Slightly Less Beloved Classics takes a second look at the lesser-known works of celebrated authors. Here we shall decide what is to remain by the wayside and what is to be led gaily back home, lauded with timbrels and trumpets and fatted calves. Previously in this series: Nightingale Wood.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is the kind of book that, if you have read it and you see it on a bookshelf at someone else’s house, you will immediately demand to know whose copy it is; the two of you will talk of nothing else for the rest of the night.
Its status as a classic is unimpeachable; it won the Hugo Award in 1961 and has never gone out of print. 2010, the year of its 50th publication anniversary, saw a spate of (very good) articles from sci-fi and mainstream book reviewers alike. But it has never achieved the kind of broad public awareness that books like Dune or even Starship Troopers have.
Part of the reason for this is that it’s the only novel Walter Miller — normally a short story writer — ever completed. There’s a sequel of sorts, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (may a merciful God someday put an end to the Man With a Name and Archetypal Female Companion titling convention), that was finished by an assistant after Miller died, but there is no reason you should read it. Somewhere, perhaps, there exists a world where Nabokov finished Laura and Ralph Ellison finished Juneteenth and Miller finished Saint Leibowitz sometime before 1997, but that world is not here.
Supposedly the book originated as a short story based on Miller’s experience as a bomber in World War II, particularly one mission where he participated in the destruction of a 1400-year-old Italian monastery. He went on to write several companion short stories, then realized he was halfway into a novel and started rewriting everything with that end in mind. It’s layered, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility, but never to the point of insensibility.
It will never be made into a movie. Are you kidding me? A thoughtful, meandering look at the cyclical nature of history (finally proving Dennis Duffy’s adage that technology repeats itself to be true) from the perspective of a bunch of Catholic monks who keep getting murdered by bandits? It’s completely unfilmable. If it is ever made into a movie, expect the production process to be interrupted multiple times as different directors exit the project in frustration and disgust. It will go wildly over budget, but all of the effects will look incredibly cheap. At some point during production, Johnny Depp would be cast as the pilgrim, because that is the kind of world that we live in.
I mean, you tell me how you’d put this on the screen:
We are the centuries… We have your eoliths and your mesoliths and your neoliths. We have your Babylons and your Pompeiis, your Caesars and your chromium-plated (vital-ingredient impregnated) artifacts. We have your bloody hatchets and your Hiroshimas. We march in spite of Hell, we do – Atrophy, Entropy, and Proteus vulgaris, telling bawdy jokes about a farm girl name of Eve and a traveling salesman called Lucifer. We bury your dead and their reputations. We bury you. We are the centuries. Be born then, gasp wind, screech at the surgeon’s slap, seek manhood, taste a little godhood, feel pain, give birth, struggle a little while, succumb: (Dying, leave quietly by the rear exit, please.) Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens – and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn’t the same. (AGH! AGH! AGH! – an idiot screams his mindless anguish amid the rubble. But quickly! let it be inundated by the choir, chanting Alleluias at ninety decibels.)
There is nothing, nothing like the slightly sour mid-century Catholic. He bestrides the narrow world. No one can write about the wearying weight of old knowledge like him. No one is funny like him.
“You heard him say it? ‘Pain’s the only evil I know about.’ You heard that?”
The monk nodded solemnly.
“And that society is the only thing that determines whether an act is wrong or not? That too?”
“Yes.”
“Dearest God, how did those two heresies get back into the world after all this time? Hell has limited imaginations down there. ‘The serpent deceived me, and I did eat.”
For a science fiction novel, of course, it’s rather short on technology (by necessity, it taking place after global nuclear war leads to an anti-science revolution) and long on questions of morality and eternity and knowledge. There is a spaceship at the end, though. And plenty of murder and dangerous bands of irradiated mutants and illuminated manuscripts and long days of nothing in the desert.
Do you remember where you were the first time you encountered The Road? Somehow I had missed the book entirely when my brother and mother and I went to see the movie with Viggo Mortensen (“A father and son struggle through a postapocalyptic landscape. Sounds good.”) on Christmas Eve. When we stumbled out of the theater a thousand years later, my brother turned to us with red-rimmed eyes and said quietly, “It doesn’t feel like Christmas anymore.” A Canticle for Leibowitz is a lot like that, but with more Christmas in it.
