Book Review Saturday – ‘Cloud Atlas’

So, yes. ‘Cloud Atlas’. It’s far from being a new book, but it was a new book to me, when I read it a couple of months ago. I was warned, repeatedly, that it was ‘impossible’, ‘unreadable’, ‘too complicated’, and so on, so I did come to it with a certain amount of trepidation.

Also, a little bit of cold, hard fear.

Image: screencrush.com

Now, in the warm afterglow of having met the challenge of reading it, I wonder why so many people warned me off. It’s a big, whopping book – but it’s nothing to be scared of.

‘Cloud Atlas’ is a huge novel, full of characters and voices and ideas and time periods, but it is all connected. It’s connected through the plot that David Mitchell weaves around his characters, of course, but also through the larger ideas of shared humanity, the desire to live, the need for freedom, and the gaining of wisdom. All these things make the book easy to empathise with and understand, and they also keep you turning the pages.

Structurally, the book takes the form of six novellas, five of which are split in two; one half of these split novellas is told at the beginning of the book, and the other half (in reverse order) at the end. The middle novella, ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’ and Ev’rythin’ After’ is told in its entirety, like a ‘bridge’ across the middle of the book. The first story we come across is ‘The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,’ which tells the tale of a man on a nineteenth-century ship which is sailing around the Chatham Islands. The story takes in ideas of slavery, colonialism, brutal maritime history, and – overall – the ways in which people will use one another to get what they want. It is told in the form of a diary, and its dialect, language, and historical sensibilities are pitch-perfect in their accuracy. It reads like a long-lost primary historical document, and it’s engrossing.

The second novella is a total change. ‘The Journal of Adam Ewing’ comes to a sudden, and unexpected, stop, and the reader is flung into an entirely different world. We read about a young man named Robert Frobisher, who is extremely talented but utterly feckless, making his way to Switzerland to apprentice himself to the leading composer of his day because he simply cannot bear to do anything else. He is bisexual, louche, useless with money, and a total cad, but, somehow, we love him as much as the person to whom he is writing his letters – an old lover, Rufus Sixsmith – seems to do. We imagine Sixsmith’s pain as Frobisher details his conquests and his increasingly glamorous lifestyle, but – most interestingly – we read that he has found a manuscript among the papers of Vyvyan Ayrs (the composer with whom he is working) which is called ‘The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing’ – and it is torn in half. Finding the other half becomes an obsession. Ayrs also talks about a strange vision he has had of a futuristic society involving women who all look the same, and begins to write music based on his visions.

The next section is ‘The First Luisa Rey Mystery,’ written like a potboiler detective novel. A young woman in 1970s California discovers that a local power plant is not all it purports to be, and an eminent scientist – one Rufus Sixsmith – warns her of the danger before being murdered. In her investigation, Rey uncovers the letters from Frobisher which Sixsmith has kept, and becomes interested in his music. Her story ends abruptly – and frighteningly – and we do not know her fate as we move on to the next novella.

‘The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish’ is written in a highly comic tone, which is interesting as the story is quite frightening, in some ways. Cavendish is a publisher, who is always running short of money and who has now fallen foul of a criminal element. His brother tells him that he has booked him into a remote, and hence completely safe, hotel in order to get him away from his enemies, but this hotel turns out to be something rather different – a place he cannot escape from, no matter what he tries to do. He had to leave very quickly to escape the brutes who were after him, and – in his hurry – he forgot that he had a newly submitted manuscript in his briefcase, which he reads as he struggles to adjust to his new life in captivity. The title of the manuscript? ‘The First Luisa Rey Mystery.’

