The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector is set in Rio de Janeiro, roughly around the fifties or sixties. Structurally, it presents an outer story (of a writer struggling with a character) and a story-within (of a fictional woman) that constantly blend into each other, with the writer interrupting his own narrative to inject self-reflections linked to the emotional register revealed by the woman’s tale. It is in this blend that the theme of ‘empathy’ shines the most.

The ‘outermost’ tale is about Rodrigo S.M.

…a fictional writer who, not long before he sat down to write, crossed gazes with a woman across the street. She was from the Brazilian northeast (a historically poor region); in his words:

Because on a street in Rio de Janeiro I glimpsed in the air the feeling of perdition on the face of a northeastern girl. Not to mention that as a boy I grew up in the northeast. I also know about things because I’m alive.

This is the seed of his empathy—seeing in her face the reflection of an emotion he used to suffer due to sharing some roots with her. What follows is his writerly struggle: he wants to craft a story inspired by that girl, but he knows nothing of the real one. Rodrigo writes:

If there is any truth to it—and of course, the story is true though invented—may everyone recognise it inside himself because all of us are one and he who is not poor in money is poor in spirit or longing because he lacks something more precious than gold—there are those who lack the delicate essential.

That ‘delicate essential’ is, as I see it, a quest for meaning and purpose constantly questioned throughout the book—with Rodrigo unknowingly establishing empathy and understanding as his purpose (or even self-discovery), and the girl of the story... being something else.

So begins (or rather, ‘interrupts’ his strife) the story-within-the-story:

The tale of Macabéa, a poor orphan girl from the northeast who, after her parents died of a disease, came to live with her aunt. The aunt taught her to type to save her from prostitution, but passed shortly after Macabéa secured a poorly paying job as a typist.

For her [...] reality too was very little. She could deal better with her unreality, living in sloooow motion [...] vagueness was her earthly world, vagueness was the inside of nature.

What matters most about Macabéa is not her outward poverty, which is clear from the beginning—with her malnourishment, her illiteracy, her lack of basic hygiene, her lack of ‘common sense’. What matters is what poverty didn’t allow her to learn: how to question her situation, how to dare hope for something different and decide how to work towards it. This inward poverty reflects in a thought she often returns to: “This is how things were.” Unchallengeable. Unchangeable. She experiences life as absolute ‘facts’(*) that cannot be understood because she has no means to do so nor to secure the help she needs.

This leads me to another theme—something that Macabéa knows very well: she’s invisible to society. At the very opening, Rodrigo writes:

[...] she sometimes smiles at other people on the street. Nobody smiles back because they don’t even look at her.

The topic of her social invisibility is brought up often enough because poverty—both outward and its inward consequence—is a by-product of society... and one that, unfortunately, we seldom attempt to fix in any meaningful way. The fact she’s invisible even to her so-called boyfriend reflects on how the basis for empathy is recognising the other as an equal—something the man, Olímpico, cannot do even though he shares his northeastern roots with her.

Yet while narrating Macabéa’s story, Rodrigo flows back to himself. As readers, we cannot detach his struggle to write from her lack of struggle to simply be.

Thus, as it emerges, the story-within produces a change on Rodrigo’s perception.

He spends the first dozen pages voicing his difficulties surrounding this endeavour as if avoiding that which is painful: understanding her in order to write her story. Yet the more he does so, the more he comes to ‘love’ Macabéa. This ‘love’ is certainly neither sexual nor platonic, but perhaps a reference to empathy: how we can truly, unbiasedly, appreciate someone after we have seen the world through their eyes. Thematically, it implies her poverty no longer distresses him because he understands it. It also offers a counterpoint to Olímpico’s lack of empathy and love for Macabéa.

The ending in itself is, without spoilers, abrupt—yet it ties back to the idea of hope as the enabler of a quest for meaning and purpose, and how, sometimes, the world doesn’t really allow us to craft meaning1.

To close, a word on Lispector’s prose

It is technically brilliant. She moves between Rodrigo’s real world and Macabéa’s fictional one with effortless grace—often within a single sentence—submerging and resurfacing the reader between levels of storytelling without warning. This constant blurring is not a mere stylistic flourish; it makes the reader acutely conscious of Macabéa’s story being constructed in real time by a narrator who does not fully understand his own subject. Furthermore, Rodrigo does not follow a temporal thread, instead moving freely between her past and present—guided by his need to discover more about her.

The result is a style that does not describe Macabéa so much as conjure her... though it demands patience and a willingness to be disoriented. Readers seeking a tidy narrative arc will find little comfort here, but those seeking an experience may have come to the right place.

(*) On the use of the word ‘facts’.

The word ‘facts’ in this story may have several meanings. In the very first page, Rodrigo writes:

Thinking is an act. Feeling is a fact.

Philosophically speaking, this is incredibly rich. Feelings are automatic reactions; they come to us due to what happens, and we have no control over them... but we do control, to some extent, what we think. How we reason, what we reason, and the conclusions we reach. Those, in turn, can affect how we feel in retrospect about what happens to us.

However, if you remove emotional literacy—the ability for someone to distinguish that, for example, contempt and frustration are two different ‘flavours’ of anger—the very act of feeling becomes estranged from thinking: one can no longer study their own emotions, one can only be those emotions.

