A Canticle for Leibowitz

"So it was that, after the Deluge, the Fallout, the plagues, the madness, the confusion of tongues, the rage, there began the bloodletting of the Simplification, when remnants of mankind had torn other remnants limb from limb, killing rulers, scientists, leaders, technicians, teachers, and whatever persons the leaders of the maddened mobs said deserved death for having helped to make the Earth what it had become." (ACFL, 52).

Sometimes, I have the feeling that a lot of the books I've read form a vast, suppurating skin beneath which can be seen the skeleton of one definitive book. That feeling occured to me as I read Miller's famous tale of ecclesiastical life in a post-apocalyptic America. Don't those mutants, the biencephalic ones, remind me of the creatures that turn up In Philip K. Dick's stories of future America, even the humanistic treatment of their plights re-occurs in Dick. And didn't Dick and Zelazny co-write a tale about a cleric surviving in a nuclear blasted America. And in England, think of that cascade of novels setting their stories of medieval futurism where fealty is paid mainly to the Church who war interminably with the State: "The Alteration", "The Cloud Walker", "Pavane", Cowper's Corlay series- and probably more that I've missed. Like Dick, Miller sprinkles his text with Latin quotes, but more abundantly. Basic English has died out, and the abbots and monks we meet on this journey speak an highly formal Latin, some of it used gratuitously, some of it meaningfully, all of this an intellectual armamentarium against the extinction of learning through the Simplification. There's also a bit of Hebrew too, and the whole book might be seen as a document about language, which in the "Memorabilia" of Liebowitz, or in the general reserves of Earth knowledge, is needed if humankind is to re-invent itself. Miller is an excellent wordsmith; where have I seen the word "orinthophagic" before? At the start of the final section of the novel, he brings Joycean babblespeak and Do Passos fictionalised reportage together with humorous results. In fact, there is a lot of humour here; but it's dark comedy, the sort of moralistic, Dantean laughter which can make you LOL or be freezed to the bone at the stupidity of humankind. Perhaps Miller's greatest achievement was to make this history cyclical, not linear. First, we get Lucifer's flame almost destroying humanity,, then the pursuant Dark Ages, followed by a Renaissance led by a Johnny-come-lately neo-Einstein, and finally the raining down of missiles again upon the Earth. The only salvation for the Church is to found a colony in deep space, and spread the message amongst the aliens, leaving Earth to the buzzards, who are themselves on the brink of extinction.