‘The Orison of Sonmi~451’ is the next novella, and it was by far my favourite. It tells the story of a ghastly futuristic society called Neo So Copros, but which seems very familiar to anyone who has ever been inside a large fast-food restaurant. The world is a totalitarian state, and the ‘people’ who work serving food and doing other menial tasks are ‘fabricants’, or clones grown for the purpose of being slaves. Their minds are manipulated by ‘pureblood’ humans in order to keep them down. The novella is written like an interview between one of these fabricants, Sonmi~451, and an archivist, and Sonmi gradually reveals her story. Led by one of her fellow fabricants, she stops taking the medication that keeps her mind enslaved and she becomes ‘ascended’, or conscious – a dangerous crime. She mentions, just before her novella breaks, that she loves a movie from the ‘old days’, which is called ‘The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.’

‘Sloosha’s Crossin’ and Ev’rythin’ After’ is set far, far into the future, in an unknown year. A post-apocalyptic society – or, after ‘the Fall of the Old ‘Uns’, as it is put by Zachry, the narrator of this novella – we work out that the people are living on the big island of Hawaii, and that they are largely peace-loving, but regularly come under attack from their warlike neighbours. They worship a goddess called Sonmi. One day they are visited by people who are far more technologically advanced, who wish to observe their people and their culture, and Zachry becomes suspicious. Meronym, the woman who stays behind to live with his people, has a strange holographic device from which the image of a beautiful woman emerges, telling her story – Meronym tells Zachry that this is a recording of the long-dead Sonmi, who was not a goddess after all…

This only brings us up to the novel’s halfway point, but I hope, if you haven’t already read the book, of course, that I’ve whetted your appetite for what happens next. The connections between the novellas, and the vastly different – but each of them perfectly realised – styles of writing used to bring them to life, were nothing short of stunning. ‘Cloud Atlas’ is a work of genius. It at once made me feel like a wholly inadequate writer and a very connected human being – and I loved it. If you’re anything like me, you’ll try to spot all the connections between the novellas, from names to birthmarks to things being mentioned and referenced to the mind-boggling idea that, despite the fact that this book has a huge cast of characters, perhaps some of them are simply the same people, being reborn and reborn throughout the centuries. Perhaps that’s all any of us are.

Many, many Sonmis, all in a row… From the movie of ‘Cloud Atlas’
Image: filmschoolrejects.com

Amazing.

Happy Saturday, and happy reading.

Troubled Waters

I slept badly last night. Or, rather, I slept, but it was disturbed and not at all restful. This was because I spent the whole night having the same nightmare over and over, and eventually I woke myself up early because I couldn’t face going through it again. The dreams were so upsetting that when I woke up, and realised for sure that what I’d been dreaming about hadn’t happened, I almost wept with relief.

I often wonder what the point of nightmares is; why do our brains feel the need to pump our dreams full of terror? In this case, I think perhaps my brain was reinforcing my love for a particular person by making me dream about what life would be like without them. At least, that’s how I’m going to try to rationalise it! Perhaps it was a way of dealing with the grief and horror of losing someone close, without actually having to go through it for real. Still, though. Whatever the reason, I really hope my brain leaves me in peace tonight and lets me sleep undisturbed.

I wonder, too, if my troubled sleep last night had anything to do with the news bulletin I watched yesterday evening. I saw footage of people dying, elections being interfered with, people being savagely attacked as they tried to exercise their franchise in an attempt to bring some sort of peace to their country, children living in camps for Internally Displaced Persons, countries where whole generations of people have lived and died in war… is it any wonder I’d take all that to my sleeping world, and that it would disturb my rest as it disturbed my waking life? Add to that the trial of a man in Japan accused of murdering a young Irish woman who grew up not far from where I grew up, the gangland and sectarian crime still rife in parts of my country, and the parlous state of the economy, and you have the perfect nightmare brew.

Ireland’s police force – An Garda Siochana
Image: en.wikipedia.org

In Ireland, the police force is called ‘An Garda Síochana’, which means ‘The Guardians of the Peace’ in English. By and large Ireland is peaceful – certainly, I’m lucky to live in a place where the worst I have to contend with is noisy neighbours. But there are parts of Ireland, as there are parts of every country, where the Gardaí have a harder job. Peace was hard-won in this country, and I’d hate to see a return to the ‘bad old days’; desperation still drives a lot of people, though, and the causes that divided and hurt so many people in the past are still alive and well, albeit quieter. Sometimes, when I think about how thin the layer of civilisation is, and how it relies very much on everyone co-operating, I tend to get a bit light-headed.