I believe Lispector was circling this topic when using the word ‘fact’ as a replacement for ‘unknown or unlabelled emotions.’ What I find more interesting, is that Rodrigo—the fictional writer—eventually tires of ‘facts’... because, let’s be honest, true empathy is far more than ‘relating’, but an demanding an active task that requires suspending one’s beliefs to see and experiment the world as another person does.

In this review, I will cover the elements of the story through the three ‘interwoven’ genres I mentioned.

First, this is a fictional story set during the Second World War, in the small town of Molching, on the outskirts of Munich. The bulk of the story takes place between 1939 and 1943, and follows Liesel Meminger: from the first time Death meets her when she is nine years old (Death is there to take her younger brother), to the moment Death collects the ‘journal’ she wrote during the war. Liesel is German, and it is implied her parents were German Communists—meaning that her biological mother was forced (though there are few details about her) to give Liesel to an adoptive family before disappearing.

Her adoptive family lives on a relatively poor street, not far from Dachau—one of the concentration camps. The book also follows some of the neighbours; for example a Nazi shopkeeper, a widow of unknown political affiliation who has lost both sons to the war, frightened people, radicalised people, and small children with little understanding of what is happening. From this group, Liesel’s adoptive father is the most important character.

Hans Hubermann is German. He survived the First World War because a Jewish friend—who also taught him to play the accordion—saved his life. As the plot develops, this

connection escalates unfavourably: while working as a painter, Hans ‘commits the crime’ of repainting slurs on a Jewish man’s door. This costs him his membership of the NSDAP, which in turn hurts his work, as he receives fewer and fewer commissions. Things take a further turn when Liesel is eleven years old and Hans arranges something else entirely: to hide Max Vandenburg—the son of his deceased Jewish friend—in their basement.

Something to note is that familiarity with WWII history enriches the reading because—more often than not—Death (the narrator) is quite vague when referencing events during the war. For example, he mentions ‘the beach in the north of France’ before recounting how many souls he collected, or shares a scene in which a returned soldier ironically asks a child, ‘Do you think this is cold?’—only for it to be revealed later that the man survived Stalingrad. Sometimes, Death describes the skies after bombing raids with an abstract focus on colour, as though the grim reaper himself does not wish to dwell on the suffering and death on the ground.

Some comments are clearer than others, but the effect is always the same: once realisation dawns, reality hits differently.

But let me move on to the speculative element: Death as the narrator.

One would think Death would make the story quite grim, but that’s not the case. Death takes no sides, and is kept relentlessly busy by what humans do to one another. Here is where one of the key themes of the book come into play: in the end, everyone meets Death, regardless of the flag they wave.

Overall, he is a fascinating narrator: mesmerising and thoroughly opinionated, to the point that he often ‘interrupts’ Liesel’s story to offer a comment or two. For example:

I do not carry a sickle or scythe. I only wear a hooded black robe when it’s cold. And I don’t have those skull-like facial features you seem to enjoy pinning on me from a distance. You want to know what I truly look like? I’ll tell you: find yourself a mirror while I continue.

Death is never graphic in his commentary. On the contrary, and as per the example above, he is constantly reminding the reader of what humans do to other humans: the terrible and unthinkable, but also the acts of kindness.

The final element to consider is the book’s literary construction. Death narrates in an unconventional style:

• He uses the first person, but also the collective ‘you’ to address not the individual reader, but humanity as a whole. This can be seen in the quote above.

• At times, Death uses bullet points to quickly outline people, stolen objects, beliefs, and more. This is an interesting literary device that reinforces Death’s inhuman presence (that is, Death is not human and does not adhere to conventional human narrative structures), though it may not appeal to every reader.

• Likewise, Death frequently ‘interrupts’ the flow of the story with clearly presented ‘intermissions.’ These are always centred on the page, given an all-caps title, and contain Death’s translations, opinions, or recollections. In some cases, these intermissions follow his account of how a character—now only marginally relevant to the story—died.

• Finally, there are also ergodic elements. For example, when Death recalls the three colours present when he first met Liesel (red, white, black), and introduces them through a list with small drawings (a flag, a circle, a symbol). When Max Vandenburg writes an illustrated story for Liesel, the thirteen drawn pages are included as the story itself, rather than being supplementary material, as it’d be done in an illustrated book.

• Something that struck me is how this book consistently presents events in a quiet way that requires the reader to dwell on detail. Death, being neither human nor aligned with any particular flag, presents facts alongside subtle commentary—and it is within these moments that a spectrum of meaning emerges.

For example, when Liesel realises that her biological mother was a Communist and may have been taken by the NSDAP—even though she was German—she exclaims, “I hate the Führer” during a book burning held to celebrate his birthday. Hans, her father, slaps her across the face in public, forces her to stand, and makes her perform the salute alongside him.

Has Hans changed his beliefs? Death offers no explicit commentary beyond this:

It was quite a sight—an eleven-year-old girl, trying not to cry on the church steps, saluting the Führer as the voices over Papa’s shoulder chopped and beat at the dark shape in the background.

This moment exemplifies the book’s subtlety. By this point, readers already know that Hans is opposed to the NSDAP, yet is still waiting for his long-delayed party application to be approved because it offers a measure of safety. The reader also knows that Hans has helped Jewish people before, and Death has already hinted—this time less subtly—that Hans will hide a Jewish man in his basement within the year.

