Subject: Review: Miller's _A Canticle for Leibowitz_

From: [email-masked] (Paul S Jenkins)
Date: 01 Jun 1998 16:59:19 -0400

_A Canticle for Leibowitz_ by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
	   Review Copyright (c) 1998 Paul S. Jenkins

I approached _Canticle_ with trepidation; the Catholic Church is, in my
opinion, an unlikely subject for science fiction. But the novel is often
cited as a classic, and I was eager to find out for myself what it was
like, especially following the publicity surrounding its posthumously
published sequel.

_Canticle_ is a fix-up of three novellas, originally published in _The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction_ during the fifties. The first,
_Fiat Homo_, concerns Brother Francis, who at the opening is attempting to
find his vocation in the Utah desert. An itinerant beggar -- whose
identity remains a conundrum throughout the book -- guides him towards an
underground shelter, wherein Francis discovers the 'blessed documents.' I
should point out that this takes place in a post-apocalypse third
millennium, at a time when the technology of the late twentieth century
has been lost, and that the shelter was built to protect its occupants
from radioactive fallout. Of course Brother Francis has no idea of its
purpose, and neither have his superiors in the Order.

Francis is our naive observer; it's his religious comrades and superiors
who put a momentous interpretation on his findings. There are some
genuinely comic moments during this first third of the novel, many to do
with the quaint -- not to say medieval -- practises of the monks. Francis
is given leave to embark on a fifteen-year rendering of one of the sacred
relics: a blueprint of a circuit design produced by the great Leibowitz
himself. Eventually Francis is commissioned to take the relic -- and his
illuminated copy of it -- to New Rome, and present it to the Pope. Certain
events befall him on his journeys, but it would be unfair of me to say
what these are.

The second part, _Fiat Lux_, takes place many decades later, at a time
when there are rumblings of war. Some members of the Order of Saint
Leibowitz are experimenting with constructing the devices depicted in the
relics, and they achieve some success. The insular character of the Order
pervades the novel, and this gives credence to the idea that the abbey
would be, to some extent, isolated from external influences.

There's a good deal of Latin chanting sprinkled throughout the novel, and
though it's often translated in a fairly transparent way, readers like
myself who don't "have the Latin" may feel excluded. At the time the novel
was first published the Latin Mass was still being said in Catholic
churches, so contemporary readers wouldn't have been at such disadvantage.

The final third, _Fiat Voluntas Tua_, is set a further jump into the
future, when technology is on the rise again, but with such rise comes a
new threat of apocalyptic destruction to echo the first -- the one that
precipitated the technological dark-age with which the story opens.
Miller's thesis appears to be that civilization follows cycles of
development: growth, catastrophe, stagnation and rebirth.

To see the development of civilization through the eyes of a strict
religious order is to see it from a narrowly blinkered viewpoint. The
novel is well written but slow, paralleling the inch-by-inch progress from
the medieval to the technological. It's essentially a character-driven
story, but the characters are fundamentally similar.  A short interlude in
the middle of the novel is told from the point of view of one of the
tribal chieftains, but that's no more than light relief in a dense
narrative.

I don't wish to disparage _A Canticle for Leibowitz_. It has style and
wit, and a vision of the future -- albeit narrow. The novel's classic
status derives, in my opinion, from its originality. Those readers who
like gung-ho space opera, or science fiction full of biotechnology and
virtual reality, will find nothing like that here. Instead, Miller has
given us a novel of character and vision, set in an almost fantasy-like
milieu, depicting a future that could yet come to pass.

%A   Miller, Jr., Walter M.
%T   A Canticle for Leibowitz
%I   Bantam Spectra
%C   New York
%D   1976
%G   ISBN 0 553 27381 7
%P   313 pp.
%O   paperback, US$ 6.50