The old saying – that ‘we’re always only three (or four, or nine) meals away from anarchy’ – has often played on my mind. When that’s coupled with my innate suspicion of getting too reliant on technology, and my natural tendency towards anxiety, I fear I’m only one step removed from the tinfoil hat brigade.

Image: bigrab.wordpress.com

But I remind myself how well the world does work, despite everything, and how there are always more people who want to work together and strive for the same goal than there are people who want to tear it all down and dance amid the ruins. I’d like to see a society where every person is valued and cared for, and where compassion is the ruling force – ‘where love is Lord of all’, as the old song goes. But keeping my own home, my own mind as a haven of peace is probably as close as I’ll get to that.

As a weird little finishing note, I’ve just texted the person about whom I had all the disturbing dreams last night. Their reply read something like: ‘That’s so weird. I spent all last night having crazy dreams about you! Get out of my head!’

Is it time for this? After me: Doodeedoodoo, doodeedoodoo….

Image: katymunger.wordpress.com

 

Human Nature

This evening, I had the house to myself. I don’t like being at home alone, so I took my mind off the fact that my husband was away by watching a couple of movies we’d recorded over the past few weeks. One was ‘Moon’, which I’d seen before and really enjoyed, and one was a golden oldie, ‘The Running Man’, which (somehow!) I’d managed to miss until now. If you haven’t seen these movies, you might want to be aware that there are some spoilers below.

I knew I’d find a reason to put an Arnie picture on the blog eventually!

Another reason I took some time out to watch these movies was because I had a bit of a fraught day yesterday, WiP-wise. I was doing some research into submissions to agents and publishers, writing query letters, and so forth, when it struck me that my book is long. Really long. Too long, in point of fact. I had an idea that I was running a little towards the long end of the ‘accepted’ word count, but figured that most of my favourite books in the YA-fantasy genre are about the same length as the work I’ve produced. However, it would appear not. If I’m to believe what I’ve discovered during the course of my research, my book is about 50,000 words too long. I’ve been thinking about what I can do to fix this ever since, and my brain is on a loop, trying to suggest solutions to itself.

Hence, the movies.

As well as being short, both movies are tightly packed with action (‘Running Man’) and tension (‘Moon’). They both tell a good story in a small space, without wasting time on irrelevance. Perhaps I only noticed this because my mind is twisting itself in knots about this very issue at present, but it doesn’t make it any less true! Also, they both had lots to say about human nature, and what it means to be human, I thought – something that’s important to me, but also to anyone who wants to write a book. Thinking about people, and why they do the things they do, is intrinsic to creating characters.

‘The Running Man’ – at least, the movie version, as I haven’t read the book yet – is (we have to face it) very similar in message and tone to ‘The Hunger Games’. I’m not complaining about this. I found ‘The Hunger Games’ profound, at times, in its message about humanity and what it means to be a human being, too. If the world really did descend into a dystopian hell, and if we really were living through the fallout of a horrible war, or a devastating economic crisis (hang on…!), would we take out our frustrations and horrors at our own daily lives on watching others suffer and die? What would it take to push humanity over that particular precipice? As I watched ‘The Running Man’, I asked myself the question: ‘If this was real, would I be a rabid viewer and consumer of the TV show, and would I be cheering as the stalkers chased down the contestants, or would I be a ‘conscientious objector’, refusing to take part in something so inhuman?’

