A Canticle for Leibowitz
Sep. 21st, 2017 01:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaI don't often read 50's era scifi nowadays—not because I hate it or anything. But, it tends toward hard science where I prefer softy goopy anthropological scifi, and it tends toward pulp and space opera when I'm more into artsy and earthy things. Moreover, its themes tend toward things that can feel strikingly archaic nowadays. Endless Cold War-era brooding of superpower stand-offs feel faintly quaint in a post-Soviet world where nuclear concerns are more diffuse, and tangled, and unpredictable and tenuous.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is absolutely 50's-era scifi, but very much unlike the rest. It's only called scifi because there's not another classification that really fits—"alternate history" maybe? There's no space opera here, just monks hanging out in abbeys, and even though it is basically the Cold War scenario—"what if nuclear holocaust"—its take is surprisingly fresh, even a half-century after its publication.
The book's divided into three sections, each six hundred years apart, starting six hundred years after The Big Nuclear Apocalypse. Christianity survives, but just barely, and a tiny order of monks out in the Utah desert have been busily preserving what few scraps of writing and civilization remain.
The first section of the book is delightful all on its own, alternately charming and intriguing. The bemused reverence with which they treat even the most mundane pre-apocalypse artifacts elicits plenty of laughs (from the back of the book: "the blessed blueprint, the sacred shopping list, and the holy shrine of Fallout Shelter"). And yet it so lovingly illustrates daily life in the abbey, with all its small pleasures and mundanities. Years spent copying and re-copying manuscripts. Struggling to decipher a now-foreign English language from before the apocalypse. Vigils, fasting, all of that, but in the company of real brothers, with little rivalries and friendships forming here and there. You finish it feeling suffused with a sense of the sacred—but not of a particularly religious nature, just the sacredness of a small band of humans so devoted to knowledge and preservations.
The second section is the meatiest of them, depicting a world on the verge of a Renaissance. A natural philosopher, Thon Taddeo, comes to the abbey to inspect these isolated, secretive documents they've been protecting for so long.
A simpler book would portray this as some Bold Atheist coming in to bring The Enlightenment about, hail Richard Dawkins and so on. Or else they'd portray it as a necessary and inevitable conflict of Science versus Religion. What the book does is far more interesting.
We see the beloved abbey from a new angle: in the first section, they seemed lone lights in the darkness, the only ones in the world left dedicated to knowledge. Tilt the spyglass a little, though—look at it through the Thon's eyes—what are they preserving all this knowledge for? to what end? is it truly the best thing to have this cloistered in a desert where so few can make use of it, even for simple pleasure, it not greater things?
And we also see the Thon through the abbey's eyes. A few monks are starstruck at having such a famous scientist around. Yet others are more guarded, seeing those foibles which make him merely mortal. The Thon, man of "objectivity" that he is, openly sneers at a young monk's suggestion to investigate the work of Saint Augustine—even though the monk is suggesting specifically the bits of Augustine that provided a very early guess at the Theory of Evolution, a bit we know is absolutely right. At one point the Thon, by request, gives a lecture about his discoveries, but halts every so often to beg forgiveness, stuff along the lines of "I hope not to offend anyone by talking about this" before talking about the properties of light. And yet no one in the abbey is offended by his technical discussions; theirs is the deep-rooted faith of a more Jesuit flavor. What can more knowledge of the physical world do to such a faith? The abbot is only enraged later, when he calls out some of the Thon's scientific speculation for what it really is—an interpretation meant to satisfy his own vanity, theorizing based more on ego and self-aggrandizement than his own supposed rational objectivity.
It all converges in an uncomfortable stalemate between the abbot and the Thon. The abbot knows this Renaissance will become inextricably entangled with violence, with war, with nation-state interests, just as soon as the kings realize what power it can grant them. At least here in the desert they are removed from such concerns; they cannot help but neither can they harm. The Thon does not disagree—but sees no other option than to press on, sees those harms as inevitable as the wind—"if you try to save wisdom until the world is wise, Father, the world will never have it." (And of course that entanglement happens far sooner than either of them realize.)
And the bits of humor do not leave the book, either, even with the heavy subject matter. A scene where the Thon grapples with an "ancient" text on relativity had me in stitches.
The third section of the book wavers a bit. Once again civilization has developed high technology; once again civilization is on the verge of destroying itself; I've seen the whole Great Filter thing before, thanks. And for a bit we're retreading all that familiar territory (familiar to me, anyway; I know a lot of nerds who fret over this shit).
And yet then the story abruptly takes a sharp left turn, focusing on an abbot trying to advise a woman with a radiation-sickened child. This was fascinating because it was circling around a moral train of thought I truly don't understand—but the abbot is so forceful, so articulate, and so clearly pained by the situation that you're forced to take seriously what he's saying and doing. And there's something very startlingly intimate about focusing on such a difficult, personal human concern in the face of impending global doom. Everyday moral concerns are not suspended in times of crisis, and indeed, here seem to be of far greater concern than the crisis itself.
And, throughout the book as a whole, there's a few tiny touches of mysticism—or apparent mysticism—strewn about, leaving us blinking and guessing—is there some higher power in this book's universe? or is this another cute trick by the author, showing how we, too, can misinterpret things exactly the way the early post-apocalyptic monks did when looking at the old civilization?
Moreover the text is a pleasure to read, style-wise. It's in a "50's scifi style," similar to what Ted Chiang's doing nowadays. And I do not mean that as an insult; there's hardly been a paragraph in literature more beautiful than the opening of Chiang's "Story of Your Life". But that story is beautiful because of its starkness, choosing simple and economical language to try and make itself invisible, to allow the story itself to shine—the kind of trick you can only pull off when you are very sure of the story. So it is with Chiang's writing; so it is with Miller's, and it works well.
