’t a preachy book, even if it did get on my nerves and feel a bit preachy at times. Certainly, I can believe it won a Hugo, and I’m glad I finally read it.