From here, it is left to the reader to infer Hans’s motivations: protecting Liesel, who at eleven years old has no understanding of the broader political context or the danger of making such statements in public, surrounded as they were by loyal party members.

Thematically, the book explores meaning, the power of words, and the duality of humankind: the extremes we reach to protect others, and the extremes we reach when radicalised by belief. It is baffling—and it baffles Death, who reflects on this more than once throughout the novel.

All in all, this is an excellent book.

About the Rating

I ultimately withheld a five-star rating for two details related to Death’s narration, both of which are a matter of personal taste. At the beginning of the novel, Death has a truly distinctive voice; however, in my view, this voice dilutes toward the middle section, before returning in the final third. Likewise, while Death’s commentary on the broader historical context is often subtle, he occasionally labels Liesel’s internal states too clearly and neatly by comparison.

This review was originally posted on Goodreads on December 29th, 2025. Yes, I was reading this over the holiday break, followed by Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl. Do not judge me.

The story centres on the Radch:

—a human-led empire spanning several regions of the galaxy. It is ruled by an Emperor (the Lord of the Radch, Anaader Mianaai), and built on a multi-deity pantheon of gods—similar as the Roman Empire. This society is highly classist and reminiscent of patrician structures in ancient Rome, with high-born houses extending patronage to those of lesser status, thereby expanding their networks of influence.

The military forms a fundamental pillar of Radchaai society. This is an expansionist empire, intent on conquering—or, in its own terms, “annexing”—other human, non-Radchaai planets. As such, most citizens serve in some capacity. Entry into service requires passing the ‘aptitudes’, a particular form of assessment. The novel hints at an ongoing debate as to whether these aptitudes are biased—either in favour of the “well-bred” or of “provincial upstarts”, depending on which character is voicing the opinion. Regardless, as with many other commentaries, this is mentioned in passing and never truly addressed.

The central element is the Radchaai fleet itself. Each vessel is equipped with a sentient AI, capable not only of emotion but of inhabiting multiple human bodies known as ‘ancillaries’. The procurement of these bodies is unethical (they’re captives taken during the annexations) and certainly not consensual—another concern noted in a handful of comments but never developed in depth.

That said, these ancillaries—these bodies—function as extensions of the AI’s single consciousness, creating a distributed, multi-bodied identity.

This leads to several interesting elements.

In particular, the book is narrated in first-person past-tense, following the last surviving ancillary of the Justice of Toren—a troop carrier destroyed twenty years before the book’s events. The story is split between the events leading to the destruction (past timeline, with the Ship as the narrator) and the present timeline (with ancillary Breq/One Esk as narrator).

What I need to praise is the execution of the almost omniscient presence of the Ship in the past timeline. In a handful of scenes, the conversations or events reflect the multi-spacial awareness, hopping from place to place in each paragraph—for example, Justice may be talking to its captain with one ancillary, while another is serving tea to a Lieutenant, another escorting someone else, a last one running to deliver a message. The execution is neat, novel, and never abused.

However, one of my main grievances is around the execution of the central theme:

The idea of fragmented or multi-body identities.

Early on, the book presents a curiosity: one of Justice’s units, One Esk, has developed a penchant for singing, which the other units do not share—hinting that there is some degree of individuality or fragmenting identity. Likewise, these units (such as One Esk) can have ‘preferences’ towards specific humans that are not shared by the Ship as a whole.

More interestingly even, the Lord of the Radch—allegedly a human, not an AI—has ‘cloned’ herself to exist in multiple bodies thus ensuring her continuance throughout millennia. However, after ordering the genocide of a specific society (the Garsedd), her identity split due to the weight of the decision. This division led the Lord to fight a secret “war” against herself.

Unfortunately, there is very little commentary about either: (a) the philosophical and psychological implications of Anaader’s identity split, and (b) what does it mean for Justice of Toren> that only a segment of it (the ancilliary Breq) survived.

Granted, there are some quotable and philosophical sentences:

...or is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by a convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?

But from the moment of the theme’s breakthrough onwards—when both ‘identity splits’ are revealed—the narrative just... forgets about the implications entirely, as if the author had shied away from the thematic complexity she wove into the plot.

For example, ancillary Breq comments on ‘grieving’ part of her self... but we are never shown the pain, just informed of it by one or two lines of thought, always centred on the awkwardness of having a single body. Likewise, Breq never wonders whether she lost something else, or if she’s truly herself (Justice of Toren) or a new self that resulted from the split.

Were the narrator omniscient, this might be forgivable. Instead, because the story is limited to Breq’s first-person perspective, the lack of exploration of her identity (along with other elements such as the emotional dissonance between Breq’s actions and interiority) reads less like subtlety and more like an unresolved pretense: the theme is suggested, but never probed in depth.

Another of my grievances…

…is the existence of extremely convenient elements that favour Breq or result in events that align with her goals. I’ll give you two examples.

As I mentioned above, there are two timelines: the past (detailing the events leading to the destruction of Justice of Toren), and the present, following Breq on her revenge quest.

