A Canticle for Leibowitz
by Walter M. Miller Jr.
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Book Reviews of A Canticle for Leibowitz
Book Review: St. Leibowitz: A Post-apocalyptic Saint for our Times
Summary: 5 Stars
A truly classic novel is one that reveals deeper layers every time it is read. Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of the all-time classics of science fiction, and if it weren't such a Catholic book, would undoubtedly be rated as highly in literature as 1984 and Brave New World, though some reviewers rate it that highly anyway. Miller's book, a collection of three novelettes, is actually deeper than either of those distopian visions, possibly even surpassing C.S. Lewis's space trilogy in terms of character development, solid theology, realistic vision, and mystical insight.
Written as the cold war was heating up, Walter Miller chronicled a three-part history of one abbey on the edge of the Utah desert, starting from two centuries after a nuclear holocaust. The first part, Fiat Homo ("And He created Man"), occurs during the second Dark Ages, and involves the beatification of Isaac Leibowitz, a former weapons engineer who founded an order of monks to preserve the fragmentary knowledge that survived the nuclear war. During this time, life in the abbey reflects in loving detail the Medieval mindset that values eternity above all else. Fiat Lux ("Let there be Light") is set during the second Renaissance a few hundred years later, in which the world discovers science and international politics. Finally in Fiat Voluntas Tua ("Thy Will be Done"), events occurring in a second modern age impact the monks and nuns in ways similar to how the world affects us today.
The first layer of Canticle mesmerized me with its development of saints. This is especially well done in the first part -- Miller beautifully portrays his protagonists as unpretentious and earnest souls who were simply trying to do the best they could with the limited gifts that God gave them. Later generations often revered them, as the ordinary events in their lives mythical proportions. I really liked the ambiguity with which Miller surrounded most of the miracles he recounted -- just as in real life, miracles do not convert those who have refused to believe, while for those with faith, miracles are unnecessary for belief. Miller's portrayal of the unfolding of history is wonderful, and I never saw such a powerful anti-war retelling of WW III until I saw the playground scene in Terminator II.
A second layer of meaning can be found in the theological issues underlying the entire book. The conflict between science and religion provides much of the tension in the second Renaissance -- as it did in the (real) first one. But theological issues become most obvious in the last section, in which the Church battles the heresies of modernism and euthanasia -- as it does today. What is amazing is how accurately Miller portrayed the roots of the pro-euthaniasia groups, calling them the world's oldest and greatest heresies: that pain is the worst evil, and that society determines right and wrong. Miller's predictions about social issues are no different than those made by many popes in the Twentieth century, so perhaps his success in predicting them should not be surprising. Predictions aside, only C.S. Lewis and Peter Kreeft have been able to weave the practical consequences of theological issues into stories as well as Miller did.
The mystical third layer is usually impenetrable to the logical and engineering geeks (like me) that normally read many science fiction books. Obviously, Miller looks at suffering and death very differently than secular writers do -- as a Catholic, how could he do otherwise? But the last time I reread Canticle, what really floored me was his vision of the Immaculate Conception. Mysteries are unfathomable by nature, but sometimes it possible to catch a glimpse beyond the veil. At such times, I can understand why after seeing a vision of heaven, Thomas Aquinas put down his pen and never wrote again -- declaring that all he had ever written was straw. It is absolutely true. I owe Miller a deep debt of gratitude for the glimpse he gave me (though I haven't quite laid down my pen yet :-) ).
The only possible drawback of Canticle is that it was written before Vatican II, and Miller did not foresee the practical disappearance of Latin as the linga franca of the Church.[...]
