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.

What Would Jesus NOT Do?

Choke
by Chuck Palahniuk
p. 2001

Choke is the second novel I’ve had the pleasure to read by Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, so I sort of knew what I was getting myself into going in. Palahniuk’s quintessential pièce de résistance might have been enough to give the me a starting impression, but now I’m convinced the author has a type: stories about damaged losers who find themselves entrenched in incomprehensible situations of their own design. Like Fight Club, it’s a non-linear first person narrative, but this narrator has a name—Victor Mancini—and his problems are a little more of this world, specifically, of the flesh. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. When he’s not attending sex addiction meetings, he’s usually at work, unenthusiastically reenacting medieval times amongst his coworkers and friends, mostly burnouts and addicts themselves, or he’s having sex with various women (and for such a short, terse narrative, Palahniuk sure doesn’t spare the reader all the lurid details).

But Victor has another addiction, and it’s this one that really sets him up to fail. Victor’s mother—his only familial connection in his 20-odd years on this planet—is wasting away in an asylum that Victor cannot afford on his own, so to make ends meet, Victor has become a con artist. His art? Choking on food in restaurants every night to force complete strangers to save his life. I’ll admit, I had a hard time believing that this sordid hobby would actually yield monetary reward, but according to Victor, having people save his life creates a lifetime bond between the savior and himself as well as giving the stranger a sort of hero complex that makes him or her feel responsible for Victor. He then uses that bond to write to the would-be heroes, and make himself out to be so pathetic that they feel compelled to give him money. I still have a hard time buying this plot point, but I guess I’ll never really know if it will work. In any case, suspension of disbelief is something I came armed with going into a Palahniuk novel.

Our author—and by extension, Victor Mancini himself—wants us to believe that Victor is a terrible person. It is, in fact, the first thing we are told at the beginning of the book, right after being told we’re wasting our time reading it. There is certainly a lot of evidence to support that, and Victor goes to great lengths to convince us and himself of its truth, and yet I just couldn’t buy it. Maybe it’s the natural need to find something sincere or relatable about main characters—a coping mechanism to get through a piece of fiction, a response conditioned into us for the history of the written word until postmodernism came along. Maybe it’s a gut reaction to not believe anything Chuck Palahniuk says. Or maybe Victor Mancini really isn’t such a bad guy after all.

I suppose whether or not you like Victor really just depends on what type of person you are. I could easily see people despising him for all the right reasons. Hell, if I met Victor Mancini in real life, I’d probably not get along with him either, but in character form, I find him more sympathetic. It’s his complicated relationship with his mother that got me. No matter how many times Palahniuk describes the adolescent Victor as a “stupid little ratfink crybaby twerp” or a dickwad or a sucker, my heart went out to him every time he went back to his disturbed mother and took himself away from a healthy life. The kid never stood a chance, and his method of coping as an adult—theatrically risking his life in public to get some any kind of a loving reaction towards him from strangers—is so pathetic and masochistic that I still feel for him, even though I know he’s an adult now and should technically know better. Perhaps I’m just a sucker, another sap that Victor would easily manipulate if he got me in the place he wanted me, but I do find Victor sympathetic. It doesn’t help that the book proceeds to draw some crafty, if far-fetched parallels between him and Jesus Christ himself. That sort of manipulation is less Victor Manicini; but it is all Chuck Palahniuk.

Though Choke follows similar storytelling patterns as Fight Club—a narrator who is a little disturbed, who finds himself launched into bizarre hostile circumstances far out of his control, who tells it like it is, even if it’s not very politically correct—the book, on the whole, ends a much more positive note. I’d be interested to check out more Palahniuk novels next year, to see if my theories about his philosophy are true, or if I just happened to pick two very similarly-styled books.