The present timeline begins with Breq discovering a drugged, near-dead individual sprawled at the entrance of a tavern in a far away world. Breq recognises this person as a former Radch Captain Seivarden and—for reasons unknown to herself—decides to help Seivarden.

Eventually, it is Seivarden’s presence that allows Breq to stand face-to-face with the subject of her revenge—extremely convenient, given that Breq still had the intelligence of an AI, and had spent two decades plotting this revenge.

Through the book, it is clear that Anaader Mianaai, the Lord of the Radch, was capable of implanting ‘secret’ instructions on the AI’s minds. Thus, there is a chance that Mianaai had implanted something... but the book does not raise suspicions, and leaves this open entirely. Likewise, Seivarden seems strangely attached to Breq for no reason—and Breq merely comments on it once and lets it be.

Given that this is a trilogy, this could be a setup for something else—especially given the above breadcrumbs. Unfortunately, the opening is too fortuitous, and the text does not offer enough foreshadowing as to indicate that there was a purpose beyond something convenient to the plot.

Likewise, towards the end of the book, Breq makes some questionable choices and, for some reason or another, the consequences of her actions are cleaned up in her favour. For example, on a depressurising shuttle, a sail-pod happens to be nearby to rescue her just on time.

While Radch society’s belief in omens and fate provides a thin thematic justification, the reliance on these conveniences stretches plausibility and highlights the tension between the novel’s ambitious themes and its narrative mechanics.

That said, certain aspects of the setting are particularly well realised.

For instance, whenever the Radchaai annex a new society, they argue that local deities are merely incarnations of Radchaai gods—echoing the strategies of the Roman Empire. Similarly, the novel conveys a distinctive and consistent sense of fashion and etiquette, using jewellery to indicate affiliations and patronages. Non-verbal communication seems standardised and it often accompanies speech through gestures, adding depth to social interactions.

Perhaps the most distinctive and frequently discussed element is the treatment of gender. Radchaai society does not recognise gendered traits (such as mannerisms, fashion, accents, or interests), and therefore employs a neutral pronoun for all individuals. In the English ‘translation’ from Radchaai, this generic pronoun is rendered as she/her. The choice has provoked debate among readers, but it also functions as meta-commentary: why should the male pronoun be considered default?

This approach also produces secondary effects that enrich the world-building. Radchaai citizens often struggle with pronouns in other languages or regions, since annexed provinces may signal gender differently. Traits considered ‘female’ in one society may register as ‘male’ or ‘neutral’ in another, highlighting the subtle interplay between language, perception, and social interaction.

This linguistic sensitivity is reminiscent, to some degree, of Samuel Delany’s Babel-17. It is also a reasonable assumption that distinct societies develop different traits and languages—an element of speculative fiction that is too often overlooked in favour of simplified, monolithic cultures.

All in all…

While the first half of the book promises thematic richness and delves head-on into it, the second half does not deliver. Instead, it shifts towards a more conventional narrative structure, leaving many of these ideas insufficiently explored. This creates a sense of imbalance, as though the novel gestures towards complexity but ultimately retreats from it.

It is often presented as a book about religion and—to put it in modern terms—perhaps incensepunk. I, however, wouldn’t go that far. Miller leveraged satirical elements at many points (though I’d be hesitant to call this only a satire) to critique the Catholic Church, as well as our tendency to succumb to dogma without any attempt to question the truth beneath it. If anything, it is more social science fiction than anything else—and not precisely kind in its portrayal.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The novel is divided into three sections, each titled in Latin: Fiat Homo (namely, “let it be human” / “let there be men”), Fiat Lux (”let there be light”), and Fiat Voluntas Tua (”let it be your will”). The first section takes place approximately 600 years after a nuclear holocaust, likely to have occurred somewhere around the 1970-80s. The following two sections are set 600 years apart from each other.

The first section, Fiat Homo, begins in the post-apocalyptic dark ages.

Much of what occurred during that cataclysm has been lost to history, surviving only through myths and legends. The reason for this is that, after the nations destroyed one another, the surviving population adopted a strikingly anti-intellectual stance. Rather than confronting their own indirect responsibility—whether through electing the politicians who led them to ruin, or remaining politically disengaged—they concluded that knowledge itself (physics, chemistry, computer science, etc.) had been the root cause of humanity’s suffering.

Thus began the Age of Simplification.

During this period, politicians, researchers, educators, and eventually anyone who could read or write—including school teachers—were systematically hunted down and killed. In an effort to survive, many sought refuge within the Church and its monasteries, taking holy orders to escape persecution.

This was the case for Leibowitz, a scientist. The novel reveals little about him directly, though it is strongly implied that he was a Jewish engineer who played a role in developing the bomb responsible for the cataclysm, drawing an intentional parallel with Oppenheimer. Following the death of his wife, he sought sanctuary within the Church. Eventually, he returned to the desert—somewhere near present-day Denver—alongside several companions to recover and conceal books. “Until humanity is ready again,” was their motto.

By the time of the Fiat Homo section, the Albertian Order founded by Leibowitz possesses its own abbey and preserves a collection known as the Memorabilia: texts and records of the “ancients” recovered and hidden by Leibowitz and his followers. Leibowitz himself has since been declared a Beatus.