Of course, I’m glad that there’s no way for me to answer that question, because such a TV show doesn’t exist. Not yet, at least. I wondered why people would take such extreme enjoyment in watching a show like that, and why they’d idolise the show’s host and crave the logos, merchandise, and other accoutrements, and concluded it had to be because of their own feelings of powerlessness and disenfranchisement. They’d crave the branded clothing and the memorabilia in order to prove to everyone that they were part of the ‘in’ crowd, not to be hunted; they were of the powerful class, and not the oppressed. But maybe it’s not even as deep as that. Maybe people, as a whole, just enjoy watching other people (or beings, maybe) suffer. I really hope that’s not the reason, though. Maybe it’s because they’re thinking ‘if those people over there are suffering, then the focus is not on me. If they’re the ones being chased and hunted and killed, then there’s nobody chasing me.’ I’d love to think I’d be the one standing outside the system, and I’d be the one running the underground resistance, but it’s hard to know. I think I have more compassion for my fellow human than the people in ‘The Running Man’ seemed to have, but even I know it’s difficult to be the dissenting voice when you’re living under a frightening regime; a regime where, to stand out and live a different message, could spell death. Sadly, we don’t have to look to fiction for those sorts of situations – those kinds of oppressive regimes are in place all over the world. Perhaps ghoulish game-shows are the next step in the process.

‘Moon’ is an entirely different film, but it takes on a similar question: what constitutes a human? If, in ‘The Running Man’, we were faced with a two-tier version of humanity – a tier in which people are hunted to death, and a tier that sits back and watches it happen – ‘Moon’ uses the concept of cloning to explore the same idea. We’re faced with two, and then three copies of the same person, all of which look identical and are ‘programmed’ with the same memories, loves, hates, and fears – but which, despite all that, are still seen as individuals. Even if we didn’t have the visual cues to help us distinguish one version of ‘Sam’ from the other (one has a facial wound, and quickly begins to display symptoms of illness, while the other remains healthy throughout), it would still be clear. They are very different men, despite technically being exactly the same. So, what makes them different? Is a clone merely a copy of a ‘real’ person, or is the clone a person in his/her own right? What does it take to make a living, breathing, sentient body a ‘human being’? One of the clones in this movie even offers to die to help another clone to live – an act of nobility that few ‘proper’ human beings would be able to match. Again, though this film is SF and not intended to be ‘realistic’, it has a message for our world. Who judges the fitness of others to call themselves ‘human’, and who have we placed on the pedestal, and to whom have we given the power, to make calls on others’ right to live, or exist, as they please? We live in a world in which regimes exist which attempt to argue that certain individuals are lesser than others, that whole groups of people are unimportant because of gender, race, orientation, gender identity, or whatever the case may be. Why have we done this, and who has the power to make these calls?

Well. Those are my thoughts for today. Perhaps I should just learn to watch a movie, and not take every second of footage apart for meaning. That’s what trying to write a book does to you, though – it makes you analyse everything for structure, meaning, motivation, and symbolism. It’s also hard to stop doing it once you’ve started!

So, after all my procrastinating, I still have some big book-related decisions to make. Wish me luck! Hopefully I’ll be able to take some of my analytical skills to my own book, and whittle it away to its essentials. Here’s hoping.

Choosing to Live

This morning’s offering is a response to a wonderful blog post, here, written by Susan Lanigan. In it, she discusses her reasons for choosing to live – not just continuing to live, but actually making the choice to live – despite the difficulties which this choice can bring. I’m very pleased that she asked me to share my thoughts on the topic, and I hope I can do her marvellous post justice.

I’ll begin with a truism: life can be very hard. This nugget has been trotted out by generations of mothers and fathers in an attempt to comfort their tear-stained children when they reach the age at which they realise the world is not designed to fulfil their every wish; it is not comforting, but it is important to know. Life (or, rather, the choice to live) can, and probably will, be very hard for the majority of people, and life has been hard as long as human beings have existed. Every age has had its own particular struggles, which vary with the centuries, but they all have similar roots. I think, despite the differences in technology, lifestyle, beliefs, language and law that separate us from our ancestors, that people are people – we don’t change much, down through the years. The things which occupy our minds and the fears that bedevil us – mortality, sexuality, money, power – are things which they were all too familiar with, too. I’m not sure it’s true that earlier ages didn’t have time for introspection, or that they were too busy working themselves to an early death to worry about things like self-actualisation and individual significance; I think every age has sought meaning in its own existence, and has produced art which has reflected upon the world which created it. We are no exception – we just have wider access to the tools of creativity, and our record of our own existence is a bit more durable than that of earlier generations. In times gone by, only the chosen few had the opportunity to record their thoughts about the world around them. Sometimes I mourn for all the words and stories we’ve lost, and for all the wisdom that has returned to the earth along with the person who laboured hard to gain it.

