Book Corner “A Canticle for Leibowitz” by Walter M. Miller Jr.

When humanity presses the big red reset button and a nuclear holocaust covers the earth, you will be stunned to find that nothing has changed. Walter M. Miller Jr.’s standout novel depicts the post-fallout world after the modern world as we know it is eradicated. Yet, centuries after the end of the world, humanity lingers on. Remnants of the ‘ancients’ survive in destroyed manuscripts and ruined bunkers, and it is the duty of the Order of Leibowitz to preserve and unveil the pieces of secret knowledge their ancestors have left behind in an age where knowledge is scorned in favor of survival. If this sounds familiar, you might be aware of the role of monks during the Dark Ages, where manuscripts and records were kept in monasteries for an age when they would be needed again. Despite living thousands of years and a collapse of civilization apart, the new humanity’s actions echo our own history.  

A Canticle for Leibowitz depicts a cyclical timeline of humanity. The three stages of the novel depict different eras in the post-fallout world, and yet each of them appears to reflect a different era in our own history. It’s as though humanity is on the very same rails that we were, despite living on an entirely different Earth—and if they’re following the same path their ancestors did, then who’s to say that the ending will be any different? 

Walter M. Miller Jr. created a beautiful, haunting novel depicting how human nature is utterly unchangeable and unrepentant. Humanity is unable to change itself, no matter the age. We like to claim that we learn from the mistakes of the past, yet A Canticle for Leibowitz challenges this and shows how, even when a culture knows full well the consequences of its actions, it will make the same mistakes over and over and over again. While the monks seek to discover and learn more about the ancients who once inhabited the world, there is a grim feeling dominating the back of the reader’s mind that they are doomed to watch the world go the same way as the last.