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crownh8 's review for:
A Canticle for Leibowitz
by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
I picked up A Canticle for Leibowitz immediately after finishing Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle because it seemed fitting to read the book that more or less inspired Wolfe to incorporate religious themes into a sci-fi setting. A Canticle for Leibowitz is by no means as grand in depth and scale as a Wolfe novel, but it is a pretty unique story on multiple fronts and enormously influential for its time despite its relative simplicity. I'm really glad I read it, despite not loving everything about it.
A Canticle for Leibowitz takes place after a nuclear war (and a subsequent anti-intellectual culture war against any and all knowledge of technology) essentially resets society back to the Stone Age, and the story centers around a small Catholic monastery in the Utah desert that exists with the sole purpose of preserving ancient documents from the hands of the ignoramuses who would see them burned (these documents being anything from grocery receipts floating in the wind to blueprints for war machines—none of which is really understood by the Order that keeps them). The book is split up into three acts that cover roughly 1,800 years through a series of small yet timeline-altering events, beginning with the discovery of a fallout shelter by a lowly Brother Francis, to the slow resurgence of education and scientific interest, and then accelerating (degenerating??) all the way back to the same age of nuclear weapons and spaceships in which society first destroyed itself. A Canticle for Leibowitz makes a clever case for the cyclical nature of history and brings to light questions of whether science and religion can ever fully coexist under the same framework of morality.
Despite the three acts of the book having 600-year gaps between them, Miller Jr. weaved some subtle threads throughout that I really appreciated, like the mysterious old wanderer from the first chapter continually popping up around the abbey (in the second act, he straight up tells people that he's lived for thousands of years, but everyone just thinks he's lying), and then Dom Zerchi finding the skull of Brother Francis in the final act was just pure gold. The final act, however, is also responsible for this book only getting 3 out of 5 stars. Miller Jr.'s religious philosophy just really reared its ugly head at the end, and all of his pro-life and colonial apologist views started getting rammed down my throat. Blech. I don't mind these themes cropping up in books, but when Dom Zerchi tried to force a woman and her child with lethal radiation poisoning to die a prolonged and terrible death instead of letting them opt peacefully for medically assisted suicide, as a group of monks and their world-destroying knowledge simultaneously get blasted into space to colonize the stars, it just felt yucky. Learning about Miller Jr.'s life helps put some of his views into context, and the irony of his own suicide calls into question whether he really sympathized with Zerchi and the Catholic worldview or whether the scene was just a representation of his own internal conflict. Either way, it soured the ending for me a bit.
Overall, A Canticle for Leibowitz was still a great read, with enough enjoyable prose, societal critiques, humour, and narrative playfulness to keep it from buckling under the weight of its philosophy. I can definitely see myself reading it again in the future.
A Canticle for Leibowitz takes place after a nuclear war (and a subsequent anti-intellectual culture war against any and all knowledge of technology) essentially resets society back to the Stone Age, and the story centers around a small Catholic monastery in the Utah desert that exists with the sole purpose of preserving ancient documents from the hands of the ignoramuses who would see them burned (these documents being anything from grocery receipts floating in the wind to blueprints for war machines—none of which is really understood by the Order that keeps them). The book is split up into three acts that cover roughly 1,800 years through a series of small yet timeline-altering events, beginning with the discovery of a fallout shelter by a lowly Brother Francis, to the slow resurgence of education and scientific interest, and then accelerating (degenerating??) all the way back to the same age of nuclear weapons and spaceships in which society first destroyed itself. A Canticle for Leibowitz makes a clever case for the cyclical nature of history and brings to light questions of whether science and religion can ever fully coexist under the same framework of morality.
Despite the three acts of the book having 600-year gaps between them, Miller Jr. weaved some subtle threads throughout that I really appreciated, like the mysterious old wanderer from the first chapter continually popping up around the abbey (in the second act, he straight up tells people that he's lived for thousands of years, but everyone just thinks he's lying), and then Dom Zerchi finding the skull of Brother Francis in the final act was just pure gold. The final act, however, is also responsible for this book only getting 3 out of 5 stars. Miller Jr.'s religious philosophy just really reared its ugly head at the end, and all of his pro-life and colonial apologist views started getting rammed down my throat. Blech. I don't mind these themes cropping up in books, but when Dom Zerchi tried to force a woman and her child with lethal radiation poisoning to die a prolonged and terrible death instead of letting them opt peacefully for medically assisted suicide, as a group of monks and their world-destroying knowledge simultaneously get blasted into space to colonize the stars, it just felt yucky. Learning about Miller Jr.'s life helps put some of his views into context, and the irony of his own suicide calls into question whether he really sympathized with Zerchi and the Catholic worldview or whether the scene was just a representation of his own internal conflict. Either way, it soured the ending for me a bit.
Overall, A Canticle for Leibowitz was still a great read, with enough enjoyable prose, societal critiques, humour, and narrative playfulness to keep it from buckling under the weight of its philosophy. I can definitely see myself reading it again in the future.