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.