But here comes the tragedy of the setting: the monks protect the documents and work to preserve them... but they don’t truly understand what the documents mean. As an abbot thinks:

How much of it had been reduced to gibberish, embellished with olive leaves and cherubims, by forty generations of us monastic ignoramuses, children of dark centuries, many entrusted with a message to be memorised and delivered.

This forms one of the novel’s central ideas: that scientific knowledge—whether in the sciences, the humanities, or any other discipline—depends upon both contextual understanding and collective memory. Ultimately, knowledge cannot exist in isolation; it is shaped by the society in which it develops and by what each generation preserves and passes on to the next.

The monks living after the Age of Simplification possess the surviving books, yet they are incapable of making practical use of them because two essential pieces of the puzzle are missing: the social context in which that knowledge once existed, and the accumulated cultural memory needed to interpret it.

As the abbot explains:

Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible-that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense [...] or Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded [...]

Therefore, what little remains known about the world before the Flame Deluge—the nuclear catastrophe itself—has become inseparable from myth and mysticism. Many scenes throughout the novel illustrate this cultural regression. The “Fallout”, for instance, is commonly understood as a “demon”, imagined as a salamander-like creature... while wandering hunter-gatherers roam the wastelands breaking apart ancient “rocks” (concrete) to retrieve the metal rods hidden within them—fragments of long-decayed structures whose original purpose they cannot possibly comprehend.

Likewise, in a society where literacy is rare outside the monasteries—and where being a “simpleton” is regarded almost as a virtueven human suffering is interpreted through superstition. The descendants of those exposed to radiation are viewed as “children of the fallout-demon”, not out of cruelty alone, but out of profound ignorance. The novel makes it abundantly clear that this civilisation lacks even the most elementary scientific concepts, including chemistry, electricity, and thus radiation itself. They witness the consequences of these forces without possessing the intellectual framework required to understand them.

It is here that one of the novel’s most compelling dualities emerges: although the characters interpret the world through myth, the reader is often able to infer the underlying truth through context and common sense. I will give one example below, within spoiler tags.

During Homo Lux, the monks read this ‘historical record’:

[…] that the princes of Earth had hardened their hearts against the Law of the Lord, and of their pride there was no end.

And each of them thought within himself that it was better for all to be destroyed than for the will of other princes to prevail over his. For the mighty of the Earth did contend among themselves for supreme power over all; by stealth, treachery, and deceit they did seek to rule, and of war they feared greatly and did tremble; for the Lord God had suffered the wise men of those times to learn the means by which the world itself might be destroyed, and into their hands was given the sword of the Archangel wherewith Lucifer had been cast down, that men and princes might fear God and humble themselves before the Most High. But they were not humbled.

With some common sense, modern readers can deduct that the “princes” are likely presidents or prime ministers, and their “pride” possibly extreme nationalism or economic aspirations. In that manner, the “sword of the Archangel” could refer to a weapon of mass destruction. This part: “of war they feared greatly and did tremble” could indicate the understanding of the threat of MAD (mutually assured destruction), something often discussed during the post-war era and the Cold War.

Curiously, the monks know that much of these ‘historical’ accounts are not accurate, but they cannot distill the truth out of them. Eventually, this enables a discussion on whether humanity can learn from a past that has been mangled by distorted accounts retold and ‘adjusted’ through the centuries.

Leave a comment

Reconstructing lost knowledge becomes the central theme of the second section: Fiat Lux (”let there be light”).

On one level, an inventive monk succeeds in recreating an electrical generator—a dynamo—to power a lightbulb: the novel’s most literal expression of light. He achieves this not through genuine scientific advancement, but by painstakingly inferring forgotten principles from fragmented books, diagrams, and blueprints.

At the same time, a secular scholar arrives at the abbey to study the Memorabilia, hoping to usher in a new age of enlightenment: the metaphorical light of knowledge and reason. In doing so, however, he is eventually forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: he is not an inventor of new knowledge, but merely a rediscoverer of what humanity had already lost.

The exchanges between this scholar and the abbot introduce another discussion: humanity’s persistent tendency to distance itself from its own past. The scholar continually constructs elaborate theories intended to separate the present from the civilisation that preceded the Flame Deluge. At various points he speculates that the Memorabilia may be fraudulent, reduces figures such as Einstein to little more than magi or natural philosophers, and even entertains the notion that the “ancients”—the civilisation responsible for the Fallout—may not have been truly human at all.

The abbot answers this:

Why do you wish to discredit the past, even to dehumanising the last civilisation? So that you need not learn from their mistakes?

The idea of whether humanity can learn from its past is an underlying constant in the story.

It is also the central theme of the last section: Fiat Voluntates Tua (”let it be your will”).

It shows how society changed after 600 more years, and how different—or not—it is, 1800 years after the last nuclear holocaust. I will not spoil this part; I’ll only say this: while the first two parts are satirically funny, the last one is darkly truthful to human nature.

Yet these are not the novel’s only concerns.

Although the narrative is largely centred upon the monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz—and many of its rituals deliberately mirror Catholic tradition—the novel is by no means uncritical in its portrayal of religion.

Through irony and satire, Miller frequently draws attention to the institutional absurdities of organised faith, including:

• The bureaucratic machinery surrounding sainthood, particularly the exhaustive effort to gather “evidence” of “miracles” in order to canonise Leibowitz;

• The treatment of books as sacred relics to be venerated rather than understood;

• And the preservation of ritual long after its original meaning has been forgotten. One striking example occurs when the monks activate the dynamo while reciting, in Latin, the passage from Genesis containing the words “let there be light”—the phrase from which the section itself takes its title.

