The Cloud Atlas

The Cloud Atlas
by Liam Callanan
p. 2004

In 2013, I watched a movie called Cloud Atlas and was thoroughly perplexed but entranced enough by it to read the book, which I eventually popped onto Amazon and bought some months later. I didn’t get around to reading it until early this year, thoroughly excited to finally get a new perspective on this complicated story... only to discover I’d purchased the wrong book.

That’s right. Who knew that Cloud Atlas was a completely different book than THE Cloud Atlas?

Well, now at least the two of us know.

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, wrote a book published in 2004 and, though it was considered unfilmable, it was eventually the inspiration for the 2012 film. The book I bought on accident, THE Cloud Atlas, was also published in 2004 and written by Liam Callanan and other than the name, has absolutely nothing in common with the film, which is why it’s a bit ridiculous that it took me almost 50 pages to figure out... I honestly thought that maybe there were other stories in the book that they didn’t write into the script and continued to allow myself to think this until the ‘unheard story’ went on for just too many pages to be a ‘cut scene.’

Putting aside my disappointment, I decided to give the novel a chance—it wasn’t too bad, had an interesting premise, and I was already 50 pages in, after all.

The Cloud Atlas is something of a coming-of-age tale set in Alaska during World War II and focuses on a young bomb disposal officer, Louis Belk, and his secret assignment in the remote northern territory seeking out ‘balloon bombs’ released by the Japanese and scattered all about the western half of mainland United States. Since I still thought—for the first quarter at least—that I was reading a book with fantasy elements, I assumed the balloon bombs were the result of fiction, a far-fetched and strange idea given life on the page. Once I realized I was reading the wrong book, I looked it up and apparently it’s all based on real—albeit highly unpublicized—maneuvers by the Japanese army in 1945. Theyreally did release 9000 balloons with incendiary devices and they really did land all over the US and parts of Mexico and Canada, a few even extending as far as Michigan.

Seeing as this ploy was, on the whole, largely ineffective, the project was abandoned before the end of the war, and only 300 or so balloons were reported, but the remains of several are still being found to this day. The balloons only caused fatalities in one single incident, and sadly it was all civilians—a pregnant woman and five children who discovered the balloon weeks after it had landed were all killed when it exploded—but considering the existence of the horrendous Unit 731, the potential of the balloons destructiveness still make for an intriguing story. The threat of forest fires from the incendiary bombs is upsetting enough, but the mere idea of biological warfare enacted upon a civilian population is terrifying; I can easily see why Callanan chose it as the subject of his novel.

As for the novel itself, I wasn’t entirely charmed by it. Though I liked the characters well enough, I thought it could be a bit boring as well. Though it presents itself by all accounts as a classic coming-of-age story of a young man in World War II, I don’t really feel like the protagonist learned or grew much from his experience besides, perhaps, a lasting appreciation for the region of Alaska in which he was stationed and the spirituality of its native people, the Yu’pik.

There is a love quadrangle that doesn’t do this book any favors. I might have overlooked it had one less male suitor been involved but the presence of all four people in the relationship felt out of place and wholly unnecessary in such a richly historical tale of intrigue.

Callanan’s writing style is pretty enjoyable; there were definitely a few parts that caused me to laugh aloud, but they also immediately struck me as borrowing heavily from Catch-22, especially in Belk’s interaction with his larger-than-life commanding officer, Captain Gurley, who is deeply obsessed with discovering and stopping the threat of the Japanese balloons.

I’m not sorry I read this book, though I do wish I’d purchased the right one last year. It ended up being a happy little accident that may not have introduced me to my new favorite book but did teach me some facts about World War II that I had never even heard of prior to this. The Cloud Atlas is certainly a thoughtful and well-composed take on a little-known piece of history. Anyone interested in historical fiction or World War II should certainly give this book a chance.

Previously on Extreme Hoarders:

Homer & Langley
by E.L. Doctorow
p. 2009

E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley is a historical fiction novel based on the lives of real-life brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer, Manhattan eccentrics who gained unwanted publicity during the Depression era. Taking considerable liberties with history, Doctorow has created a rich collage of 20^th century Americana, presenting the brothers as ambassadors of culture in a way, rich treasures tucked away in obscurity, observers of history but not necessarily non-participants.

Homer—the younger brother and narrator of the story—and Langley are the only sons of a wealthy couple who pass away in the young mens’ adolescence, leaving them a spacious Fifth Avenue home. Due to a genetic affliction, Homer has lost his eyesight in his teens. Langley, meanwhile, comes home from the first World War in the wake of his parents’ deaths, greatly changed from the boy that left. Homer—blind and deeply self-conscious—and Langley—stricken with insanity from being gassed in the war—begin to slowly but surely shut themselves off from the outside world.