I live in a complex world, in a struggling country. I have a body and a brain which sometimes conspire against me, and I know how it feels to fight with your own thoughts, to battle out from underneath your own darkness of mind. I have been in the pit of what my medieval friends used to call ‘wanhope’ – in other words, despair. Allowing yourself to wallow in wanhope was seen as a sin in the Middle Ages, because it did not allow for the grace of God; falling into it was one thing, but allowing yourself to remain there was tantamount to giving up hope in the all-powerful love of God. It was like committing treason against your greatest and most powerful liege-lord. You were cutting off the possibility of being rescued, of being helped, and you were refusing to allow yourself to be loved by God – and, I suppose, by anyone else. The medieval mind saw it as imposing a limit on the power of God’s love and compassion (which, of course, would be sinful human hubris), but a modern mind might recognise the feeling, too. Divorced from its religious framework, it sounds a lot like the struggle most of us have to face at some point in our life – the feeling that we are alone, that we’re unconnected to anything else, that nobody loves us and our existence, or lack of it, makes no difference to the grand scheme of things. It sounds so terrible that it’s hard to imagine why anyone would allow themselves to fall into it, but it’s actually not that difficult. The road to the pit of wanhope has been walked by so many feet that the stones which pave it have been worn smooth, and it’s a road from which so many people find it impossible to come back. Sadly, I wonder if the road to Wanhope is busier now than it has ever been.

So, why do I choose to live? The word ‘choose’ is so important – nobody can make you live. You were brought into existence, sure – but nobody can force you to live. The choice is yours. It might seem obvious – it might not seem like a choice at all, perhaps – but it’s there, and it’s one which we need to make on a regular basis. Why do I choose, every day, to avoid the road to despair and choose the harder, rockier, narrower path that is life? I choose to live because I want to make a difference in the world. I want to be part of that durable human record – I want my choice to mean something, and I don’t want my hard-earned wisdom to die with me. I choose to live because I was brought into the world through love, and I have been lucky enough to know love every day of my life. I choose to live because I want to amplify the love I have been given, and return it tenfold to those who love me, and to others who might need love and compassion more than they need anything else. I choose to live because it’s a challenge, and I’m the sort of pig-headed person who hates to give up on a fight. I choose to live because I believe I’m here to do something – perhaps, many somethings. I choose to live because I don’t know what I’m here to do, and I don’t know when I’ll be called upon to do it. How can I choose the other path, the one that leads towards the dark, when, for all I know, tomorrow is the day when my great purpose will be revealed? How do I know that my very existence – something I might say, or do, or write – is already fulfilling that greater purpose? I choose to live because my choice might help someone else. I choose to live because I am important, as you are important; my choice might help someone else to keep walking that hard road, and I choose to live because everyone who makes that choice means more hands to help those who might stumble, and more encouraging smiles to light the paths of those who are struggling.

I’ve walked a while on both roads, the smooth lower road that feels so familiar underfoot, and the rocky higher path that goes on into the unknown. The smooth road has no turnings. Its destination is clear. But the rocky path has many switchbacks and changes of direction – every day on it is a surprise, and every corner turned brings something new. I choose to live because I want to know what’s around the next bend, no matter what it is. I choose to live because I’ve struggled out of the pit, and back up that smooth and well-worn path, and I’ll be damned if I’m throwing away all that effort.

I choose to live out of stubbornness, and I hope my rocky path is a long and twisting one.