A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. ... a review

As I have gotten older I find myself reading a lot more than I ever did as a kid. There's something about not being forced to read that encourages me to do it. That and the fact that I have struggled with insomnia for most of my life and reading is one of the only things that kind of serves as a lullaby for me. Everything else seems to keep me up!

In our latest addition to the books I have read we go back to an old favorite topic of mine, which is dystopian post-apocalyptic musings, this time by a guy that wrote it in a time when fear of the "nuclear option" was likely at an all time high in 1959

I'm gonna get this out of the way right at the start: This is going to be a tough read for most people. It was a tough read for me and I am quite interested in the topic-matter. I’ll be honest and say that while the overall message is quite sound and when you have it all in your head and have a chance to reflect upon it, that the story is really very good. The book just unfortunately suffers from not being terribly engaging while it is going on and it may actually be a victim of what I refer to as literary “clutter.”

There are a ton of characters in this book and the names become difficult for me to keep up with and I think most other people would feel the same way. Since I was reading it on a Kindle I couldn’t really flip back to remind me of who is who the way that I would have done in another book with so many characters such as Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones and since I was starting to get frustrated with the introduction of yet another character when I don’t really even understand who everyone is that we have already been introduced to, I found myself scanning pages rather than actually taking them all in.

_{Props to Nadi for staying cool long enough to get a few pic in}

So the overall plot here is that we are in USA and the world has long since been annihilated from people nuking the entire planet and what remains is a loose governance that is dictated by some sort of amalgamation of the Catholic Church. People are intentionally kept illiterate outside of certain ruling classes and this is because it is believed that the reason why the world self-destructed is because people did too much thinking. To quote "Bricktop" from the epic movie Snatch

you can get yourself in a lot of trouble thinkin' ... I wouldn't do so much of it!

People are either not told about the past or the past was literally erased to the point that when one monk accidentally discovers a Fallout Shelter that his mind is filled with some sort of beast that is called a "fallout." The shelter is described in great detail and you can tell that it is one of the super fortified underground structures that have been popularized by real existence in life and by various films and video games.

This monk, named Brother Francis, is somewhat literate as he is allowed to be because of his station with the church, comes to feel as though the various "relics" that are found around this shelter were perhaps written by Isaac Edward Leibowitz, who is believed by the church to be a near saint who is in line for official declaration of sainthood provided enough proof of miracles can be found to establish this.

Because Brother Francis met a wandering many that lead him to the fallout shelter and that man cannot be recalled by anyone else in the area, it is believe that Francis is either lying, or he genuinely witnessed a miracle and saw the spirit of Leibowitz.

Things happen and things are discussed and eventually Brother Francis gets promoted to a higher rank because of his discoveries and is invited to go meet with the Pope in New Rome and I will not spoil that part of the book seeing as how that is one of the highlights of the entire book and IMO at least, one of the only truly interesting parts of it.

Once the "part 1" is finished we suddenly find ourselves without warning, thrust hundreds of years into the future, or at least that is what I eventually surmised when all of a sudden and without warning all of the character names that I had been dutifully learning up to that point simply disappeared and were replaced by new people - which was frustrating.

The central theme of part 2 is the same as part 1 and that is that the church maintains some level of societal control and that the world is headed towards destroying itself again, but this time they aren't riding around on donkeys and everyone knows what a fallout shelter is.

My confusion elicited an online search because I was convinced at that point that perhaps my file was broken on my Kindle since it really seemed like I had joined a completely different story.

As it turns out A Canticle for Leibowitz was originally published as 3 stories and this one novel was just piecing them all together. In other versions of this book this might have been explained but I was truly reading in the dark and this turn from act 1 to act 2 and later 3 was frustrating because I didn't know what the hell was going on. It was like that scene towards the end of Mulholland Drive where the story just completely changes without any explanation about how we got there.

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This about-face as far as the story is concerned taking us from a time that had only fire for light and donkeys for transport and then thrusting us immediately into a time period where there was space technology might have been something that was meant for people that are already familiar with the book... or maybe I am just stupid. Regardless, I didn't like it and had to turn back a bit because I was convinced that I had missed a great deal of the story.

it was quite disappointing to me that the book changed so abruptly because after kind of suffering through hundreds of pages the story about Brother Francis, in my mind, was finally becoming interesting.

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I can see how this book would be considered quite influential, but in today's time I think it would fall into a category of books that it is easy to understand why people would have enjoyed it immensely at the time of its release, but in today's climate, it's mostly just really boring and is a very slow burn.

The 2nd and 3rd parts of the book are far more interesting, and we the reader are meant to pick up on the fact that humanity will always destroy itself

This level of premonition and philosophical musings wasn't something I was expecting and when you take a step back and look at the overall message it is an ominous one and one that sadly probably isn't too far off the mark of reality.

That being said I do not think that the average reader is going to enjoy this. I know that after I was done with it I had a feeling that was similar to how I felt after being forced to read various classics while I was in high school. I recall at that point in my life thinking "does the teacher really think this is good and entertaining? or is he just doing this because it is part of the curriculum?"

There are certain things that I think can be remembered fondly because they were so momentous at the time and also can believe that they were the inspiration for so much that came after, such as the Terminator series and well, any other series or stories that are based on human greed and therefore guaranteed eventual elimination.

While obviously it is going to vary depending on which version of this book you obtain, the general average is that this book is around 320 pages, which does seem to be the industry standard.

For me, I guess I am glad that I finished it but I very seriously considered abandoning it at many different points. There were many sections of it, especially the parts that contained a bunch of untranslated Latin, that I simply scanned rather than read.

Die hard fans of classic science-fiction defend this book like crazy and if this story ends up on Reddit I am almost certainly going to get torn a new one by the rabid fanbase over there.

I'm not saying it a bad story. It is not. It is very compelling once you have all the pieces. The problem I have with it is the same problem I have with more recent books that have a wonderful payoff in the end but you have to suffer through hundreds of pages in order to get to that payoff. It's especially frustrating when a great deal of what happens in the first act (which is most of the book) doesn't have any direct bearing on the 2nd or 3rd act and the few things that are referenced, if you blink, you aren't even going to notice it happened. I only found out about a few of the "easter eggs" by reading a forum about this book that was someone else claiming the book is quite dull. This was on a reddit post so of course the vultures (if you've read the book you'll get that reference) circled and absolutely destroyed the poster for having this opinion, much like they would me if I was to voice that opinion.

This is one of those books that people are going to claim to have some sort of intellectual high ground because they "get it" and you are just to much of a simpleton to understand why it is epic. This standpoint is rather ironic considering that this is precisely the sort of attitude that the book is attempting to warn us about.

Despite the fact that this book was the recipient of multiple major awards and has NEVER been out of production/print, I cannot recommend this book for mass consumption. Read the analysis of some scholar of it instead.