Mutually assured destruction. We rarely use the term anymore, being as it is the year 2011. In the year 1959, however, when Walter M. Miller, Jr. published A Canticle for Leibowitz, the world had just begun to reckon with the possibilities of atomic power.
By way of three acts, Miller paints a triptych with panels from the twenty-eighth, thirty-second and thirty-eighth centuries--spanning nearly two millennia after the twentieth-century nuclear holocaust ("the Flame Deluge"). Miller's storytelling, like the desert monastery in which each panel is set, burns away the excessive adornment of so much apocalyptic fiction. What he leaves is the gem of the human heart placed in a setting of bare and ruthless detail.
The initial plot seems almost absurd: a monastery devoted to the preservation of fragmentary pre-holocaust documents, written in a language now almost dead ("pre-Deluge English"). Yet the dedication of the monks so perfectly mirrors our common humanity that we will bite into Miller's world. And once we've taken the hook, we're yanked into a strange new world that leaves us gasping in wonder.
Miller sketches the monastery, its strange monkish characters, the "Empire of Denver," and a new world order with stark lines, leaving vast white spaces for our imaginations to fill. He spares us any attempt to explain every technological detail, which discipline only lends power to his story. The details he does fill betray the author's context. The Church of New Rome uses Latin, as did the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church. Computers with amazing capabilities still take up the space of a wall cabinet. And bindlestiffs are required for tramping across country. But these anachronisms from the 1950s do less to detract from the story than remind us that Miller was writing--as the cover reminds us--a "prophetic" book to a real world.
The best novels (of which Canticle counts in my estimation) weave together many thematic threads from human experience. One brilliant pattern in the story that surfaces in Canticle is that of memory. The monks of St Leibowitz struggle to keep the relics and memorabilia of a twentieth-century electrical engineer, even though they don't understand what his texts mean. When scientific discovery catches up again to what was lost in the Deluge (which was nearly everything technical), the monastery becomes an accelerator for humanity to gain again the power of the atom. But with the first holocaust eighteen hundred years in the past, will those who regain the same cataclysmic power choose something besides mutual annihilation?
Canticle has a dark conclusion, yet the blackness is not total. At the end of a strange story, full of monks but with only cross-wise references to the divine, we see a sprig of hope rise from the rubble. The sprig bears no blossom, however, perhaps because what Miller saw in the post-Hiroshima landscape also had not yet come into leaf.
Mutually assured destruction does not drone from news commentators in our day. Our fears are different from those of Miller's time, at least on the level of nations. Yet inasmuch as Canticle serves as an allegory for the human soul, its message is perennial: how do we rescue ourselves from cycles of evil--personal, familial, social--when we constantly receive new tools for evil to infect? Can we be rescued? Or does the destruction wreaked by human evil serve as an inevitable conclusion from which we can only hope some shred of new life will emerge?
In Canticle Miller draws us into these questions with compelling storytelling. Even sixty-two years later, his work is well worth the read.
(Thanks, Frank, for loaning me your precious copy. I shall try to preserve more than a shred of it until we next meet.)
~ emrys
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