I first took this book up in high school and put it down again before getting very far. It wasn’t that I thought it was boring, more that I was very, very tired of cold war/nuclear doomsday preaching (this was around the same time “The Day After” first aired on TV). But I had always kept it in the back of my mind as something to try again someday, and so naturally now that I’m fully immersed in Gene Wolfe’s Solar Cycle I thought of it now!

Since that time I’ve learned quite a lot of Latin, which deeply enriches the experience of reading what truly is a fantastic novel, populated as it is by latter-day (as in fourth millennium, A.D.) monks of a Catholic order pursuing their daily routines and handling crises in a post-apocalypitc Southwest.

While a lot of the book’s serious, visceral impact is reduced by exposure to so many works that took it as inspiration (I think particularly of the far-future monks in Babylon 5 who are actually Rangers), it’s still a chilling pleasure to read; the reader suffers right along with the characters in struggling to maintain hope for and faith in humanity (if not god). The treatment of the effort to canonize a far-future beatus - a technocrat who hid out in a monastary after a nuclear war left his land a hell of fallout victims, monsters and angry people hell-bent on destroying all the knowledge and tools that contributed to bringing about their plight, and later took up the faith as a means of preserving as much knowledge as he could for distant posterity - is believable, though the idea of a nation-state of Texarkana is a bit of a stretch.

All in all, great stuff!