A Canticle For Leibowitz
By Walter M. Miller Jr.
This book got stuck in my head when I first heard about it and it’s been threatening to undo my curated to-read list for years. It’s not a book people talk about very often and I’ve been able to avoid hearing about it for the most part. That was until I went down to do my laundry and found it on a “free book and puzzle” shelf in the basement. Unfortunate for the other book I had been reading, A Canticle For Leibowitz fit perfectly into my pocket and I had just finished On Writing, my previous “carry anywhere” book of that same size. The conditions had been set and at long last, I began my journey with Saint Leibowitz.
What interested me about A Canticle For Leibowitz was how the rebuilding of society was told through the lens of a catholic abbey, worshipping a religion and saint they barely understood. How language and culture would survive, then mutate as word is passed down like a societal game of Telephone. What has stayed with me since reading is the timeliness that nuclear danger and egotistical warring has served since the first testing of those weapons. First written in 1959, A Canticle For Leibowitz’s third section reads like it was written six months from now. With the war in Ukraine and other horrors seeping through the minds of men across the globe, “Lucifer Has Fallen” could be a phrase on all of our lips shortly, and this time there is no cross galaxy tera-forming happening for us to escape to.
Modern day parallels aside, writing in the first half was some fantastic world building. Starting with a cloistered abbey growing into the Texarkana/Plains warring tribes shaped an arc that I would have been fascinated to live in for another couple hundred pages. Walter M. Miller Jr. wrote with intent to weave a very specific message into his story, but in doing so set the table for what could have been a story with a much different moral, about the survival of the human character or the importance of standards when recreating civilization. I love how he set moments up that meant so much as they were happening, only to dust them off with casual indifference in later sections of the book. When the third leader of the abbey could hardly remember one character’s name from the second section, but prayed to a character from the first who had been forgotten by the second, that was some beautiful retroactive storytelling.
My favorite part of the entire book, was the many named wandering jew. The mythology of the Wandering Jew has different variations across cultures and religious sects. Is he Cain, forced to live outside death for the murder of his brother? A jew from the crowd who mocked Jesus on his way to crucifixion? Or was it Lazarus, unable to die a second time, implying that not all of actions by the son of God were miracles? Miller embraced this vague, many-possibillitied reoccurring character, but made it clear he was waiting the second coming of Christ. I have my own opinions about who he was and if his long wait was finally over by the novel’s end. The third section of the book allows for many interpretations of the text, not all events are as clear cut as others and the final paragraph leaves an opening for many endings. In any ending, A Canticle For Leibowitz is a modern classic, forgotten by anyone who talks to me about books, and easily one of my new favorite novels to hoist upon anyone asking for a recommendation.