Francis began the actual illumination of the lambskin. The intricacies of scrollwork and the excruciating delicacy of the gold-inlay work would, because of the brevity of his spare-project time, make it a labor of many years; but in a dark sea of centuries wherein nothing seemed to flow, a lifetime was only brief eddy, even for the man who lived it. There was a tedium of repeated days and repeated seasons; then there were aches and pains, finally Extreme Unction, and a moment of blackness at the end-or at the beginning, rather. For then the small shivering soul who had endured the tedium, endured it badly or well, would find itself in a place of light, find itself absorbed in the burning gaze of infinitely compassionate eyes as it stood before the Just One. And then the King would say: “Come,” or the King would say: “Go,” and only for that moment had the tedium of years existed. It would be hard to believe differently during such an age as Francis knew.
Works Referenced
Walter Miller Jr., A Canticle For Leibowitz (Amazon | Indiebound)
Walter Miller Jr., Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (Amazon | Indiebound)
Frank Herbert, Dune (Amazon | Indiebound)
Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers (Amazon | Indiebound)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Amazon | Indiebound)
[Image via Flickr]
Tags: a canticle for leibowitz, books, catholicism, dune, science fiction, slightly less beloved classics, walter miller jr.
“Bless me, Father; I ate a lizard.” I loved this book in a terrified way when I was a teenager, and I still enjoy it, though it’s so bound in the Cold War that I wonder how it would be as a first-time read today, when kids don’t grow up wondering whether the plane passing over their house is carrying an atomic bomb.
I’ve actually taught this book to undergrads a few times in recent years in a post-apocalpyse class, and one of the ways I get around the “what Berlin Wall” generational thing is to start the first day by asking them to talk about what kinds of apocalyptic scenarios they personally fear — and which kind of “mini” apocalypses (i.e., culture-destroying, but not world-destroying) have already happened. It actually surprises me how many different fears have taken the place of the Cold War nuclear dynamic. “Mutually assured destruction” is something I usually have to explain, though.
I am idly running through course names I would use for a class on the post-apocalypse; you could get very sneaky with the references. “Mail Service from the Clearys: Post-Annihilation Communication.”
I took several semesters’ worth of courses on nuclear policy, security, and gamesmanship, almost entirely because of the professor. She mentioned one day that her mother was relieved when the Soviet Union officially folded its tents: “Oh honey, now your job will be so much less worrying.” “No, Ma; I’m just going to be worrying about shit that’s a lot less predictable.” Fear is a constant, if a shifting one.
I… definitely always assumed this was a book about a rabbi/talmudic scholar. Huh.
So the SAINT LEIBOWITZ in question is a Jewish convert to Catholicism whose shopping list and writings about electricity are discovered by a group of monks after the Simplification. The reader knows he was/is Jewish, but no one in the story ever does. LAYERS!
My uncle was really extremely very into “The Road” when it came out, because he found its post-apocalyptic hellscape pretty much in line with the emotional realities of parenting–his son had just been born–even in a society where [spoilers] babies are ROASTED AND EATEN very infrequently.
I’m compiling a list of books where EVEN IN THE FUTURE, the Catholic Church is the worst. So far: “Canticle,” and Mary Doria Russell. Any suggestions?
Only after finishing The Road did I learn that it was inspired by a trip McCarthy took with his son when McCarthy was nearing 70 and his son was 13ish. Maybe this level is something that would have been obvious to a parent reading the book, but recontextualizing the whole story as McCarthy dealing with the very real possibility that he would not see his son’s adulthood made it even more tragic for me.
The Catholic Church definitely isn’t the worst part of the future in Canticle for Leibowitz. It’s complicated, for sure, but it’s a deeply necessary institution and a preserver of knowledge. So take that off the list!
You could definitely make an argument that getting shot in the face by an arrow is the worst part of the future in Canticle for Leibowitz (also: the present, IRL), but persuading mothers that their already-dying, horrifically burned (irradiated?) children will go to hell if they euthanize them has got to be a close second.
I mean, it is very explicit within the morality of the book that this is preferabl to the social rot that leads to another war. Not saying I agree, but the text is clear!
