A Canticle for Leibovitz

Anyway, then someone else joined in about the copying, and reminded us, well me, of the great science fiction novel “A Canticle for Leibovitz” (by Walter M. Miller Jr). Anyone know this book? This is the second time I had come across a reference to this book in the past few months; it was mentioned in a letter to the Guardian sometime last year. It is so long since I read it, and I’ve never owned a copy or ever heard of anyone else referring to it, so that I began to wonder if I’d imagined the whole thing. It’s a clever little novel, written in 1960, which covers a 1000 years of the future and makes some witty points about religious organizations which are of course, not about the future but are comments on the past and present. It has a post nuclear holocaust “New Rome” religious community transcribing the works of “St. Leibovitz” (actually a twentieth century Jewish electrical engineer), without actually understanding all of them (including, as I recall, his laundry lists). It’s central theme is that humanity is unlikely to learn from its mistakes. Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes appeared around the same time (1963) and dealt with some similar concerns. I loved both novels. I read “Leibovitz” when I was 18 or 19. When I went for selection for ministry I remember someone asking me to talk to him about a book I had recently read. Even then, something told me that this was not the book I should talk about ….