A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Yesterday I read “A Canticle for Leibowitz’ by Walter Miller. Now recognised as one of the classics of the sci-fi genre it’s an early post-apocalypse novel based on three short stories by the author. It was at once an exhilarating and a depressing read. Exhilarating in the way that any novel which, when read for the first time and appreciated as a REALLY good book is exhilarating. Depressing in the predicated cyclical history of humankind. The progress from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance of learning, to the obsession with worldly power, assumption of the possibility of control over nature and the final hubristic acts which destroy almost all sentient life forms.

There have been many post-apocalypse novels written since, (‘On The Beach’ notably) so many that it has become a cliché. Furthermore any child of the 40’s probably had the same nightmare in the 60’s expressed succinctly by Bob Dylan in ‘Talking World War III Blues:’

‘Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody's having them dreams.
Everybody sees themselves walkin' around with no one else.’

That doesn’t detract from its impact.

Personally I also found the book depressing because he envisaged the Church surviving to be a potent force against the State whereas I’ve always lived in hope that an apocalypse might be a final purging of a (IMO) malign institution!

It had virtually no female characters (except a very weird old lady with two heads who appears in part three.) That was a problem. It made it harder for me to identify with and left me with the thought that perhaps he had left an important factor out of the equation here. I don’t think the cycle of technological evolution and dissolution would be changed in any way; there is a universal truth in the allegory, clearly demonstrated on many levels. So what am I hoping for? That it happens with more emotion and more soul? That there are some voices crying the truth however futile? I don’t know. I don’t have any answer. My personal belief system gives me comfort in the promise of personal awakening (enlightenment?) I see the world-as-we-know-it as a nursery for the growing human soul. An environment which will exist in its present form, providing the classroom into which human consciousness enters and eventually graduates from (freeing itself from the Wheel of reincarnation in Buddhist terms) when certain lessons have been learned. Maybe that’s a pretty fairy tale but it keeps me sane.

Walter Miller committed suicide eventually.