The novel also presents a significant critique of universities and scientific institutions. Though such organisations often portray themselves as neutral or apolitical, Miller criticises how readily they align themselves with political power to preserve influence and funding—even when this cooperation contributes to the development of weapons of mass destruction. In this respect, the book repeatedly hints at a troubling historical pattern: humanity’s greatest discoveries are so often first employed in the service of conflict before later being redirected towards more constructive ends.

At the same time, the novel reflects upon both humanity’s resilience and its capacity for self-destruction. Miller portrays civilisation as stubbornly prone to division, endlessly categorising people into competing groups, ideologies, and identities that produce little beyond hostility and resentment. Governments, likewise, are depicted as willing to accept the devastation of war rather than devote themselves to preventing it in the first place.

To close off…

A Canticle for Leibowitz is far more intellectually and thematically complex than many reviews suggest. Beneath its post-apocalyptic setting lies a remarkably layered discussion on knowledge, memory, religion, war, and humanity’s cyclical tendency towards self-destruction. From its recurring symbolism to its literalised metaphors—including two characters I have deliberately avoided discussing in detail—the novel constantly demands careful attention from the reader.

For that reason, it is also a work that can be easily misunderstood. Miller is rarely interested in offering simple moral answers; instead, he presents a civilisation shaped by contradiction, ignorance, faith, guilt, and historical amnesia, leaving the reader to wrestle with the implications.

I will first review the narrative, the characters and plot, and then move into the themes.

In terms of narrative, Tender is the Flesh is told in a limited third-person present tense—an unusual choice that generates a dissonance between the apparent proximity to Marcos Tejo’s mind (the narrating character) and the increasing blurring of events in his life.

The author also alternates between presenting dialogue conventionally (using quotation marks) and narrating it in large, dense paragraphs. This choice appears deliberate, as narrated dialogue only surfaces when Marcos ‘spaces out’, disregarding whoever is speaking in favour of his own inner monologue. This works very effectively, particularly because these moments often coincide with gruesome scenes (for instance, Marcos’s tour of a breeding centre of ‘heads’: humans bred for consumption). In these cases, his lack of attention creates a sense of detachment that, by any reasonable moral measure, should not exist—yet it does, because the normalisation of horror is, perhaps, the novel’s central concern.

Which leads us into the plotlines weaving throughout the book:

1. Marcos’s work as the second-hand man to the owner of the Krieg Processing Plant presents the horror of legalised cannibalism, alongside its implications for those dehumanised individuals now designated as ‘products for consumption’. It establishes the setting, but operates as the background of Marcos’s life—the day-job he performs while other, more personally transformative events unfold. This ‘relevance’ says plenty about his character.

2. The death of his child and the departure of his wife, Cecilia, bear down on Marcos. It acts as a catalyst for several narrative developments, including those connected to Jasmine’s storyline.

3. Jasmine’s is arguably the most harrowing, yet also the most relegated. As a high-quality ‘head’ (a human bred for consumption), she is gifted to Marcos... yet despite her market value, he locks her in a barn and tends to her minimally. His disregard culminates in an act of sexual violence, resulting in her pregnancy. I will return to this storyline when discussing the novel’s themes.

4. The central storyline is, in my opinion, the most important: the situation with Don Armando, Marcos’ senile father, now living in an aged care. It shapes much of Marcos’ behaviour, from his line of employment to his visits to an abandoned zoo solely because his father once took him there. Likewise, Armando’s death marks a decisive turning point: the moment when Marcos begins to impose boundaries, sever relationships that burden him, and initiate change.

Thematically, though, this novel is a goldmine.

Leave a comment

It presents extreme horrors through Marcos’ detached, almost bored narrative voice, yet it tempers this detachment with selective ethical concerns—enough ‘morality’ to make him initially relatable, and enough ambiguity to allow it to surface throughout the story. This gradual unveiling of Marcos’ true character can be read as a covert moral test for the reader. What I found particularly effective, is how the author sowed ‘clues’ about Marcos’ ethics from the very beginning, yet hid them in his curated, carefully crafted inner monologue:

No one can call them humans because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food. Except for him; he would prefer not to have to call them by any name.

As the story progresses, his language ‘slips’ and becomes blunter—mirroring Marcos’ gradual acceptance of his own feelings towards the ‘heads’. This is especially evident when he bathes Jasmine before naming her:

He cleans her chest, armpits, stomach. Diligently, as though he were cleaning a valuable but inanimate object. He’s nervous, as if the object could break, or come to life.

Her story is uncomfortable and dehumanising. As a ‘head’, her vocal cords have been removed (a practice intended to prevent screaming during slaughter and, likely—though never explicitly stated—to limit communication). She has been branded in the forehead like cattle, and kept in a cage sleeping on hay. When Marcos receives her, she is even wearing a leash and does not attempt to remove it.