This doesn’t happen all at once. The hermit lifestyle evolves over time as Homer sinks deeper into loneliness and resignation and Langley literally constructs the walls to his own prison as he amasses a veritable junkyard of knick knacks and possessions that he can never seem to get rid of. Over the years they invite dozens of unique personalities into their home; gangsters, prostitutes, flappers, jazz musicians, and—for a brief period in the sixties—a bevy of hippies that float in and out of the brothers’ lives. They experience a wide range of American life—the evolution of pop music, unrequited love, techonological advance, the pain of losing a loved one in the war, organized crime risen from the Great Depression, McCarthyism and fear-mongering, antiwar protest, a battle with the taxman—before they eventually shutter their windows from the world.

Doctorow has done a wonderful job creating vibrant personalities for two notorious hermits that make them seem endearing and genuine; their motivations for retreating from society are well-defined and relatable. I felt moved by their plights at times and frustrated by their inability to connect at others. Their journey which spans many decades yet never moves beyond the confines of their home is very moving and the way Homer narrates his life tale, addressing a mystery woman named Jacqueline, gives the reader hope that—before the end of his life—Homer finally finds the type of love and companionship he has been seeking his whole life.

... Except that’s not what happens at all!

In a cruel twist, it turns out the oft-mentioned but yet unseen Jacqueline is simply a writer that Homer met once and had a nice afternoon with then never saw again. He constructed an imaginary life with her as he did several other women before her, and deluded himself into believing she would come back for him. Instead, Homer and Langley die, separate and alone, entombed and literally suffocated by their amassed possessions.

I waited patiently for things to turn around for the Collyer brothers but it wasn’t until I read the final few pages and put the book down that I realized I wasn’t going to be getting any sort of uplifting ending. I felt cheated; surely their symbolic suffering would come to an end, surely it meant something, but instead I just felt like chucking the book at the wall.

I didn’t think about the book again for some days but then I sat down to write this review and finally looked up the real-life Collyer brothers, of whom I knew nothing... and it turns out Doctorow’s invented history is actually the optimistic version of the story. Go figure.

Doctorow’s story can pass for truth because not too much is actually known about the reclusive brothers. In the fictionalized story, Homer’s blindness and Langley’s insanity become metaphorical walls between them and the world, a complement their literal walls. In reality, Homer (actually the older of the two in real life) became blind in his forties, and Langley moved in to care for him. Their parents didn’t die young, they didn’t host tea dances and jazz music sessions or put up their house like a hostel to young hippies. They didn’t even live to see the sixties and they never let anyone in anyway. Homer and Langley—the real Homer and Langley—died in 1947, the former of starvation and heart disease, the latter of asphyxiation, smothered by his own hoarded objects. Their deaths were probably painful and terrifying and they were alone, but together in the same house.

So at least Doctorow got that part right.

I don’t blame him for trying to make things seem sunnier. In the author’s version of things, Homer and Langley lived exuberant lives that intertwined with many unforgettable characters. It’s nice to think they experienced life from behind those walls. The more likely reality—that the Collyer brothers were hermits of their own design, afraid and resentful of the outside world all the way to their tragic ends—is a much less interesting story. If I had known the details of their true demise, I probably wouldn’t have resented Doctorow’s ending so much, as it mirrored the truth.

Still, when you take as many liberties as Doctorow has, you might as well fabricate a happy ending as well. Maybe Jacqueline did come back for Homer after all... Just maybe...

Like Labyrinth Meets Pan's Labyrinth... Minus the Labyrinth

The Book of Lost Things
by John Connolly
p. 2006

In World War II era rural Britain, young David, struggling to make sense of the premature loss of his mother to a wasting illness and the rapidly-altered structure of his family, stumbles upon another world, one parallel to but inconceivably darker than his own. This fantastical landscape of corrupted fairy tales provides the boy with the means to step into adulthood, but not without cost.

John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things visits all the familiar fairy tales—and some unfamiliar ones—but they are not the Disney-saturated family friendly tales popularized by American audiences; this is because John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things is not a fairy tale for children. Though the hero is but twelve years old and its coming of age themes follow the classic paths of any otherworldly adventure novel, this fairy tale for adults dances around themes much closer to the original Grimm style than anything animated and slapped on a screen with celebrity voices.

I found it difficult to like David at first, as he is a rather selfish and stubborn child, but such is the case in the traditional coming of age tale. I can’t say that the David who emerges by novel’s end will become a cherished favorite in my arsenal of beloved characters, but there’s no denying that he is more mature, for all that he’s been through, and it softens his earlier nastiness considerably. The reason David gets a pass early on is because the adventures he goes through are so immeasurably dark and he doesn’t fall apart when faced with them. Coincidentally this is also the reason why David will never be a favorite—because I kept wondering time and again when this kid would crumble under the enormous burden of his ‘adventure’ and it was almost inconceivable that a child so young could manage it without losing his mind (then again, maybe he did...).

