/lit/ - Literature

>>21443786
A Canticle for Leibowitz, St. Leibowitz #1 - Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)

A Canticle of Leibowitz is three novellas that have minimal overlap due each one taking place roughly six hundred years after the previous one. Its structure is due to it being a fix-up novel composed of previously serialized works that were revised to form a novel. As a general rule, I don't like fix-up novels, though I didn't know this was one until after I read it.

The three parts are concerned with with the Abbey of St. Leibowitz and its residents, though outsiders are also present, and there a few times where the narrative goes elsewhere. The titular Isaac Edward Leibowitz has been deceased for roughly six hundred years and serves no role other than he founded the abbey to preserve human knowledge and was martyred. Sometimes I found the story be so farcical that Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz seemed like a more appropriate reference.

This is very much an idea novel, to the exclusion of almost all else. I suppose it can be read for its post-apocalyptic nuclear fallout setting, but I don't know who would read it for the characters, as they're seemingly only for the functional purpose of delivering the narrative. The central idea, there are several, to me is that humanity is doomed to its own intentional self-destruction, over and over again. It's thoroughly fatalistic, but there are also elements of optimistic wishful thinking that are still with us today, particularly that are currently viable escapes from Earth. I also believe it to be Sisyphean, which may be what I dislike the most about it. The very concept of continually losing progress after much effort and suffering, over and over again, is disagreeable to me.

I'm not able to relate to the effusive praise or awards I've seen for this book, though I also feel the same way about Isaac Asimov's Foundation, of which it bears at least a passing resemblance. There are ideas, passages, and commentary that I enjoyed, but overall I wasn't able to engage with this is in any meaningful way. One of the main reasons for this is that I found it to be too concerned with allegory. They're of the Catholic sort, but there are many secular ones as well. I don't want to emphasize the Catholicism because despite itnearly omnipresent from beginning to end, I felt it was more a thematic choice to support the idea of cyclical history than to be religiously oriented fiction.

I won't be seeking out more from this series or author. The novel is worthwhile, but it's style doesn't suite my tastes. I don't have any issue with saying that others should try reading it and seeing what they think. If you enjoy a low-action novel about religion, long-term preservation of knowledge and tradition, philosophical contemplation, and ideals being more far important than people or anything else, then this may be something you'd enjoy.

Rating: 3/5

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