A Canticle for Leibowitz | |||||||||||||||
Walter M. Miller, Jr. | |||||||||||||||
Bantam Books, 338 pages | |||||||||||||||
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A review by Stephen M. Davis
A Canticle for Leibowitz, though, is also really good writing, all
the way through. Even if you don't necessarily agree with Abbot
Zerchi's views on the evils of mercy killing, as he relays them in
the section entitled Fiat Voluntas Tua, you will have to agree that
his argument is well-stated, and that his character and the
situation are perfectly believable.
I'm ahead of myself by about 300 pages, so let me try to begin
at the beginning.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is divided into three sections, each
of which takes us further into the future. The first section,
Fiat Homo, is set several hundred years in the future -- several hundred
years from the devastation of a nuclear holocaust, which is given by
Mr. Miller as having occurred in the early 1960's.
Civilization is gone, and the survivors have systematically purged
themselves of all doctors, scientists, and men of learning. Anyone
with knowledge of the old ways is seen as a reminder of the people
who brought the devastation in the first place.
The church has become, once again, the storehouse of ancient knowledge,
with its monks memorizing books and transcribing the pitiful
remains of book print into illuminated manuscripts.
Leibowitz is a figure from the early days following the holocaust. He
is a booklegger -- a man who moves books from place to place at great
peril to his personal safety. At some point he is caught and executed slowly.
The church has made him a martyr, and the Albertian Order of
Leibowitz is in the process of trying to make him a saint.
As A Canticle for Leibowitz begins, one of the newest members of
the Order of Leibowitz, Brother Francis Gerard of Utah, is out in
the Great Salt Lake fasting. He is bemoaning the fact that he cannot
find a rock in the shape of an hourglass that will fit a space in
the roof of his shelter.
An old man wanders down the road toward him, and after a bit of
sparring, the old man decides that he will find a right-fitting rock
for Francis, in gratitude for some information that Francis has supplied.
Francis eventually stumbles across the rock that the old man has
left his mark on, and upon removing it, discovers he has stumbled
upon an old bomb shelter.
Briefly, certain artifacts are uncovered outside the shelter that may
well have belonged to Leibowitz. There is even talk among the lesser
members of the order that Francis may have encountered Leibowitz
himself -- talk which infuriates the monastery's abbot, who sees the
possible negative implications of an order of monks happening upon a
cache of saintly artifacts at the exact moment it is bidding for its founder's Canonization.
I'll leave the summarization here. Suffice it to say that Brother
Francis spends the better part of fifteen years making a gold-leafed,
illuminated version of a blue-print found in a box believed to have
been used by Isaac Leibowitz.
On the trip to New Rome, Francis has his life's work taken from him by a highwayman.
There is certainly a parallel here with those many people today who
are spending their lives doing jobs they don't fully understand, for
people who don't appreciate it, and who wake up one day to discover
their talent and the better part of their lives have been stolen from
them. (I've just been told that this happens, of course).
Fiat Lux, the second part of Mr. Miller's book, takes another large
leap into the future, to a time when the church is no longer just a
recording society, and has become quite active in applied science. Very
rightly, Mr. Miller shows the seductive power of technology.
Brother Kornhoer has developed a dynamo capable of producing a light
of stupendous power. As he descends into the monastery basement for a
demonstration, he states "Dixitque Deus: 'FIAT LUX.'" Moments later,
when he is lightly electrocuted, he
shouts "Lucifer!...ortus est et primo die." Even those readers with
no Latin will grasp that Brother Kornhoer has moved from an invocation
from God to a Satanic oath in the space of a moment, with the electric
dynamo acting as the bridge.
Much like an ark for a covenant between man and some new god of man's
making, the dynamo has a tendency to maim its keepers, and works by
principles that are grasped only in a revelatory fashion -- not through
any firm empiricism.
In Fiat Voluntas Tua, the third and final section of A Canticle for Leibowitz,
men have reached the stars and are colonizing the planets that circle them. But
men have also come full circle in that the planet Earth is once again threatened
with nuclear holocaust. I won't be so crass as to give away the ending, except
to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it without understanding half of what was
going on. Who knows? Maybe that's another guideline for knowing that this
work is very rightly considered classic literature.
Steve is faculty member in the English department at Piedmont Technical College in Greenwood, S.C. He holds a master's in English Literature from Clemson University. He was voted by his high school class as Most Likely to Become a Young Curmudgeon. |
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