Miller treated the Catholic Church with affection in Canticle, though not without criticism, alluding to Church politics and theological hair-splitting. His increasing disenchantment with the Church became obvious in his sequel, St. Leibowitz and the Horse Woman, which unfortunately does not even come close to his other work. Some of his short stories are as good as Canticle (especially "Gray Benediction"), so I was really hoping for a masterpiece. Unfortunately, his "sequel", set soon after the second section of Canticle, is a bitter story of political machination, wasted love, and confused theology. The protagonist is a monk who is not well suited for monastic life, so he ends up involved in the tumultuous events surrounding a succession of the Papacy. Meanwhile, he falls in love with a mysterious woman, adding further conflict and doubt to his already troubled faith. Many of the same themes appear as in Canticle -- especially the nature of Christian faith in a very human world full of conflict. However unlike Canticle, the sequel is more graphic in its portrayal of sexuality and violence, and refuses to answer any of the deep questions of faith posed to the characters. That bothered me the most, since he had done such a masterful job of doing so in Canticle. The character development in the sequel is probably better than most science fiction (with the exception of Donaldson's The Real Story), but I was *very* disappointed.
As book-reviewer Paul Ziring put it, "Perhaps an author only gets one such inspiration as Canticle per lifetime". That may be true, but like Aquinas' straw, such an inspiration sheds light for generations.
(This review originally published in Credo, January 11, 1999)
Book Review: One of Sci-Fi's Sacred Texts, and Deservedly So
Summary: 5 Stars
If science fiction fans had an organization equivalent to Gideons International, dedicated to disseminating the sacred texts of the genre along the traffic lanes of life, you would find a copy of A Canticle for Leibowitz lying next to the Gideons Bible every time you slid open the night stand in your motel/hotel room. It would be stamped AOL (Abbey of the Order of Leibowitz), and it would be a call to the faithful, a reminder of just how good sci-fi CAN be, when brilliant wordsmithing, sophisticated humor, and an excellent tale are couched in richly layered philosophy and theology.
The tale itself is bi-apocalyptic, in and of itself filling a very sparsely populated niche. Beginning with Francis, a young applicant to the Brotherhood of the Order of Leibowitz, fasting and praying in the post nuclear war ruins of what had 600 years earlier been the United States, and subsequently stumbling upon an intact fallout shelter, a story spanning many centuries unfurls. Technology reawakens, Lucifer in nuclear form begins once more to stalk the earth.
William Miller Jr. published his only novel (the sequel to Canticle was not written by Miller) in 1959. The date is important for context. The Cuban Missile Crisis, arguably the closest that mankind ever came to nuclear annihilation, was a mere three years in the future. The threat of nuclear war was pervasive, a common topic in magazines as popular as Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report was the building of fallout shelters; every major U.S. city had designated underground shelters for civilians stocked with olive drab square five gallon tins containing water, medical supplies, and survival biscuits that tasted something like a cross between dust and graham crackers. Virtually every school routinely went through nuclear war drills, in which the Civil Defense sirens would go off, the students would "duck and cover" under their desks to wait until the all clear signal was given. Daytime images of Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the lectern and saying "We will annihilate you" merged in my mind with the 2 AM growl and roar of the Strategic Air Command nuclear armed B-52's doing practice launches against the USSR from nearby Beale Air Force Base. Few books, if any, have captured the ubiquitous dread of those years as well as Miller's.
At the same time, the Catholic Church with its pre-Vatican II liturgy in full Latin throat, was at a peak in terms of mystery and majesty, long before its loss of priest and nun vocations, long before what atheist Christopher Hutchens refers to as the Church's "No Child's Behind Left policy" become a scourge of the Church's image. Miller's depiction of postulant training, the role of the Church in the preservation of pre-apocalyptic knowledge (including the mysterious sacred relic from St. Leibowitz himself that reads "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels"), and the Church's role in trying to preserve the gentle candle light of the soul side by side with the eyeball frying arc welder light of technology is mesmerizing, nuanced, and yes, brilliant, hearkening back to the role of the Church as protector and promoter of knowledge during the Dark Ages. If there is much that is dated (and there isn't much) about this tale, it is the idea of the contemporary Catholic Church as a beacon in the age of intellectual darkness.
