A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of those books I’ve known of for years, known it was one of the classics of the genre, but never got round to reading, for one reason or another. But it caught my eye in a Canadian bookshop last year, and now I’ve got round to reading it.

I’m not sure I knew it was a post-holocaust work; nor did I know — though maybe the title should have been a clue — that it was so religious. So I started reading it mildly annoyed, I think, and became considerably more annoyed at the end of the first section (of three), when (and spoilers ahead) the main character, whose life in the monastery we’ve been following all this time, is killed.

Well damn. I didn’t expect that.

And then there’s a time jump of several centuries. OK, that’s one of the great things you can do with novels. We’re still with the monks of Saint Leibowitz, mainly, but technology is starting to pick up again. The fracture North America is forming into new kingdoms and tribes.

The third section begins, ‘There were spaceships again in that century…’ Which I really didn’t expect. Several centuries further on, technology’s back up, oh, and hey, we’ve got nukes again! The things that caused all the problems in the first place.

Of course, people know that now, so they won’t use them again, of course. Of course. But better get some monks an priests offplanet to the colonies, anyway. Gotta take the Word of God to the stars.

Which sorta kinda seems to be the message of this book? The Catholic church will endure and Christianity go on, even if The Beatles didn’t? Actually maybe they did, they just aren’t mentioned. It’s not like it was an anti-Lennon tract, it was published in 1959!

Anyway, yeah, it was fine, I didn’t love it. I’m just about to read an erudite piece about it, so I might get back with more.