2016 read #11: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Introduction by Mary Doria Russell
340 pages
Published 1959
Read from February 11 to February 15
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Ugh. What a month this has been. First my spouse was in the hospital getting her appendix snipped out, then our child and I got hit by a speeding truck called the flu, and I could barely manage sufficient mental function for well over a week there in the first half of the month. I had been muddling through H. G. Wells' The Sleeper Awakes, but after several days I wasn't even halfway done, so I abandoned that (temporarily?) and picked up a book I'd been meaning to read for many years now. Even now, I can't seem to spark enough neural energy to say anything of substance in response to Leibowitz.

Canticle, I think, is preceded by a reputation that has little to do with the book itself. There's this idea floating out there, the result of some game of plot summary telephone perhaps, that Canticle is a satirical novel of a post-nuclear sect built upon the grocery list of one Isaac Leibowitz: "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels -- bring home for Emma." This mistaken understanding of the book is promulgated by the summary on the back cover, as well as the introduction here by Mary Doria Russell. A long time ago, someone I knew sought out Canticle for that supposed plot, with its promise of satirical hijinks, and came away disappointed. I asked her not to spoil the book for me back then, so when my turn came at last, I was no wiser.

This is very much not a book about a desert sect built upon reverence of a 20th century grocery list. Canticle is actually built upon a foundation of Catholic sincerity, ripping into euthanasia and the "false god" of comfort and security, a common enough theme in mid-century sci-fi explored with passion and religious vehemence. I think you have to have something of a Christian worldview for the final sections to land for you -- all these burdens of supposed sin dating back to Adam don't compute from a humanist perspective. The need to forgive God was an interesting wrinkle, closer to my sympathies, but otherwise the ending was, I felt, the weakest part of the novel.