A Canticle for Leibowitz

Why hadn't I got round to reading A Canticle for Leibowitz before? Not only is it one of the classics of the genre, it's also right up my street - a post-apocalyptic novel written in the late 1950s about the recovery of society after a nuclear holocaust. And I've no idea why I've only just got round to reading it, should've done so long ago.

The narrative is centred on a Catholic monastery in the southwest of the USA (although by the time the story opens this is an anachronistic description of its location). It's told in three sections (originally published separately then put together and modified into this novel). The first one is set about 600 years after the Flame Deluge, the nuclear holocaust which happened in the 20th Century. A backlash against technology and learning in the aftermath of the Deluge had left monasteries once again the storehouses of knowledge in a Dark Age. The story here centres round a novice who discovers relics of the blessed Isaac Leibowitz, beatified for his role in saving the knowledge of the world after the Deluge. His canonisation is being considered by the Church and there's a tension between joy at the discovery of the relics and fear that this might jeopardise the canonisation if the Pope in New Rome thinks they're faked. The protagonist for this part (the novice) is a sort of Holy Fool character - he believes, and he copies the knowledge of the ancients, and even understands some tiny part of it, but it's all in a mystical way and he'd no more fake relics than fly in the air. Other monks are much more cynical, as you'd expect. And no-one really understands the knowledge they're keeping, they are keeping it because that is their sacred trust.

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