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Bump for great justice. As they say.
So I just finished this after starting it something like... thirteen years ago. Maybe a couple more. I must have read the first half of it four or five times, and always ended up discarding it a way into the second section. That stuff about the impending battle for control of the continent, it's not painted very clearly - the reader gets thrown straight into the middle of this ongoing situation and has to fumble around to try and place the protagonists, because it's all happening off the page and you only get to hear about it third hand. Which annoyed me and which made me pack it in.
Slightly embarrassed bump, this one - my previous post to this thread is *exactly* the kind of thing I hate otehr people doing nowadays, for one. For another, searching for the thread kicked this up - one of the attempts to get through it must have coincided with another discussion with Riz, in which he (understandably) thought I'd read the fucker through to the end. So, sorry for that, chief - I'd have cleared it up sooner, but never noticed it before.
Anyways. Before I read Leibowitz, I read a collection of Miller's short stories, currently published under the title Dark Benediction. And what's interesting is how much the central idea of Leibowitz - the collapse of civilisation/s - is at the core of nearly all of his work in that collection. There's the tale of a great city, run by automatons - all old school tech, rollers in the place of legs and the like - which has become uninhabitable after a war with another, largely because the city's central processing unit believes that the war is still ongoing, so sends out bombers to perform raids on a regular basis, even though they've long since run out of bombs. It's largely a metaphor about the demon Red Tape, but there's a covering story about a guy trying to get back in, trying to regain control of what's been lost and rebuild with what's left.
There's another about a far-future civilisation worshiping the relics of a long-dead one, not understanding that the Giant that protects the hallowed grounds is just a big robot, the curses relatively simple logic puzzles, the keys for which have been ignored or misread or something else. So that's another idea that pops up in Leibowitz: knowledge decaying over time.
There's also a lot of pretty obvious sexism, unfortunately. Woman isn't as clever as man, has a tendency to think emotionally instead of rationally. A quick slap'll sort her out. She'll prolly want to have yr babies if you threaten to kill her.
They're interesting stories, but the writing's very generic. Very much the sort of SF that you can imagine getting knocked up for inclusion in a mag. There's not even a hint of the flights of fancy in the novel - whether or not Miller was having to hold himself back or write out the really thoughtful stuff, as PKD did, I don't know. I can't understand the drastic jump in quality that the novel represents otherwise, though.
So, yeah. Leibowitz. I really love it, now. I still think that the larger political picture in the second section is fluffed quite badly, but it doesn't make much difference to the book as a whole - you can let the details wash over you, just take away an understanding of the climate of the time.
What I like the most is how Miller often appears to use the various abbots as mouthpieces for his own stream-of-consciousness thoughts on moral and ethical responsibilities, the importance of religious belief and all that guff. It really personalises the novel, makes the anger and despair have a lot more depth and justification than if it was just "meh, people are shit". And there's a fair amount of vagueness as to what Miller's point is, as the discussion between KCC and P upthread shows. Not just about his view of humanity's fate, but also in the stuff about religion - he seems to be making a strong argument in favour of religious belief as the novel draw to a close, but the abbot's final moments with Rachel could be read one of two ways and the first of the three sections of hte book seems to be... well, taking the piss out of organised relgion, really.
And I'm a bit confused, too, by the sudden disappearance of a major, previously imporant observer when it comes to the third section - the Wandering Jew is mentioned in passing once, then just drops out completely. Am I missing something obvious there? I'm not sure if his role's taken over by Mrs Graves, or what.
But yeah. Loved it. Won't be touching Wild Horse Woman, even though it's sat on my shelves, after Riz and others gave it the thumbs down. |
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