Yet the novel uses language effectively to convey Marcos’ discomfort around her: he keeps her out of sight in the barn, tends to her minimally, and considers selling her. It is not until he observes her body that he perceives her differently, going so far as to strip naked in front of her:

He strokes her neck. Now he’s the one who trembles. He removes his jeans and stands there, naked. His breath quickens. He continues to hug her as it rains down. What he wants to do is prohibited. But he does it anyway.

For a book that does not shy away from explicit depictions of extreme horror (which I will not detail here), the scene in which Marcos sexually assaults Jasmine concludes with the passage above. This is particularly striking given that before the novel included two explicit, on-the-page sexual encounters between Marcos and a former lover.

This omission can be read as a reflection of the value Marcos assigns to Jasmine: she is ‘beautiful’, a ‘valuable object’—yet insignificant enough that her rape is excluded not only from the narrative, but from Marcos’ conscience. The text expects the reader to infer what occurs (as well as the subsequent months Marcos spends ‘enjoying’ her), precisely because she is framed as a ‘head’, and nothing more.

The second half of the novel—beginning when Jasmine is eight months pregnant—is harrowing, yet notably restrained in how it exposes her continued dehumanisation. Marcos may sleep with her, fondle her, yet he keeps her locked in a room and monitors her through cameras akin to those commonly used to monitor pets. He still ‘feeds’ Jasmine (rather than ‘serving her food’), and worries about her primarily insofar as she is carrying his child.

His treatment of her as the bearer of his child, rather than as a woman pregnant with his child, opens the door to a broader discussion of objectification, and of the way societies often value a foetus more than the person carrying it.

This brings us back, once again, to language and its role in constructing moral contradiction. At one point, Marcos narrates:

She spends hours watching television, sleeping, drawing, staring at a fixed point. At times, it seems she’s thinking, like she really can.

And yet, only a few pages earlier, he acknowledged that ‘heads’ were, in fact, human:

Before going into the plant, he sits in the car for a few seconds and looks at the complex of buildings. They’re white, compact, and efficient. There’s nothing to indicate that inside them humans are killed.

So is Marcos’s numb detachment a defence mechanism, or an ethical failure? Is he dehumanising because the system is, or because he himself has grown numb?

The novel doesn’t answer these questions. Instead, it presents situations for the reader to craft their own answer—while simultaneously ‘training’ that same reader to accept its language until, by the end, they have learnt to expect the most gruesome crimes against humanity.

It is then when the horror surfaces: when the reader finishes the book and realises that, halfway through, Marcos no longer needed to be subtle with his choice of words.

PS: A podcast episode will be landing soon.

This review was originally shared on Goodreads, on March 2nd, 2026.

In short, a masterpiece as only PKD could craft.

In terms of setting, this is what I affectionally call "period scifi"—sci-fi books that are actually set in the past, most likely because it was "near future" when it was written. In here, it is the year 1992, and individuals with psionic powers (e.g., precognition, telepathy) are a threat to the social, economic and political balance. To contain their manifestations, there are "prudential" companies that provide individuals called "inertials" that can neutralise the activity of telepaths and precogs. Prudence organisations also offer their clients security and privacy from the intrusions of psychic spies. Runciter Associates is owned by Glen Runciter and provides "inertial" services, but has lost track of a dangerous telepathic.

That is only part of the setting. A key element is the distinction between full-life (i.e., what we currently consider as "being alive") and half-life. Half-life occurs when someone is recently dead and placed into a cryogenic facility called "cold-pac", known as Moratoriums. While in this cryogeny, the half-lifers cannot move, and their bodies age neither, but they can be "telephoned" by their full-life relatives.

This description is just scratching the surface of what half-life is, since very early in the book it is implied that half-lifers have their own sort of "world", that they mingle with the others that are close, and that perhaps their half-life minds create a different reality.

So that begs the question: what if the world we know is just a half-life world (the product of our minds) and not "true" reality?

Here is where Plato's allegory gets twisted: how would people/characters react to being told they're dead and half-living? Would that be more painful? Can they do anything about it? But then... how many layers to reality are? What if you "awaken" from one reality into another, then "awaken" into another? Maybe there’s no safe layer of reality at all.

I won't answer these questions because the book doesn't; PKD was just exploring them… though I do find those questions core to Ubik's theme.

Now, what is Ubik? It's a product; a spray can, a salve, a balm, powder to be diluted. The most popular definition out there is that Ubik is:

…a stabilizer that can reverse the course of time and protect people and things from decay.

Though while somewhat true, that definition falls short of what Ubik truly is... yet any attempt at defining or explaining it are deeply spoilery. I think a nice attempt at defining Ubik is saying that Ubik is the product of someone's mind, will manifest, the persistence to live, a belief that gives someone resistance to reality. I don't think there is a single answer, but to me, the spray can was certainly not "god", as I've seen reported in some reviews.

TL;DR: It's a great book, but in PKD's style, it cannot be taken lightly as "just" a plot. Thematically, it is incredibly rich.

This review was originally shared on Goodreads, on July 18th, 2025.

If you are interested in hearing more about Ubik, I did a lengthy podcast episode (with transcript included) discussing the book through Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and Kant’s noumenal/phenomenal as applied to Ubik (the spray can, the salve, the… everything Ubik is inside the book). It’s one of my favourite episodes:

Leave a comment

The story is intentionally narrow: a post-apocalyptic setting, and a nameless father and son travelling south across the United States. There is no clearly defined goal beyond escaping the cold—which seems to follow them—and one message:

You have to carry the fire.