There are other sci-fi tales that eschew space opera and military hardware to examine the role of religion in an age of nearly omnipotent technology, e.g. Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, a gentle but provocative tale of the Jesuits privately financing an expedition to make first contact with a nearby alien civilization. But there is something special in the intensity of the technology versus science duel in Canticle for Leibowitz, the awkward waltz that results when the two ways of knowledge WANT to dance, but can't avoid treading each other's toes into pulp. I suspect the articulate, profound, and tragic conversation on the topic is a direct reflection of William Miller Jr.'s own trichotomy: an excellent scientist, a man of liberal arts education, a person of great religious passion. It was no small struggle for Miller to resolve, who eventually took his own life.
Miller's quest in this book, though, is not to give us one more iteration of the potential conflict between science and religious faith (though he does address this), it is a bigger fish, maybe a Leviathan, that is at the core of his search: does the very nature of being human condemn us to endless cycles of destruction and redemption. Poignant, haunting, and uncommonly accurate in depiction, A Canticle for Leibowitz functions as a sort of Hubble Space Telescope turned towards the surface of the Earth, rather than towards the stars, with the resulting images no less spell-binding. Bravo, William Miller, Jr., and thanks for the gift you bequeathed to us.
Book Review: As funny, scary, and compelling as ever; Scifi for readers who don't read science fiction
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a book with its own legend. Written near the height of the cold war, published two years after Sputnik, Miller's genre-bending classic of speculative fiction (a newer, more reverent term for science fiction and other imaginings of the future) is a well-written, carefully crafted warning of a future we may think we have now escaped.
If you were born after 1980, A Canticle for Leibowitz may lack for you some of the vivid, personal terror readers who knew life lived each day under the threat of global nuclear war will remember. Fear of terrorism, global warming and ecological disaster may have to some extent replaced the dread of being incinerated in a mushroom cloud, but as clear and present as those danger are, they menace with a future dystopia that will come upon us gradually (if they finally do), and we remain able to change & reverse those events & their consequences, even at their worst. Not so in those gray days of 'SALT' and detente. No warnings, no time to act, and nowhere to hide even for the richest few. All, and nothing; and in less than an hour.
I first read A Canticle for Leibowitz in the summer of 1982, on the recommendation of a high school classmate with whom I had attended the million-plus person June 12th Nuclear Freeze Rally in Central Park (still the largest gathering ever in NYC, 2nd largest ever on Earth). I have such vivid memories of that day, almost dead-center in a crowd of over a million, and though I don't find references to it elsewhere, I am certain that Orson Welles quoted from A Canticle for Leibowitz when he addressed the crowd. That was how the subject came up: I asked my friend if he knew the book, and he recommended it enthusiastically. He was right.
The book captures well the dread we all felt then, seven years (when I first read this in 1982) before the fall of the Berlin Wall and nine before the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the time, for myself and many others, the end was inevitable and nigh. Miller's prose had the blessed effect of offering a sort of consolation & hope, while being funny and very ironic. Reading 'Canticle' was a way of escaping the reality of 1982 while confronting it, sideways. Well-written as a piece of prose fiction, at the level of Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula LeGuin, & Ray Bradbury, with portions of poetic narrative beyond them, and wickedly funny, laugh out loud passages in every chapter, A Canticle for Leibowitz is still highly relevant as a piece of social commentary. The threat of world-wide instantaneous annihilation may be gone, but other threats and challenges remain.