The moody, bleak presence of The Book of Lost Things is what drew me in to the story. I didn’t really know what to expect from this book, but it was definitely not the tainted fairy tales I found. David meets the woodsman while running from wolves, but in the fantasy world they are called Loups, and are the product of human girls and wolves, the former playing part of seductress to the latter in a bizarrely sexual twist to Little Red Riding Hood. The boy later happens upon Snow White and her bevy of dwarves, but is surprised to find that it was the dwarves who attempted to rid the world of the no-longer-fair maiden, and who are now enslaved to her detestable whims. A white knight on a quest takes David under his wing, but his motives and the object of his quest are not what you would expect.

Creeping up on David at every turn is ‘the Crooked Man,’ Connolly’s take on Rumpelstiltskin, a devilish figure that stalked David before his descent into this unknowable land and now wants something from him to fulfill his own unseen motives. The woodsman, the white knight, the Crooked Man—all play the part of David’s father figure at various stages in his development, just as the terrible and imposing female villains in David’s fantasy world represent aspects of his dual motherly relationships—his longing for his deceased beloved mother and his complicated tension with his beleaguered stepmother Rose. Central to the novel’s themes are David’s acceptance of change and the imperfect human nature of his parents.

As I understand it, The Book of Lost Things is a departure from Connolly’s regular style of writing, but you can tell it was a very special project for him. Despite his tendency to dip into cliches, Connolly was obviously interested in the topic of traditional fairy tales and presenting his own brooding spin on them. The final 150 pages of my edition were actually his in-depth research into the topic, and a collection of the versions of fairy tales Connolly lifted his ideas from.

If my hints as to the dark direction of this novel weren’t enough, I feel it’s worth offering this final warning, though I will try to be vague: there are not very many happy endings in this book. It is not all depressing either, but it is far from ideal. Like life, there are ups and downs and if summed up in a few lines, the downs can seem overwhelming, but—like life—you take from this book what you can and hope it gives you some insight on yourself for the journey through the woods.

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
p. 1961

Catch-22 strikes me as one of those books that you either love or you hate. Having heard glowing praise for it over the years, I had high hopes finally sitting down to conquer this 450-page beast, and I’m sorry to say my feelings gravitate more towards the latter sentiment.

I wanted to like Catch-22, I really did. It’s clever and witty and has a lot of interesting quotable bits that stick with you, but there were too many things I couldn’t get past.

There isn’t really a plot to Catch-22, per se. It’s a war novel and it’s not. While it does indeed take place entirely in a World War II setting and revolve around themes of war, it doesn’t dwell on those themes and you could almost lift those elements out and still have the same novel. It is a loosely connected, non-sequential collection of stories revolving around the random, often absurd experiences of Captain Yossarian and his friends and superiors as they navigate a war none of them really understand their part in.

Since a majority of the chapters are named after a specific character in Yossarian’s realm, I assumed early on that this would be a character-driven book, and perhaps in some people’s opinions, it is, but I had a difficult time differentiating between characters since they all generally followed one of two types: either they were naive pushovers or blustering, bombastic jerks and no matter which division they landed in, they were sure to be totally oblivious. That last commonality is at least excusable to me, since one of Catch-22’s central themes is the nonsensical side of war. Everyone, no matter how high they were in a position of power, usually had no idea what was going on and just pretended as though they did to get by. I wanted to like the characters, and by the end of the story, some had stood out enough for me to start caring about them, so of course at that point everyone was summarily killed in a nonsensical way that had little to nothing to do with actual combat. Just when I was starting to like them.

My other major gripe with Heller’s classic is the writing style he chose. It’s not the non-chronological presentation that bothers me—some times parsing out the order of things can be half the fun of discovering a new story—but rather the rambling, repetitive, stream-of-consciousness aspect of the book. Stream of consciousness is hit or miss in general, but the seeming lack of direction was concerning about 100 pages in when I realized I still had no idea what type of novel I was reading.  The repetition in the dialogue was amusing for a few pages but about the 50^th time I read the exchange between an officer and an enlisted man where neither side spoke clearly, I started to wonder if I was reading the literary equivalent of a 3 Stooges bit.

Catch-22 is the first book I’ve encountered this year that I really struggled to get through. It’s extremely frustrating and not the least bit direct. I despised most of the characters and those that amused me didn’t seem to have a point. The abrupt change in tone in the final ten chapters or so was jarring and didn’t sit well with me either. Reading this book is more like listening to an old guy with burgeoning dementia reminisce about the war; he may have some interesting things to say, but he talks about things as he remembers them and rambles for far too long about topics that have no relevance.

I will contend that I may not have fully understood this novel, impatient as I was to breeze through it about halfway in, when I realized I wasn't enjoying it. I’ve heard that some people who hated Catch-22 the first time loved it the second time around and maybe that’ll be me, but I’m giving myself a wide berth before I attempt this one again. On the other hand, perhaps Heller’s style of writing is just not for me and no amount of time will get me to look back on this one fondly. I guess I’ll just have to get back to you on this one.