I have no additions to your list, but OH MY GOD The Sparrow. That shit will WRECK YOU. I mean, you know that. But seriously. They meant so well, and it went so, so wrong.
Oh my god, The Sparrow 🙁 I made the mistake of picking up The Sparrow on a romantic week away with my partner and read it in an afternoon 🙁 At one point, he said, he looked up at my face while I was reading it and knew that a) we weren’t going to be having sex that night, and b) we were going to be doing a lot of drinking.
haha, that sounds like a good idea in the same way that it sounded like a good idea, when I woke up at 3:00 AM in a remote mountain vacation cabin, to read Lord of the Flies to help myself get back to sleep.
I read that book while on vacation in Jerusalem and just went around thinking STOP IT, ALL OF YOU, YOU WILL RUIN EVERYTHING at every religious location.
I took a course in college called The Future (it was a literature course) and we read The Road–and the professor recommended A Canticle for Leibowitz and Riddley Walker as non-required reading, just because they were good and relevant. I read Riddley Walker and fell in love, and then read about 1/4 of Leibowitz before putting it down for some unremembered reason and never finishing it. Time to start over again.
HA! I totally read these three in a literature course too, except that one was called Nuclear Epic. Also on that reading list: Gravity’s Rainbow; Don DeLillo’s End Zone.
(I’d read Canticle before that course in a lit/history course on science fiction and fell in love with it there.)
I ought to revisit Riddley Walker. Great great great book.
Arg, I keep forgetting to request Riddley Walker from the remote library branch that has it. Thanks for reminding me.
Russell Hoban also wrote the Frances picture books, a favorite childhood series in my family. Though the subject matter and structure are obviously quite different from his work for children, sometimes the similarity in voice jars me right out of the story. I recently read Kleinzeit, and throughout the book, I felt my own childhood peering up at me in dismay, asking “Really? Are you going to keep reading this? Don’t you feel a little… icky?”
Yes! I have a copy of his kid’s book The Mouse and His Child, which I’d read and liked when I was younger, and parts of it are surprisingly dark, but it all has a similar depth that I simultaneously love and find troubling.
HE WROTE THE FRANCES BOOKS???? Worldview shattered.
RIGHT?
All of a sudden the thing about Frances talking about eggs just WAITING for you to eat them is a whole lot creepier.
RIDDLEY WALKER IS THE GREATEST BOOK
THE END
The bit that starts “We are your centuries…”? Easy. Footage of the desert, with supercut voiceover by Dennis Hopper.
WHY MUST YOU REMIND ME THAT DENNIS HOPPER IS DEAD
But he probably filled a bunker somewhere with reels and reels of audiotape of himself reading every post-apocalyptic novel ever, right? Just as a lark? That seems like something he’d do.
Also a separate bunker just filled with bongos and ether masks.
Speaking of McCarthy (from Wikipedia, so grain of salt or whatever):
“After marrying fellow student Lee Holleman in 1961, he and she ‘moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxville.’ There they had a son, Cullen, in 1962. While caring for the baby and tending to the chores of the house, Lee was asked by Cormac to also get a day job so he could focus on his novel writing. Dismayed with the situation, she moved to Wyoming, where she filed for divorce and landed her first job teaching.”
Of course you did, McCarthy. You had to FOCUS.
“Dismayed with the situation” I’ll bet. Dismayed…with fire.
A classic of the genre. Thanks for reminding.
Sad to say I never actually made it through this. I keep meaning to go back and read it, and then it’s like “What? There’s a new Buffy comic out? I’ll read that instead!”
And then obviously I go watch Friday Night Lights or something.
I am an archivist! I became an archivist in no small part because of this book! My fourteen year old self was convinced that I would save some piece of beauty and memory for the people who survive the Simplification.
Putting this on my reading list. I’m also very fascinated by mid-century Catholicism. I wrote my senior thesis on the relationship between alcoholism and Catholicism in 1940s British literature. The three authors I focused on were Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Malcolm Lowry. The prose in that excerpt reminds me most of Under the Volcano – Mallory have you read it? It’s my very favorite book – another slightly less beloved classic.
