My
laughter when I first read the opening scene of A
Canticle for Leibowitz
was of the near-maniacal kind that might accompany an epiphany. I was
in the Army at the time, stationed in Germany during the Cold War.
Madness hummed always somewhere in the air. We drank. Our humor
tended toward the cruelly ironic. A particularly irreverent friend
had recommended Canticle
as a particularly funny book.
I
was already primed to appreciate the ghastly irony of the second
scene that made me laugh, the one where we learn of the sacred relic,
the scrap of paper containing a grocery list in the handwriting of
the now St. Leibowitz, found in ruins by survivors of a nuclear
holocaust. My outburst at this revelation was less raucous than the
first.
By
now Walter M. Miller Jr.'s drollery had completely captivated me. His
writing at the very start--the dot on the horizon that wriggles in
the shimmering heat waves as it grows, drawing relentlessly
nearer--was the snare that closed around my ankle and tugged me
through a narrative so complex and esoteric that without its
unceasing crafty brilliance I'd surely have broken free and fled in
utter befuddlement.
