Book: A canticle for Leibowitz

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Author: Walter M Miller Jr

Details: (c) 1959 Walter M Miller Jr; Pub Orbit 1997; ISBN 1-85723-014-0

Verdict: A brilliant book, moving, complex and intelligent. Wow.

Reasons for reading it: It's vaguely famous, and M's talking about it jumped up the priority of a vague intention to read it at some point.

How it came into my hands: lethargic_man lent it to me.

A canticle for Leibowitz is one of the most impressive books I've read in ages, certainly since I started this blog. I was gripped from the first page; aCfL does just about everything right: flowing prose, new ideas explored rigorously and interestingly, an exciting story, etc.

Although aCfL is much more a book about ideas and situations than people (it doesn't really have a protagonist, as such), every single minor character is absolutely believable. That alone would generally let me like the book a great deal, but aCfL has many other good features as well. The narrative voice is never intrusive either; there are many possible messages that a reader could take away from reading aCfL.

As a portrayal of the horror of nuclear war, this is absolutely unsurpassed by anything I've read. The book opens several centuries after the end of the devastation that everybody expected at the height of the cold war, and recounts how the remnant of humanity claws its way back to cvilization... and back to nuclear capacity and proliferation. This makes the second nuclear holocaust in the final chapter all the more horrifying, partly because it is the second time round. But there is far more to aCfL than anti-nuclear polemic.

In many ways aCfL is a religious piece; the Catholic church plays more or less the rôle expected for a protagonist. I am of course not qualified to say whether it presents a realistic portrait of (pre-Vatican II) Catholicism, but it most certainly presents a highly plausible potrait of a religion. The Church is portrayed in a very balanced way; there is a very clear sense of both the positive and negative aspects of an entrenched religious institution, as well as the religious impulse in various characters' lives. Religion in aCfL is not reduced to a simplistic message, but is morally complex enough to be sustainable for real people in a morally complex world.

There are all kinds of elements in aCfL, and I got the impression that every little detail was very carefully placed and contributed something symbolically. I'm sure that a more literary sort of person than me would get even more out of it, but it never felt pretentious because it works so well on a simple story level as well. I think a lot of it is elements of Christian mythology reinstated in a new context: the Wandering Jew keeps showing up, and there's a very weird interpretation of the Immaculate Conception.

I loved the glimpses of society and the monastic community within it at different stages, the equivalents of the Dark Ages, the Renaissance and the modern period. Again, everything felt plausible and solid, and not just a vehicle for the story. In a sense it's alternate history, but the repetition is a key element, it's not just an excuse for the alternate-ness.

As well as taking great delight in reading such a well-written piece, I was very moved by aCfL. I really cared about the fate of indivuals and also of humanity as a whole. The book avoids easy emotional tricks, and provides neither a happy-ever-after ending nor total despair.

Comments

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would recommend Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilisation
Interesting, you're the second person in a relatively short period to reccommend Cahill. But the other person was a total random the repetition is considerably more convincing.

I'm finding myself in recent years far more comfortable with non-monotheistic values of deity
See, I can't do non-monotheistic deity very well. To me the idea of a deity that is not one is like the idea of a square circle, I just can't conceptualize it. I was trying to explain this to a Christian friend at some point and he interpreted it as meaning that I have an absolutely rock-solid faith. Which isn't the point at all; I can perfectly well imagine that God doesn't in fact exist, but I can't, on a purely language level, really deal with an idea of several entities all being God.

The conditioning that has lead me to this position is really perfectly explicit, but I'm not sufficiently convinced of the desirability of breaking such conditioning to be able to go through the psychological process to do so.

contemplating the Library of Alexandria
I regard that destruction with the sort of utter grief and anger which really ought to be reserved for violence against human beings. And yes, that must weigh very heavily on the negative side if we are considering the role of the church in history. (Admittedly there are also examples of Classical, both Greek and Roman, civilizations deliberately expurgating traces of pre-classical cultures, but that really doesn't excuse anybody.)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

contemplating the Library of Alexandria
I regard that destruction with the sort of utter grief and anger which really ought to be reserved for violence against human beings.

There's a small cold voice in the back of my head that says "Humans are a renewable resource." I don't let it out much, because it is prone to the sort of rants that can lose me friends.

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I think there's not much merit in my trying to argue this one. It's very likely that my view that individual people matter more than anything else is either purely a moral axiom, or predicated on a particular theist and theocentric worldview. It's good for me to be reminded occasionally that my axioms are just that, and that not everybody has to start with the same assumptions, though.