A Canticle for Leibowitz is Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s only novel. He was an Air Force engineer who was involved in the WWII bombing of an Italian monastery. Later, he converted to Catholicism, wrote this book, and eventually committed suicide.

Given the context of Miller's life, it's difficult to believe he could have written any other story. Canticle is a millennium-spanning, quietly epic novel that addresses mankind's constant cycle of self-destruction, barbarism, renaissance, and more self-destruction. It takes place in a Catholic monastery in what was once Utah, several centuries after the world was demolished by nuclear war. There, the monks worship one Saint Leibowitz, a somewhat mythical figure from "the time of the Flame Deluge" who attempted to salvage humanity's collected knowledge during the postwar book-burning backlash. The novel is divided into three sections separated by centuries and so different from each other that they're almost separate books in their own right.

The first, "Fiat Homo", takes place in the dark age that still exists several centuries after the war; the continent is populated with warring nomad tribes and feudal city-states, and the monks busy themselves copying and preserving their library for future generations, firmly believing that someday mankind will once again desire and benefit from the old knowledge.

In "Fiat Lux", that belief comes to fruition; the world is abuzz with a new renaissance of culture and science. A prominent scholar visits the abbey and is astonished at the wealth of scientific knowledge housed there. But outside the monastery, a war is waged between burgeoning empires, with the church caught in the middle.

Finally, in "Fiat Voluntas Tua", mankind has reached technological maturity, once again able to create rockets, robots, and nuclear bombs (the book was written in 1959, and these three artifacts seem to be the hallmarks of The Future in spec-fic of that era). America is once again an empire; so is Asia, and miscommunication and overreaction between the two don't bode well for the future of humanity.

Overall, the book is meditative, dark, and epic, but also at times very funny. There are major themes of faith vs. politics (and similarly, church vs. state), humanity's persistent short-sightedness, and the meaning of suffering. In these elements, the story is saturated with Miller's Catholic viewpoint. But there are also some very bleak, unCatholic threads to the story. Essentially, it's about a group of monks who work for a millennium to salvage, restore, protect, and share the collected knowledge of mankind, only to have the world use that knowledge to yet again destroy itself. The monastery itself acts as Eden's tree of knowledge. Not to mention the irony of this particular group of monks worshipping a Jewish man who likely converted only because he saw the monastery's potential as a bastion of learning in the midst of a world bent on ignorance.

This book isn't for everyone; it's slow-moving, somewhat dated, heavily religious, and contains a great deal of untranslated Latin. But it is deservedly one of the classics of Cold War-era apocalyptic fiction: dark, pessimistic, thought-provoking, and sadly believable.

February 3, 2008

Of the two science fiction epics featuring human actors in monkey suits that came out in 1968, I much prefer Planet of the Apes to 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I would even argue that, despite its camp and the other's fairly universal acclaim, PotA is the better movie.  In addition to the social commentary that's still powerful and relevant, the awesomely discordant soundtrack, and the sheer entertainment value of Charlton Heston's scenery-chewing, at heart it's a very moving -- very human -- story.  It even has, I would argue, a feminist icon in Dr. Zira, the totally badass chimp scientist.

2001, despite being nominally about the ascent of man, is a cold and almost totally inhuman story.  The most relatable character in it is the computer HAL, and he's a homicidal psychopath.  And the only woman with a speaking part is the stewardess.  An intergalactic monolith with mind-control powers is one thing, but the idea that women might hold positions of prominence in the future was apparently too ridiculous to contemplate.

Before picking up the book this week, I hadn't seen the movie since I was a child, and I wondered if my impression of it as boring, pretentious, unbearably long, and almost completely nonsensical, was the result of having been too young to understand it.  After all, people call it THE BEST MOVIE EVER MADE.  I figured I'd rewatch it after finishing the book, and hoped that the book might clarify some of its weirder scenes.

After all, the book is always better, right?

Well, in this case, I think it's kind of a wash.  I hadn't realized that the film isn't based on the book; they were more or less developed in tandem.  The book is a bit more straightforward and comprehensible than the movie and differs a bit in some details, but it's not enough to really distinguish it as "better than" the movie.  Where the movie really excels (the inspired use of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" and "The Blue Danube"; the iconic shots of sun, moon, and earth aligning with the monoliths; HAL's creepy monotone) the book has no counterpart.

It's kind of strange that I enjoyed the book as much as I did, given how void it is of plot and characters.  Like the film, much of it is taken up with painstaking descriptions of the technology.  Everything from the minutiae of spaceflight to the functioning of the hibernation chambers to the mathematical dimensions of the monoliths to the size of Floyd's iPad-like Newspad (foolscap-sized, if you're wondering) is diligently explicated.  This kind of "hard" science fiction would usually leave me snoozing, especially with how dated it is, but I was immersed.  It was amazingly prescient for its time.

Like the movie, the book is divided into several sections, and the most famous is by far the best.  The astronauts' confrontation with the psychotic HAL computer is really the only exciting, plot-driven section of the book, and it's over far too quickly.  And after all that buildup, from the dawn of man to the distant future, what's left at the end of the book (and movie) is just a bunch of psychedelic, pseudophilosophical garbage, culminating in the monolith-building aliens transforming Dave into a gigantic Space Fetus.  At which point, he apparently (spoiler alert!) nukes the planet Earth.

