John Michaud in the New Yorker on Walter Miller's "Canticle for Liebowitz": Wednesday Book Reviews/Live from Crows Coffee
...eighty miles south of Rome... founded in 529 by St. Benedict of Nursia.... Generations of scribes labored in the abbey’s library to copy texts and preserve artifacts.... From November, 1943, to May, 1944, the hill on which the abbey stood was at the center of one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the Second World War. Monte Cassino was a crucial part of the Gustav Line... ‘fortress strength.’... The Allied command, believing that the Germans were using the abbey as a garrison and ammunition dump, made the controversial decision to bomb Monte Cassino. On February 15, 1944, American B-17s, B-25s, and B-26s dropped more than four hundred tons of explosives on the monastery....
One of the American airmen who participated in the bombing of Monte Cassino was a young radio operator and tail gunner from Florida named Walter M. Miller, Jr... best known for the only novel he published in his lifetime, ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’... [which] has never been out of print, selling more than two million copies.... ‘Fiat Homo’ (‘Let there be Man’), is set at a monastery in the Utah desert some six hundred years after a nuclear holocaust known as the Flame Deluge.... The monks who reside in the monastery are devoted to honoring the memory of Isaac Edward Leibowitz, a Jewish scientist at Los Alamos who was martyred for his efforts to safeguard scientific knowledge in the aftermath of the conflict.... ‘Fiat Lux’ (‘Let there be Light’), takes place hundreds of years later.... Thon Taddeo, a latter-day Newton or Einstein, visits the monastery to investigate its holdings. He is astonished to find that one of the monks has created a working electric light.... Taddeo believes the Leibowitz Memorabilia will lead him to breakthroughs in his work, but the abbot refuses to let Taddeo take items from the library back to Texarkana.... ‘Fiat Voluntas Tua’ (‘Let Thy Will Be Done’), describes the beginning of another nuclear war... [in] the year 3781.... As the war begins, the abbot Dom Zerchi, instructs a group of monks to flee the earth for a colony near Alpha Centauri. They take the Leibowitz Memorabilia with them. After they depart, the abbey, which has stood for nearly two thousand years, is demolished by an atomic bomb. The abbot is crushed in the ruins. The final passages of the book are an eerie imagining of the Earth without mankind:
A wind came across the ocean, sweeping with it a pall of fine white ash. The ash fell into the sea and into the breakers. The breakers washed dead shrimp ashore with the driftwood. Then they washed up the whiting. The shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in the old clean currents. He was very hungry that season....
‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ sits squarely at the heart of the subgenre of novels about nuclear holocaust.... Beyond being a repository for his fears about the bomb, ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ was a means for Miller to work through the trauma and guilt that haunted him from his wartime experiences, especially the bombing of the abbey at Monte Cassino....
‘Walt was deeply depressed by post-traumatic stress disorder and had been for half a century,’ Joe Haldeman told the Washington Post. ‘I don’t know how many people he felt responsible for killing, but it was a lot.’ Miller took his own life in January of 1996...