Two fun things: a) That first paragraph LITERALLY HAPPENED when Mallory visited me and b) my wife and I used readings from Canticle (and, uh, from Angels in America) as part of our confusingly mixed-spirituality family’s advent celebrations.
I read Canticle For Leibowitz a few years ago, but now I’m thinking I didn’t read it so much as stare uncomprehendingly at pages and then turn them after an appropriate amount of time because literally all I remember is there are monks and a nuclear war and the branch of monks the book is about are working to get Leibowitz declared a saint. Nothing in this article rings any bells for me. Maybe I stopped reading really fast and only think I finished it.
Is it bad that when Babylon 5 ended with that big confusing long timejump episode (vague to avoid spoilers), I watched it thinking, “So suddenly this all becomes A Canticle for Leibowitz?” Only not really, but it rhymed pretty hard.
I read Canticle for Leibowitz about…. 6 years ago? maybe? I can hardly remember a thing about it now, besides monks and deserts and Texarkana, but I do remember that I loved it. Thanks for the reminder. 🙂
Aaagh I tried to read this a few years ago and now I will get a copy from the library and try harder.
I read this in a sci-fi themed freshman comp class at a community college when I was 20 or so, having dropped out of the local Actual University without having passed comp. I loved the class, found my voice as a critic, and eventually convinced the instructor to let me skip class time and just turn in papers on each book. Because my own mall-working, wreck-driving, bastard-dating life was already so bleak I could’t look directly at Canticle. I should probably go back to it now that I’m in a better place.
My husband, who only reads poetry, read The Road as his one novel a year a few years back and pushes it on everyone. He is currently reading Colson Whitehead’s Zone One as This Year’s Novel.
RIGHT?
I've actually taught this book to undergrads a few times in recent years in a post-apocalpyse class, and one of the ways I get around the "what Berlin Wall" generational thing is to start the first day by asking them to talk about what kinds of apocalyptic scenarios they personally fear — and which kind of "mini" apocalypses (i.e., culture-destroying, but not world-destroying) have already happened. It actually surprises me how many different fears have taken the place of the Cold War nuclear dynamic. "Mutually assured destruction" is something I usually have to explain, though.
I read that book while on vacation in Jerusalem and just went around thinking STOP IT, ALL OF YOU, YOU WILL RUIN EVERYTHING at every religious location.
RIDDLEY WALKER IS THE GREATEST BOOK
THE END
… and The Toast strikes again, writing outposts from inside my head — this time, from The Future.
Friday, I ordered A Canticle for Leibowitz from the library. Today, I excitedly told the friend/local bookseller who organizes a women’s sci-fi book club that I no longer have a conflict for the monthly Wednesday meetings. She said “Oh, good! This month, we’re reading A Canticle for Leibowitz.”
… duh duh DUH.
… and The Toast strikes again, writing outposts from inside my head — this time, from The Future.
Friday, I ordered A Canticle for Leibowitz from the library. Today, I excitedly told the friend/local bookseller who organizes a women's sci-fi book club that I no longer have a conflict for the monthly Wednesday meetings. She said "Oh, good! This month, we're reading A Canticle for Leibowitz."
… duh duh DUH.
I wrote a book report on this in grade 7, and remember it making a big impression on me. After reading this post, however, I realize that I probably missed the point utterly and completely. Time for a reread!
My father’s copy of this book from his senior year was totally responsible for my A+ comparison with Lord of the Flies. Everyone else picked much more conventional books, and my English teacher thought I was really insightful for having a unique personal choice.
“It will never be made into a movie.” You’re probably right, but it has been adapted into a stage play by Richard Felnagle in 1986, I think (the copyright is in roman numerals) and the script was published The Dramatic Publishing Company. So it’s possible it could be a film but probably won’t be. The play is decent but the novel is great.
It’s also been made into a pretty decent serial radio drama, which can be downloaded and enjoyed courtesy of the Internet Archive! I listened through the whole thing a few years ago (after reading the book many years ago in my 20s) and then listened to an unabridged audiobook last summer, and I must say the radio drama is the easier option for those who don’t necessarily want to dig deeply into Miller’s flights of psychohistoric religiosity during their morning commutes. One of my favorite reading pleasures!