This message is easy to overlook, particularly at the beginning, as McCarthy does not return to it often, and certainly does not explain it—at least not on the page.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Allow me to examine the novel from its setting to its characters, and finally its themes.

The setting is minimalist: an ashen, desolate world, post-apocalyptic (perhaps in the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe), yet scarcely explained. The decay is pervasive, all-encompassing, and overwhelming, eroding everything—especially the remnants of humanity.

What the father and son encounter makes the bleakness unmistakable. This is an “every man for himself” world, where survivors will readily kill one another simply to strip away whatever rags and goods they possess. There are “bloodcults” roaming the roads, pillaging and enslaving others (it is implied that they assault women, keep adolescent boys as sex slaves, and even consume newborns). Some survivors have also resorted to cannibalism, a horror underscored through several encounters along the road.

This is never made explicit, yet the extreme nihilism—which renders even survival seemingly meaningless—is essential to the exploration of the novel’s central question: can moral goodness exist when every external structure that sustains it has collapsed?

Leave a comment

The setting itself appears to suggest that, without such frameworks—no society, no laws, no governing bodies to enforce them—humanity will descend into utmost depravity and moral disintegration.

Here I must pause to analyse the father and son.

Interestingly, McCarthy chose to keep them nameless. At no point are their names revealed, and even when the narration remains closely aligned with the father’s perspective, he refers to his son simply as “the boy”. One might argue that this resists the expectations of readers more used to conventional, commercially-oriented narrative structures; however, the absence of names is consistent with the novel’s thematic axis: if the world is nihilistic, if meaning itself is eroded, what purpose does a name serve?

Ultimately, a name is typically bound to identity, but the road—and the post-apocalyptic landscape it traverses—relentlessly strips both meaning and identity away: first at the societal level, and then from the individuals who endure it.

For this reason, the father and son are not quite characters in the traditional sense, but rather characterised themes—almost akin to literalised metaphors, where abstraction is given narrative form.

Allow me to elaborate.

The father is a remnant of the “old world”: a man who remembers what it was, and who clings to the identity that way of living once allowed him to have. He was raised to be the provider, the protector, the moral centre of the family he was building—but the journey along the road steadily erodes that role.

It begins with a question:

How does the never to be differ from what never was?

From the moment this question surfaces, something in him begins to change. He is forced to confront whether he could kill the boy—if circumstances demanded it—while questioning why they continue to survive at all. And yet, he persists in a fragile, almost reflexive faith in an unnamed god, insisting that they are “the good guys”, that they are still “carrying the fire”.

Yet, as the father’s doubts deepen, an unspecified sickness begins to take hold of him—subtle at first, but progressively more debilitating.

The boy’s age is unspecified, though he cannot be older than four to six years. At first, the father attempts to shield him from the surrounding amorality—covering his eyes when they pass burnt corpses, or withholding explanations when the truth would reveal something too disturbing. He tells the boy:

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever.

Later, when they cross a stretch strewn with charred bodies, the father again tries to protect him—but the boy responds:

What you put in your head is there forever?

Yes.

It’s okay Papa. [...] They’re already there.

Yet somehow, this doesn’t... reach the boy. He remains unchanged—innocent, vulnerable, and in need of protection.

More importantly, the extent of the world’s bleakness seems not to matter (whether it be a man holding a knife to his throat, the discovery of humans imprisoned as livestock, or being shot at by those seeking their supplies): the boy retains his innocence. Whenever they encounter others—someone struck by lightning, a lost child, even a half-blind old man—he insists on sharing their food, or offering help in whatever way he can.

Such behaviour may appear irrational if the boy is read purely as a character. However, if he is understood instead as a characterised theme, his behaviour fits what he embodies: an irreducible moral instinct, a form of pre-cultural goodness that cannot be entirely eroded by the surrounding desolation, and which must, therefore, be protected.

You have to carry the fire.

I don’t know how to.

Yes, you do.

Is the fire real? The fire?

Yes it is.

Where is it? I don’t know where it is.

Yes you do. It’s inside you. It always was there. I can see it.

Understanding the boy in this way allows us to reinterpret the father’s faith—not as belief in an unspecified god, but as faith in the idea of goodness embodied in the child. The father’s sickness, then, is not merely a loss of the will to live, but a weakening of his ability to remain “one of the good guys” in a world where such a choice can be fatal.

This brings us back to the nihilistic setting, and to the question McCarthy may have been probing: can moral goodness exist when every external structure that sustains it has collapsed?

What the novel hints at is philosophically compelling: morality is a choice, and one that must be continually reasserted through each decision (through every encounter along the road) even when any external justification for it has already fallen away—whether social, religious, rational, or evolutionary. The boy (and the moral instinct he represents) must be protected, and cannot persist entirely on its own (as the ending may suggest), because morality is only meaningful if it can endure despite having no reason to exist.

This, perhaps, is what it means to “carry the fire”. To choose to live nobly despite hardship, and morality not as a principle that can be proven or defended, but as something enacted, again and again.

All in all, The Road resists easy categorisation and offers none of the legibility of modern fiction. For those willing to engage with it on its own terms, this is a work of remarkable philosophical depth.