Walter M. Miller: A Canticle for Leibowitz
Jul. 8th, 2022 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI would not, in all honesty, recommend A Canticle for Leibowitz as holiday reading. But I had been looking, quite late in the evening, for my next book - actually, checking the SF shelves to see whether a couple of paperbacks I had found in the slush pile were duplicates (still don't know the answer to this one; must take the kitchen steps upstairs and have a closer look), and there it was. It's one of those books I read so long ago that I hesitate to claim to have read it; and right there right then, it felt like something I wanted to re-read. Since I hadn't finished it before we left, it came on holiday with me, and yes, as I read the final section, it did bring a degree of gloom with it. Oddly, later on our trip, a small coincidence made it feel slightly more appropriate. I had been looking at the background of the novel, and read that one of the seeds of the story was that Miller had served in the bombing of Monte Cassino: visiting Hackness Battery and Martello tower on Hoy, we heard about former owner John Cload, who had served in the British Army, and found himself on the ground at Monte Cassino...
What did I know about A Canticle for Leibowitz, going into this re-read? That it was a post-apocalyptic novel, a bit grim, with a major rôle for the Catholic church which I found challenging. And that it contained the unforgettable line: May he win the eye of the poet at mumblety-peg! Nothing else - I couldn't even have guaranteed to spell the title correctly! Was it a family cult favourite, or was it actually a well-known and / or well-regarded novel? (Spoiler: it won a Hugo, and has been in print ever since.)
I had certainly not remembered the tripartite structure of the book, a reflection of its initial publication as three linked novellas. Three episodes, hundreds if not thousands of years apart, are carefully stitched together, returning to the same big themes and dropping in small recurring details: but the tone grows steadily darker. Reading the first part, Fiat Homo, I was surprised how much humour there was - black humour, but humour nonetheless (this from me, who am often oblivious to humour). In the second section, Fiat Lux, the humour is still there, but overshadowed by the darkness; and part three, Fiat Voluntas Tua is downright grim. Nuclear annihilation and Catholic self-righteousness is a mixture that could have been concocted specifically to repel me, and, to be fair, Abbot Zerchi's position is not uncritically endorsed. Take this as a content warning: contains nuclear threat and Catholicism.
It's also overwhelmingly male: unsurprisingly so, considering the monastic setting, and maybe not exceptionally so by the standards of 1950s SF, but it is.
Despite all of which, it's still a great book. You might want to skip the last section, if you weren't feeling particularly strong, but brace yourself, it's worth it.
That line that I had remembered as a sort of recurring refrain, though? My memory strikes again! It appears just once, and I hadn't even got the name of the game right:
What did I know about A Canticle for Leibowitz, going into this re-read? That it was a post-apocalyptic novel, a bit grim, with a major rôle for the Catholic church which I found challenging. And that it contained the unforgettable line: May he win the eye of the poet at mumblety-peg! Nothing else - I couldn't even have guaranteed to spell the title correctly! Was it a family cult favourite, or was it actually a well-known and / or well-regarded novel? (Spoiler: it won a Hugo, and has been in print ever since.)
I had certainly not remembered the tripartite structure of the book, a reflection of its initial publication as three linked novellas. Three episodes, hundreds if not thousands of years apart, are carefully stitched together, returning to the same big themes and dropping in small recurring details: but the tone grows steadily darker. Reading the first part, Fiat Homo, I was surprised how much humour there was - black humour, but humour nonetheless (this from me, who am often oblivious to humour). In the second section, Fiat Lux, the humour is still there, but overshadowed by the darkness; and part three, Fiat Voluntas Tua is downright grim. Nuclear annihilation and Catholic self-righteousness is a mixture that could have been concocted specifically to repel me, and, to be fair, Abbot Zerchi's position is not uncritically endorsed. Take this as a content warning: contains nuclear threat and Catholicism.
It's also overwhelmingly male: unsurprisingly so, considering the monastic setting, and maybe not exceptionally so by the standards of 1950s SF, but it is.
Despite all of which, it's still a great book. You might want to skip the last section, if you weren't feeling particularly strong, but brace yourself, it's worth it.
That line that I had remembered as a sort of recurring refrain, though? My memory strikes again! It appears just once, and I hadn't even got the name of the game right:
"Memento, Domine, omnium famulorum tuorum," the abbot whispered in response, adding: "And may he finally win the Poet's eyeball at mumbly-peg. Amen."