I rather enjoyed this book.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is absolutely 50's-era scifi, but very much unlike the rest. It's only called scifi because there's not another classification that really fits—"alternate history" maybe? There's no space opera here, just monks hanging out in abbeys, and even though it is basically the Cold War scenario—"what if nuclear holocaust"—its take is surprisingly fresh, even a half-century after its publication.
The book's divided into three sections, each six hundred years apart, starting six hundred years after The Big Nuclear Apocalypse. Christianity survives, but just barely, and a tiny order of monks out in the Utah desert have been busily preserving what few scraps of writing and civilization remain.
The first section of the book is delightful all on its own, alternately charming and intriguing. The bemused reverence with which they treat even the most mundane pre-apocalypse artifacts elicits plenty of laughs (from the back of the book: "the blessed blueprint, the sacred shopping list, and the holy shrine of Fallout Shelter"). And yet it so lovingly illustrates daily life in the abbey, with all its small pleasures and mundanities. Years spent copying and re-copying manuscripts. Struggling to decipher a now-foreign English language from before the apocalypse. Vigils, fasting, all of that, but in the company of real brothers, with little rivalries and friendships forming here and there. You finish it feeling suffused with a sense of the sacred—but not of a particularly religious nature, just the sacredness of a small band of humans so devoted to knowledge and preservations.
The second section is the meatiest of them, depicting a world on the verge of a Renaissance. A natural philosopher, Thon Taddeo, comes to the abbey to inspect these isolated, secretive documents they've been protecting for so long.
A simpler book would portray this as some Bold Atheist coming in to bring The Enlightenment about, hail Richard Dawkins and so on. Or else they'd portray it as a necessary and inevitable conflict of Science versus Religion. What the book does is far more interesting.
We see the beloved abbey from a new angle: in the first section, they seemed lone lights in the darkness, the only ones in the world left dedicated to knowledge. Tilt the spyglass a little, though—look at it through the Thon's eyes—what are they preserving all this knowledge for? to what end? is it truly the best thing to have this cloistered in a desert where so few can make use of it, even for simple pleasure, it not greater things?
And we also see the Thon through the abbey's eyes. A few monks are starstruck at having such a famous scientist around. Yet others are more guarded, seeing those foibles which make him merely mortal. The Thon, man of "objectivity" that he is, openly sneers at a young monk's suggestion to investigate the work of Saint Augustine—even though the monk is suggesting specifically the bits of Augustine that provided a very early guess at the Theory of Evolution, a bit we know is absolutely right. At one point the Thon, by request, gives a lecture about his discoveries, but halts every so often to beg forgiveness, stuff along the lines of "I hope not to offend anyone by talking about this" before talking about the properties of light. And yet no one in the abbey is offended by his technical discussions; theirs is the deep-rooted faith of a more Jesuit flavor. What can more knowledge of the physical world do to such a faith? The abbot is only enraged later, when he calls out some of the Thon's scientific speculation for what it really is—an interpretation meant to satisfy his own vanity, theorizing based more on ego and self-aggrandizement than his own supposed rational objectivity.
It all converges in an uncomfortable stalemate between the abbot and the Thon. The abbot knows this Renaissance will become inextricably entangled with violence, with war, with nation-state interests, just as soon as the kings realize what power it can grant them. At least here in the desert they are removed from such concerns; they cannot help but neither can they harm. The Thon does not disagree—but sees no other option than to press on, sees those harms as inevitable as the wind—"if you try to save wisdom until the world is wise, Father, the world will never have it." (And of course that entanglement happens far sooner than either of them realize.)
And the bits of humor do not leave the book, either, even with the heavy subject matter. A scene where the Thon grapples with an "ancient" text on relativity had me in stitches.
The third section of the book wavers a bit. Once again civilization has developed high technology; once again civilization is on the verge of destroying itself; I've seen the whole Great Filter thing before, thanks. And for a bit we're retreading all that familiar territory (familiar to me, anyway; I know a lot of nerds who fret over this shit).
And yet then the story abruptly takes a sharp left turn, focusing on an abbot trying to advise a woman with a radiation-sickened child. This was fascinating because it was circling around a moral train of thought I truly don't understand—but the abbot is so forceful, so articulate, and so clearly pained by the situation that you're forced to take seriously what he's saying and doing. And there's something very startlingly intimate about focusing on such a difficult, personal human concern in the face of impending global doom. Everyday moral concerns are not suspended in times of crisis, and indeed, here seem to be of far greater concern than the crisis itself.
And, throughout the book as a whole, there's a few tiny touches of mysticism—or apparent mysticism—strewn about, leaving us blinking and guessing—is there some higher power in this book's universe? or is this another cute trick by the author, showing how we, too, can misinterpret things exactly the way the early post-apocalyptic monks did when looking at the old civilization?
Moreover the text is a pleasure to read, style-wise. It's in a "50's scifi style," similar to what Ted Chiang's doing nowadays. And I do not mean that as an insult; there's hardly been a paragraph in literature more beautiful than the opening of Chiang's "Story of Your Life". But that story is beautiful because of its starkness, choosing simple and economical language to try and make itself invisible, to allow the story itself to shine—the kind of trick you can only pull off when you are very sure of the story. So it is with Chiang's writing; so it is with Miller's, and it works well.
I rather enjoyed this book.
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