Cloud Atlas, Post 2 – April 25, 2011

Spoiler Alert: Rufus Sixsmith buys it from the muzzle of Bill Smoke’s gun.  I guess it was Luisa Rey’s story, anyway.

Turns out that Luisa and Frobisher have the same birthmark.  Go figure.  I bet if I go back to chapter 1 I’ll see that Adam has it too.  I’m not sure if it’s good to write your thoughts a week after you have them, or if you benefit because time blurs the minutiae I was attending to in the first half of Half-Lives – by the way, I appreciate the title “Half-Lives” every time I read it in context with this whole nuclear energy business.

So Luisa has a little moxie, and her boss has a little more humanity than we’d originally thought.  If you’ve watched the TMZ show, you know what the initial newsroom meeting looked like, but Luisa is getting the opportunity to follow her story on Rufus’ buried report.  She meets another scientist, Isaac Sachs, who in cloak and dagger fashion gets her a copy of the report before he is transferred to another facility.  As she seems to have triumphed, and is on her way with the report back to the office, Bill Smoke runs her off the road down a cliff.  We might presume that she has died, but this is the “first” Luisa Rey mystery, so perhaps not.

Chapter 4: The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish

At this point, my attention is moving away from plot and into theme.  Mitchell is making the connections really explicit.  Cavendish is a vanity publisher who prints books that people write to share with their friends, family and network, so to speak.  It takes place in the early 21^st century.  Anyway, Cavendish is kind of a mess, a guy who runs a business that doesn’t make money, who clearly owes a lot of people money, and has burned a lot of bridges. He is proper on the surface, but is a little bit of a bigot, a wimp and a worm. 

He publishes a memoir, Knuckle Sandwich, written by a tough-guy, Dermot Hoggins, who ran a prison somewhere.  Hoggins seems to think that Cavendish is a commercial publisher, so he puts the squeeze on Timothy; he puts more of a squeeze on Felix Finch, a reviewer who panned the autobio even though it never hit a bookstore.  Actually, he throws Felix over a railing and kills him in the middle of a publishing party.  The very public murder turns the book into an overnight hit, and Cavendish is all of a sudden making some money.

One thing Timothy hadn’t thought of, however, is that the Hoggins family might want some of that money, contract terms be damned.  So Dermot’s brothers come to strong-arm Timothy, and he flees London.  Unfortunately for him, all the proceeds from Knuckle Sandwich have gone to pay back creditors, so he really doesn’t have any cash. He goes to see his brother, Denholme, and it turns out the bonds of fraternal obligation have frayed beyond repair.  Yet Denholme, seeing his brother’s desperation, arranges for him to find a place to lay low in Hull, in northern England. 

Timothy’s comedic railway journey takes him through a number of fits and starts until he finally finds his way to the final leg of the journey, at which point he meets a Rastafarian who gives him a little hit from a “cigar.”  Timothy doesn’t handle his first ganja experience very well, and after checking into what he thinks is a hotel, he collapses in his bed.  It turns out that good old Denholme has paid for Timothy to be committed to a nursing home, a “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” kind of home from which there is no escape.  After a few acts of futile rebellion that result in him being spanked and caned, Timothy resolves to find another way out.  And there this part of the story ends.

All that’s left of the first half of the novel is “The Orison of Sonmi-451” and “Sloosha’s Crossing.”  At some point very soon I’ll get to the “Important passages” part so I can undogear these pages. Ciao.

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell

Now is time to get the facts straight.

Chapter 1: The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing

This takes place in the 1850s or so on Ocean Bay, New Zealand ish.  Adam is a notary who for some reason has been a passenger on the Prophetess, his virtue and lack of seamanship unwelcome to the crew.  He meets an eccentric doctor named Henry Goose and later befriends him.  The two have church and a disdain for debauchery in common, and Dr. Goose treats Ewing’s parasite once they’re back aboard the Prophetess and headed for San Fran.  Goose has been taken on board rather than waiting for the Nellie (echoes of Conrad?) to take him to Sydney.

The style is lots of ampersands and a nineteenth century vocabulary and syntax that calls to mind Cold Mountain.

Ewing’s nemesis is Mr. Boerhaave, a Dutch first mate whose bullying is accomplished through direct threats of violence and thinly veiled threats of violence. There seems to be no third rail to his communication.  Ewing’s albatross is the palindromic Autua, a Moriori stowaway, one of the last of a peace-loving tribe enslaved by the warlike Maori. Autua’s position as a man of peace in a place of war parallels Ewing’s position as a man of virtue in a place of sin.

Ewing’s journal ends midsentence

Chapter 2: Letters from Zedelghem

Robert Frobisher is a gifted, uncompromising musician, a manipulative, scheming person who has been written out of his father’s will and is on the run from London creditors after he escapes from the London hotel room he never intended to pay for.  The story is told in energetic prose through letters that Robert writes to his friend Sixsmith in the summer of 1931.