What.

I don't get it, and I'm not really convinced there's anything to get.  The godlike monolith-builders have some kind of bizarre interest in elevating primordial apes into men, and then they wait around for 3 million years to implement the next step in human evolution, which is... planet-obliterating jumbo-infants?  Well, okay.  This is clearly a masterpiece of science-fictional philosophy.

But then, it's not the 60's, and I'm fresh out of magic mushrooms, so what do I know?

(Actually, it's somewhat ambiguous as to whether Space Fetus nukes the earth or simply destroys all the nuclear weapons.  But that interpretation is even stupider - humans have to evolve into giant telekinetic brain-babies before we can grasp the profound concept of "war is bad"?  That's, um, asinine.)

I read the book as part of my cult novel project, and it's no mystery why this one inspired a cult following.  A lot of those 60's philosophical SF novels really blew some hippie minds back in the day.  There's this one, Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, A Canticle for Leibowitz, A Clockwork Orange, Slaughterhouse-Five...  Of all of them that I've read, 2001 is probably my least favorite.  It's not bad, it just doesn't have much of anything to say to me.

I think I'm gonna go watch Planet of the Apes again....

(2014 #14)

PS: I still want a monolith action figure...

I think that Lady Chatterley's Lover is a book a lot of people have heard about, but perhaps not so many have read - at least, not since its heyday in the 60's as a bohemian cult novel, free-love manifesto, and object lesson in the sordid appeal of banned books.

And to this day, it has a certain reputation.  At least it did for me, something along the lines of, "Oh, that one that got banned for saying 'cunt' so many times".  I had this vague notion it was about a steamy affair between a fancy countess or whatever, and some virile, uncouth manly man.  All smut and no plot and plenty of descriptive four-letter words.  You know -- literature!

But while it definitely is all of that, it's also really not.  Instead of wallowing in the allure of tawdry, meaningless fucking, the book is a passionate argument for the power of genuine, meaningful fucking.  Not even fucking - lovemaking.  Connecting.  The book is really kind of disgustingly sentimental.  Sort of.

It follows Connie Reid, an artist's daughter who marries into the gentry as personified by Clifford Chatterley, who's insipid and impotent even before a WWI injury leaves him completely paralyzed below the waist.  Clifford loves Connie for her mind, but without any physical component, for her the relationship is stifling and sterile.  Enter Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on the estate, with his crude accent and his big broad shoulders and his proudly-brandished "cod atween my legs".  Bow chicka wow wow, etc.

For all that, the book has definitely lost its power to shock.  Especially in these days of the internet, where the most graphic hard-core pornography is only a seemingly-innocuous google search away, this book is relatively tame.  And all the 1930's hullabaloo over "unprintable" words is pretty quaint, too, in this age where my sister and I regularly, endearingly tell each other "don't be such a cunt".  The sex scenes in Chatterley are profane, sure, but they're also pretty vague and bland (the famous sodomy scene, for instance, is so floridly euphemistic you hardly know what the fuck is going on.  "Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places."  Huh.)

And here's the thing: Connie & Mellors's relationship, though explicitly described, is in fact being held up as this sacred ideal.  Their vigorous, bodily carnality is the only true, meaningful connection in this whole damn book.  All these prosperous, intellectual, impotent milquetoasts connecting solely on a cerebral level fall flat and stale.  Empty!  Confining!  Repulsive!  And all this meaninglessness of art and literature, fancy houses and jazz music, money, money, money, and every other offering to the "bitch-goddess Success" -- all in the service of pushing away the horrors of the recent war, the industrialized destruction of nature, the cavernous class divide.  "Ours is essentially a tragic age," the novel begins, "so we refuse to take it tragically."

And, as the introduction to my edition points out, it's not even really about a cross-class love affair.  Connie's not really a Lady, and Mellors is an educated army officer - hardly the illiterate boor he seems to be.  They're both just playing the roles they were forced into, and when they are together (physically and every other way), all of that falls away.  It's a book about naked humanity - in every sense of that phrase - and it's a book about what matters, or what should matter anyway, in Lawrence's view.  Sex is a part of it.  But it's really authenticity, seeing the world as it really is and our fellow men as they truly are.

I read this as part of my "50 Cult Novels" project, and one thing many cult books have in common (besides being iconoclastic and often censored) is their very specific idealism.  This is the way to fix society.  This one thing.  Which is, I think, why book cults tend to be made up of teenagers and young adults - people for whom simple, categorical, and ostensibly radical ideas have massive, mind-blowing appeal.

So it's no surprise that Lady Chatterley's Lover was so popular in the 60's, despite being a somewhat boring, overwritten book.  Any book that had been banned for 30 years, which made the tendentious claim that sex is the answer to all our problems, was basically destined for cult appeal.  Nowadays, that appeal has somewhat lessened - though maybe had I read it in my early 20's I'd feel differently (cult novels are often not just of their time, but of the time in your life when you first read them).  Still, I was surprised at how much I kind of liked the book.  The characters are complex, the social commentary still relevant, the sex scenes quaintly steamy.  It's worth a read.

(2014 #5)