Maybe foremost among these is the role of technology in our culture, as both the source of our troubles and, at least partially, the solution to them. Fossil fuels, pollution & waste, pharmaceuticals, genetics & biotechnology, the internet, wireless phones/data links, GMO food products, pandemic disease accelerated by air travel & resistance to antibiotics, these are our daily anxiety now. Religion in general is more at the center of our national attention than it was in the late 50's, especially the misrepresentation, misreading, & mis-translation (accidental or willful) of religious texts (be it the Koran or the Bible), and extreme, exclusive, mean-spirited doctrines east & west. A Canticle for Leibowitz's impact and import is not altered by which monster be the agent of our doom. A dystopic future where we are all shorn of our technological creature comforts, the population is decimated, history is lost, and daily life is a struggle even for the most fortunate, is not less likely than it was in 1959 or 1982. And we are not even really free of the nuclear threat. We do perhaps have some little bit more control over our fates, individual & collective, though it may not always seem so amid the wash of constant bombardment of scary news via satellite TV and 20 megabit internet. I find 'Canticle' to be somewhat an antidote for that, giving perspective and understanding of crisis, its aftermath, and what is lasting & valuable. Put another way, this is a book with a very high signal-to-noise ratio.
You might be forgiven for reading this review and thinking that this book is no fun. Granted, a grim subject. More well-meaning, stupid people in positions of power and influence. A uncertain outcome and no hero to save the day or sudden miraculous change of fortune. It is a serious read, but it is also fun, and VERY funny (and very often so), compelling, human, and finally re-affirming of what is good in humans and their civilization.
Strongly recommended, and I predict that whether your bent is scifi, literary, or casual as a reader, you will keep and remember this book for a long time.
Book Review: Enlightening
Summary: 5 Stars
A fascinating book, A Canticle for Leibowitz is both a rich treasure of fine writing and a difficult assignment: in many ways, as a conventional novel, and even as a science fiction one, it fails on many levels.
But isn't that the case for many great works of literature (and almost all good science fiction): the real stuff eschews formula, defies convention, evades compartmentalisation - it succeeds despite itself. And so, Walter Miller's great novel is uneven, ignores conventions and defies genres.
It starts as a low, ticklish farce: in a post-apocalyptic wilderness a credulous novice monk stumbles upon some papers, including an old shopping list, in the rubble of a bombed out building. Being credulous, he proceeds to venerate them as the sacred relics of the long dead, and martyred, founder of his order. This martyr, we less-credulous readers quickly deduce, was an apparently irreligious Jewish scientist (his name, Isaac Leibowitz, being the dead giveaway) of the late Twentieth Century, alive just prior to the "Flame Deluge" (yet another genre, by the way, that this novel fits rather uncomfortably within is "post apocalyptic fiction") and dead not long after it.
Six hundred years on, we learn that Leibowitz is in the process of being beatified by the order to which that hapless novice belonged (and the novice is now himself venerated) as a Catholic saint!
Thus, low farce gives way to arch and sophisticated irony - of all people it is the monks who keep alive the spark of secular 20th century technology, though only through their uncomprehending worship of the "memorabilia" they've collected.
Irony then in turn elides into a thoughtful and articulate meditation on religion, science, the tension and interdependence between them and ultimately their mutual inability, jointly or severally, to vouchsafe human frailty. Through the three parts of Miller's book the eternal wheel spins: the post-deluge dark age segues into a re-enlightenment, and in the last part the world careers inevitably back into oblivion.
That Miller achieves all this - heavy stuff, after all - with so light a touch is quite an achievement. Nevertheless, there is an unevenness of style: The airily comic disposition of the first act is sharply curtailed in the second and third which, in the main are more solemnly written.
In some ways the book has not aged well: most obviously in its (for 1959, quite understandable) fixation with the human race's inevitable nuclear self-determination (wittily and piously rendered by the monks as *diluvium ignis* - literally, the deluge of fire). Nowadays - how fickle we are! - nuclear cataclysm seems a quaint fear.
On the other hand, the maturity with which Miller confronts the argument between the rational and the spiritual is sorely lacking these days (as, this very week, even dear old Stephen Hawking wades ill-advisedly into the Science vs. God debate, demonstrating no more eptitude than has any other recent scientists who've strayed from their stock material.)
