A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, by Walter F. Miller, Jr.

1959. Rating: 8 1/2

Post-nuclear war stories abound, and have since even before the invention of the atomic bomb. But few of them have been more disturbing, horrific, and plausible than Walter Miller's classic, A Canticle For Leibowitz.

It is human nature to assume that in one form or another we will go on--either in spirit, our society, or through our children. Miller challenges us with the question, even if we do go on, what will remain? The novel starts 600 years after a mid-20th century nuclear holocaust. Not only were cities lost, along with billions of lives, but nearly all human knowledge went up in the flames as well. First nuclear scientists were blamed, and murdered; then all scientists; then as the Madness spread, all educated people were hunted down, and finally all books of any kind were burned. Most of the survivors wanted to start over with a new world that possessed no memory of the old. Those caught smuggling or memorizing books were butchered, until only fragments remained of a few books and memorized passages.

The Order of the Blessed Leibowitz (named for a nuclear engineer-turned-monk who was martyred a dozen years after the war) has spent six-hundred years attempting to preserve and recopy the leftover shadows of humanity, a daunting task in a world of darkness that is, as one of the monks puts it, "smug in its illiteracy." All of the scientific knowledge has been lost to understanding, if not paper; the literature and history has become little more than folklore, legend, or outright myth. But still they toil in their holy labor of preserving the last of humanity's pre-war legacy.

A Canticle For Leibowitz is really an epic about humanity struggling to rebuild itself, set in three parts that are each set six-hundred years apart: a Dark Age, a medievalesque age planting the seeds of rebirth of science and technology, and finally another modern age which has witnessed the birth both of starships and, unfortunately, nuclear weapons.

The book is difficult reading sometimes; occasionally obscure, filled with Latin (as the Catholic Church is one of the handful of institutions to survive the "Flame Deluge"), and usually intellectual in the extreme. But Miller makes strengths of what for lesser writers would be cumbersome and fatally distracting. Even after reading Canticle several times, I'm never quite sure while I'm buried in his often horrific world if I want to see more of what we have become and what little has survived, or if I want to seek shelter in the safety of the monastery and not come out again. (For those who want more, a sequel of sorts came out in 1997, not long after Miller's death, titled Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, which takes place about a century after Canticle's middle section. But I found the second book far less intriguing and engaging than the original.)

In the end, humanity is given the ultimate choice a second time: reach for the stars, or descend one more time into the pits of greed and selfishness, and once more try to wipe itself out with the weapons pointed at each other. The way Miller answers this difficult and all-important question we continually find ourselves faced with is the one that keeps me coming back to the novel, while I keep watching the world make that choice every day.

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