Review by Marian Powell   —   December 13, 2000

A novice monk is confessing. While fasting in the desert, he was so hungry he broke his fast by eating a lizard! That, to him, is serious. Then, almost incidentally, he mentions that he met a strange old man who directed him to a fallout shelter. The shelter had terrified him, for he had heard about fallout. Apparently, a "fallout" was a demon who killed people and caused deformed babies to be born. A fallout shelter then would be full of demons!

By now you, the reader, have probably guessed that we are in the far distant future, the Dark Ages that followed a catastrophic nuclear war. There have been many novels placed in such a future, but A Canticle for Leibowitz is unique. Leibowitz had been a scientist who had helped cause the war, survived it, and then, seeing the beginning of a new Dark Age, founded a monastery dedicated to the preservation of knowledge. He died a martyr, murdered for his dream, but the monastery he founded lives on. As the story opens, 600 years have passed. The human race has barely survived. The world is a vast wasteland, populated only by tiny communities and nomadic tribes and the monastery which is firmly holding to its purpose to preserve what scraps of knowledge it can.

The fallout shelter is discovered to contain a priceless treasure. There's an ancient blueprint, a brief letter plus an old shopping list that might well be from Saint Leibowitz himself. They all were done just before the war that is remembered as the "Flame Deluge". Even though these pieces of paper are useless in a practical sense, they are invaluable as records of the past, the way today's archaeologists are thrilled to find broken bits of pottery from ancient cultures. The discovery makes the novice monk a figure of controversy. Soon people are saying that the old desert wanderer was really St. Leibowitz returned to guide the monks to uncover this bit of the past. This gives the novice a lot of problems as he is inevitably accused of either forgery or insanity. But as the centuries go by, he and the old man become as legendary and mythological as Leibowitz himself.

The book is divided into three parts, each one separated by 600 years. The first section is purely humorous and interesting as it follows the adventures of a slightly confused young novice monk. When the book jumps to the middle section, 600 years later, the world has changed, grown at once lighter and darker. The light comes from the regrowth of civilization. The Dark Ages are ending. Knowledge is being reborn. The bits and scraps of information hidden in the monastery are suddenly treasures beyond price for the hints and guidance they give to the new breed of scientists that are coming into the world.

All that is good, symbolized in the lighting of the first electric lamp that will literally dispel the darkness. But there is a dark, a very dark side to this new world. The price of civilization is conquest and war and all the horrors that go with that. City states are arising and not only competing with each other by any means fair or foul, but arising on the backs of the poor. It is an all too familiar world of rich and poor. The ugly side of history is repeating itself along with the magnificent side.

And so we jump another 600 years to a world where we would feel at home today. It is a modern, technological world, a world reaching out to the stars with spaceships. It is a world that possesses a full armament of atomic bombs and nations angry enough at each other to use them. Or will they? Has mankind learned from the past? Will he refrain or will he blow himself up again?

This is why A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of the great classics of science fiction. It pays tribute to man's incredible ability to dig in and survive the most devastating catastrophe imagineable and it recognizes man's incredible ability to endlessly repeat the same mistakes, learn nothing from history and destroy not only himself but the very earth that cradles him. It is perhaps not surprising the book has become "lost" for its message is not an easy or a comfortable one. Most life-after-the-nuclear-war novels turn the experience into an exciting adventure. Sadly, even the author followed up his great work with a sequel that takes place within the world he created in A Canticle for Leibowitz but it is only an adventure story. It came out last year but do not read it thinking that it is this book. It does not ask the questions this novel asks.

A brilliant scientist asks a monk about the past, about the world of the Twentieth Century that created the bomb, "How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely?"

"Perhaps" (The monk replies)"By being materially great and materially wise and nothing else."

Under the pessimism of the view that man will prevail only to repeat every mistake, there is one note of hope. It is a radical hope. It is not preached. It is simply there, woven into the framework of the story. There is available to man another way to live. Man does not have to confine himself to the search for wealth and power. So long as he does, he is doomed to the endless repetition of rise and fall of civilization, but it is the focus on wealth and power that dooms him. As the dying abbot of the monastery broods to himself,

"'What does the world weigh?...its scales are crooked. It weighs life and labor in the balance against silver and gold. That'll never balance...It spills a lot of life that way...Do they laugh at us in heaven?' He wondered."

There is another way. It is seen in little glimpses. There is the monk who reinvents electric lights and then shrugs at his accomplishment. Science is a hobby he takes pleasure in, but his true joy lies in being a monk, in serving God. In that moment, religion and science are seen, not in conflict, but in their proper perspective.

Then at the end of the book, in the last pages of the final chapter, a woman appears who is like no other human being on the earth. Who is she? What does she represent? Is she a figure pointing the way to a future that can be different from the past? Or is she only a hallucination? We are not told. We are only left with a question.