|
|
Of the three discrete sections of this
book, the first was enjoyable, the second was even better, but the third
felt like it took too long getting where it wanted to go.
The main character in the first part is
Brother Francis. He ends up being the longest-serving novitiate in
Leibowitz abbey, all because he finds the tomb of Leibowitz' wife. That
was in a fallout shelter under a pile of rubble left from the nuclear
war that ended human society centuries ago. The world does not want
knowledge, because they saw what knowledge could bring them
-destruction. But the monks of Leibowitz abbey store knowledge, by
memorizing and smuggling books, and preserving various memorabilia for
the future. Francis is there to weave the history of humanity since that
fateful day, and to show how the world has devolved into The
Simplification. He meets a strange pilgrim, whom some people claim is
the head of their order, the man who was a weapons designer and who
decided that knowledge should be preserved. The pilgrim would have to be
centuries old! And because Francis continues to believe the pilgrim
existed and was not a figment of his imagination, he is passed over
becoming a monk for years. But because of the shelter Francis found, Leibowitz is
canonized and becomes a Saint. The context is a very old-school and
rigid Catholicism, which would have been current around the time this
book was written. Traveling to Rome for the ceremony, Francis is waylaid
by fallout victims, thieves who are hideously mutated and who are
typically very violent. They steal his gold-flecked reproduction of the
only Leibowitz blueprint they have, mistaking it for an original. On the
way back, Francis is shot through the head with an arrow.
The second part of the book brings
about the unification of the North American continent under one Empire,
from its various post-apocalyptic nations. This time, about a thousand
years after the nuclear war, a scholar visits the abbey to search for
knowledge. He actually doesn't believe that an advanced civilization
existed before their own, because nothing remains. When he finds out
about the tiny abbey, a lone island of knowledge in a sea of
self-imposed ignorance, he is very skeptical, and then amazed, as he
discovers how much truth there is to be found there. They even invented
a light bulb, though very primitive! Thon Taddeo represents progress at
any cost, even to the point that he accepts war as a means to generate
better technology. The pilgrim also lives in this time, as a strange
Jewish man awaiting his savior. He thinks Taddeo might be the one, but
then decides not. Here, he plays on everybody's expectations, calling
himself the heir of Leibowitz, and varying his age by millennia. This
was my favorite section, as it showed how the world was changing,
finally beginning to accept knowledge as an integral part, and how the
preservers of knowledge became both generous with what they kept, and
jealous at having to give up that knowledge, that the meaning of their
existence was coming to an end.
In the end, of course, the abbey
continued to exist, even into the far future. A society greater than
ours grew up in its wake, to the point where people had colonized other
planets, and nations had reacquired nuclear bombs. So although the
society is advanced, the threat of nuclear annihilation is on humanity
for the second time. I got a kick out of how "advanced" these people
were, with roboticized transports, but no internet nor anything more
advanced than a telegraph. Of course, even Star Trek's "cell phone"
communicators were still years away when the book was written. The only
main character in this section is the Abbot of the abbey. This section
is heavily Catholicized, which is interesting, but gets tedious. It is
also depressing, because after the initial attack people flood to the
abbey to be euthanized. This is personified by a young woman and her
child, both having received lethal doses of radiation, so the Abbot
tries to talk them out of euthanization. The book leads us
along the path of hope that humanity had learned from its past mistake
and won't let the world be destroyed again. But it is not to be. The
world is annihilated once again. This time, however, a group of monks
have preserved the memorabilia (on microfiche!) on a rocket ship and
launched themselves to one of the colony worlds, in the hopes of
creating a non-secular technological society that would put God first,
and technology second. Maybe that's the only way to ensure that morality
rules (though God has been invoked for so many injustices that we can
only hope).
I liked the way this book was written.
It uses a rich array of words to create wonderful sentences. In the
first section especially, there is a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor from
the narrator's point of view, and Francis' own thoughts. I quite enjoyed
that part of it. The book began to get more hopeful in the second part,
but became depressing close to the end. The mindset of the time, I
suppose, was that humanity would not ever learn from its mistakes, and
would destroy the world over and over as often as possible. It's a good
thing that cooler heads prevailed in the real world. |
|