Just finished reading A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. a few days ago. The book has haunted me, so I guess that makes it blog-worthy. I really doubt that anyone who reads this blog will pick it up and read it, but on the off-chance that I'm wrong, please note there is a major spoiler in this review...I'm going to give away the ending. My friend Tonia will be pleased, but most "normal" people would probably rather not know the ending before they read the book (winks at Tonia).
Just to be nice, I've clearly indicated where you should stop reading if you don't wish to know the ending.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of those "end-of-the-world" novels I wrote about several entries back. It's written in three parts. The first part takes place about 600 years after a nuclear war in the late 20th century decimates the world and blasts civilization back to the dark ages. The second part is another 600 years later, and the third part 600 years later again, concluding in 3781. It opens with a novice monk on a solitary fast in the desert who encounters a strange, bedraggled pilgrim. The pilgrim inadvertently leads the monk to discover an old fallout shelter where he finds some relics left behind by his monastery's revered founder, the beatus Leibowitz.
The book is often wryly amusing. When the monk finds the fallout shelter, he wonders what fallouts are and assumes they must have been dreadful if people had to build special shelters to protect themselves from them. And, irony of ironies, St. Leibowitz, the founder of a Catholic monastery, is Jewish!
Now, this monastery's main function (other than prayer and reflection) is to protect and preserve "the Memorabilia". The Memorabilia are found writings from before the "flame deluge"...the nuclear war. As a result of the flame deluge the world is now almost universally illiterate. Revolts and mass murders of literate people by common folk who blamed the war on them have almost wiped out all the knowledge that existed at the time of the war. The monks, literate and learned, want to preserve the Memorabilia as much as possible by copying any literature they find, and "booklegging"...memorizing writings so they can't be destroyed.
The Abbey of St. Leibowitz (for he does eventually get canonized) is the constant thread throughout the book. Gentle, peaceful people who believe in learning and literacy, their world is vastly different from our own.. They struggle along, trying to apply their somewhat modified Christianity to the perverted world they find themselves in, which is filled with tribal warfare, human mutants and illiterate masses struggling just to survive in this new wasteland. The Abbey remains mostly the same throughout the 1800 year span of the book. The world around them changes, advances and becomes ever more dangerous. The electric light is reinvented by a monk at the Abbey. A wooden carving of the revered Leibowitz appears throughout the book in the Abbot's office, or sometimes relegated to the hallway, or to the basement storage room because of its disturbingly and definitely un-saintlike smirk. The Abbey and its Memorabilia receive interest from the Pope's messengers from New Rome (which seems to now be somewhere in the American northeast), and it all seems to represent the slow, agonizing crawl back to "civilization".
You really come to admire and like these simple monks who are just trying to do the right thing. The final third of the book especially reveals this. The world has finally regained and surpassed its technological glory. Air travel, and indeed interstellar travel, has once again become commonplace. Oddly primitive contraptions do things that our current computers can't even do. The Abbot curses and fights with a translation machine that listens to his spoken dictation, writes it out in English and then translates it into a written version of any other language he chooses before transmitting it to the intended recipient. Well, when it works, that's what it's supposed to do. It's the kind of future gadget that Terry Gilliam envisioned in his weird and disturbing movie Brazil.
STOP READING NOW...SPOILERS FOLLOW
Yet, it's not just airplanes and computers that have been reinvented. Lucifer is back too, and Lucifer is the nuclear weapon. One or two bombs have "accidentally" dropped in the centuries since they were reinvented, but now, in the final pages of this novel, a world crisis develops which creates havoc at the Abbey.
A bomb is dropped on one of North America's new major cities, killing hundreds of thousands, and the monastery is turned into a bustling triage station. The Abbot fights with a doctor, forbidding the doctor from issuing "red tags" to victims of the fallout. Red tags entitle the recipients to receive government-sanctioned euthanasia. The Abbot does everything in his power to prevent the red tags from being distributed, but to no avail.
In the final pages of the book, the Abbot is listening to the confession of Mrs. Grales, a strange, two-headed woman who seems to have a foresense of what is to come. And indeed, during her confession, Lucifer falls again. Mrs. Grales' second head, Rebecca, until then mute, asleep, childlike, awakens and Mrs Grales herself seems to wither, as if Rebecca has now received all of their life-force.
As the Abbot and Grales/Rebecca flee the collapsing church, the Abbot's lower body is pinned under falling rock. Obviously he won't survive. The vultures begin to circle almost immediately, themselves singed and half-blinded by the flash. As the Abbot lays dying, Rebecca comes to comfort him, rejecting his offered baptism, but offering him absolution in return.
As Mrs. Grales represents the crass state society has reached, so Rebecca represents the childlike innocence of a society that has reverted, however violently, to its infancy. Perhaps the author is saying that technology is always going to be ultimately destructive. That a simple life is best because, however hard we scrabble to climb, we'll always knock ourselves back to the stone age in the end.
In the final scenes of the book, a starship takes off, carrying several monks, sisters and children to a new world to carry on the work and the faith. Even the fact that they had the foresight to organize this says that the monks, at least, were skeptical enough of the new technology to plan to escape if things went to hell again.
I can't decide if this book is ultimately positive or negative. Certainly, on the surface, it's depressingly negative. It's saying we can never escape our own brutality and destructiveness and that it will always destroy us in the end, no matter how high we climb. But...in a way, there's a positive message here as well. The message is that we will survive, now matter how many times we fuck up. And maybe it's suggesting that it's better to remain simple, to live with nature, than to mess around with forces that we can't control. And one of those uncontrollable forces is certainly man's own folly.
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