A Canticle for Leibowitz' tripartite structure, threaded together only by the ghost of Isaac Leibowitz and the apparition of the Wandering Jew, makes for a challenge, as none of the other characters exist beyond any one of the three acts. Seeing as the first black mark on the horizon - and the first black mark on the first page - was the Jew, I was disappointed to see him go missing in action as the book reached its inevitable conclusion. Instead of that bookend, we were left in the hands of an under-described and un-anticipated character to round the epic out.
Indeed, Miller seems to have distracted himself at the death with a side-bar debate on euthanasia and suffering which didn't really figure, or connect much with, the rest of the narrative. Clearly, though, it was something the Roman Catholic Miller himself wrestled with mightily; he did eventually committed suicide many years later.
For all that there were, in the middle stanza, some beautiful set pieces, and throughout the book is beautifully written too, which mean that for all its stylistic and structural oddities, A Canticle For Leibowitz thoroughly earns its contemporary classic status.
Olly Buxton
Book Review: A classic and essential work of SF
Summary: 5 Stars
Six centuries ago, the world was destroyed in the Atomic Flame Deluge, leaving humanity scattered and broken and the world infested by radiation and mutations. One of the few surviving points of continuity to the old world is religion, with the Christian Faith surviving in the form of isolated monasteries and a 'new Rome' that has arisen in the east of North America. When a monk discovers relics dating back to before the nuclear war, a chain of events is set in motion that will reverberate down the centuries.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is a central text of the classic science fiction canon, originally published in 1960 and winning the 1961 Hugo Award as well as a slew of other awards down the years. Unusually for an SF novel, especially one published at that time, it has won significant acclaim from mainstream literary circles, impressed with its grappling of themes such as religion versus science and its assessment of the cyclical nature of humanity's ability and willingness to destroy itself. Whilst there has never been a filmed adaptation, the book's structure and some of its ideas directly inspired an episode of Babylon 5 called The Deconstruction of Fallen Stars which also addressed some of the same themes.
Leibowitz shares a common premise with Asimov's Foundation sequence, with its band of educated men seeking to preserve the knowledge and wisdom of a prior age through the barbarian dark ages of ignorance and fear until civilisation arises again, although the book lacks an analogue to Asimov's psychohistory. The monks of Leibowitz also have themselves little idea of the worth of the knowledge they are protecting, with complex technical schematics stored alongside shopping lists and betting slips. Still, the information they are guarding eventually gives humanity enough clues to begin its rise to technological greatness once again.
Leibowitz is a 'fix-up' novel assembled out of three short stories, set 600, 1,200 and 1,800 years in the future respectively, with corresponding shifts in cast and the technological levels of humanity. Each of the three sections addresses different but related ideas, such as faith and belief in the first part, the seductive nature of technology and power in the second and the clash between religious morality and common morality in the last part. For a novel written in the late 1950s, this book touches on many topics that remain contentious today, such as euthanasia, abortion and the relationship of Church and State. Miller supports no sides, but uses his characters to make compelling arguments on both sides that provides much to think about. The book also has deliberately, even powerfully ambiguous moments (particularly revolving around a recurring character and events involving a mutated woman near the book's end) that introduce huge potential for debate and multiple layers of interpretation to the book.
Leibowitz's literary qualities are founded in excellent writing, strong characterisation (with only 120 pages or so for each part, Miller gives us several memorable and impressive characters per section) and an excellent sense of humour (often very black indeed). Unlike some of its contemporaries, Leibowitz has not aged or dated itself at all, and like Non-Stop, The Stars My Destination and Lord of Light remains a compelling, essential read from this era of SF.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (*****) a rich, funny, dramatic, dark and thought-provoking novel. It is available now in the USA. There is no current British edition (for the time being anyway) but the book is easily available on import or second-hand in the UK. Walter M. Miller sadly took his own life in 1996, but a successor volume, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, was completed and published with the help of Terry Bisson.