Practically shillingless, Robert’s plan is to take a ferry to Belgium where he hopes to win the favor of the enigmatic composer Vyvyan Ayrs and earn a job as his amanuensis.  His plan is wildly successful: he transcribes Ayrs’ tar-tar tattys into notes; he helps to write a new composition whose performance in Cracow reenergizes Ayrs’ career and inspires him to keep writing; he has an increasingly complicated affair with Ayrs’ wife, including one suspenseful, somewhat comedic scene when Ayrs visits his room twice in one night while she (Jocasta) is in bed with Robert (it is probably worth noting that Ayrs’ is very old, is barely ambulatory, and nearly blind, while Jocasta is in her forties).

Despite the success Robert has in establishing his name with some of Europe’s most well-known conductors and composers, his inclination toward criminality (or maybe to advantage, or simply impulse) compels him to steal some literary treasures from Ayrs’ library and sell them to Jansch, an unscrupulous English book-dealer likened to Shylock. After Jansch gets drunk as they celebrate their shady deal, Robert rolls him for all the money in his wallet.

In the course of Robert’s journey through Ayrs’ library, he comes across a volume of Ewing’s journal, which to his dismay, ends midsentence.  So he asks Sixsmith, who is apparently a former lover as well as best friend of Robert’s, to find him the rest of Ewing’s book. Robert’s promiscuity and deviousness give him a Karamazovian sensuality that makes him a blend of Fyodor’s narcissism and Ivan’s rebellious intellectual integrity.

The chapter ends with Robert choosing not to make his getaway but instead signing on for another six month hitch working for Ayrs.

Chapter 3: Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery (up to p. 106)

In this story, Rufus Sixsmith (surprise!) is a scientist on the run from the corrupt forces of Seaboard Corporation, a nuclear energy conglomerate.  He is stowed away in a seedy apartment in Buenas Yerbas, CA, where he ends up stuck in an elevator waxing philosophical with the gossip journalist Luisa Rey, and spilling some personal stuff that will probably end up leading Luisa to some real reporting about problems with the plant, Swanekke 2, where Rufus was the only one of twelve scientists who did not yield to the thuggery and corruption of Seaboard’s CEO, Alberto Grimaldi.  We learn here that Caius, the place Robert had fled, is a college of Oxford (or maybe you knew that, but I didn’t), and that Rufus’s niece Megan had studied there in pursuit of her doctorate in physics. 

Luisa is somehow stuck where she is.  Her neighbor leaves her eleven year old son Javier home alone while she is either at work or having affairs with men who beat her and Javier, and Javier sneaks daily into Luisa’s apartment through her window.  She is trying to live up to the journalistic legacy established by her father, who had been one of only a handful of incorruptible cops on the BYPD before being blown up by a grenade in a post WWII battle with arms dealers and becoming a war correspondent in Korea and Vietnam.

At this point, she’s on the trail of an expose that nobody wants her to write, and the bad guys have tracked down Rufus Sixsmith and are on their way to take care of him.

Time frame – mid 1970s, post initial Three Mile Island protests and smack dab in the disco era when M*A*S*H reruns can be found on any channel, anytime.

Halfway through “Half-Lives,” so stay tuned.

Hard to believe it’s already Wednesday of the so-called vacation week.  Just sent the kids off to school for their two-day vacation from vacation, and now it’s time to get a thing or two down about our travels.  Later today or early tomorrow I’ll add some things from the notebook about this vacation’s reading, Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell.

First stop was Providence-ish, as we hit Smithfield, RI for Gaby’s confirmation party. It was just the Catholic side of the family, if you can call everyone Catholic, so it was a nice sibling and family reunion, as everyone was there.  Far more food than we could eat, a trellis of gluten-free cupcakes (I should find out what a gluten is, as it is very important that they be free), and a gaggle of kids playing a hide-and-seek game whose name I can’t remember – it’s the one in which everyone seeks and only one kid hides. Kate won when Aunt Maureen ensconced her in the cabinet under the sink ordinarily reserved for the garbage can.

After confirmation celebration, I and my girls and my brother and his girls headed east toward Plymouth, MA, where my brother’s snoring lifted the roof and set it down, lifted the roof and set it down.  You’d have been amazed, LeBron.  You think this kind of thing happens only in cartoons, or that there is something seriously structurally wrong with the house, but no – certain snorers have this kind of power, and my brother is one of them.  Fascinating.

Sunday found us on a trip to Boston, not to scout the Celtics, who are two possessions up on the Knicks as I write this, but to encounter some of the Revolutionary War stuff that Emma likes so well.  First stop was Southie to pick up Caitlin at her new digs. She and some friends had done a little birthday celebrating the night before, so Caitlin was stepping, how shall we say, gingerly.  Her apartment has a great location: walk to the corner, left on Summer Street, and before you know it, you’re at South Station.

We parked in a garage near Faneuil Hall and set out for a place to eat lunch.  The day was more warm than chilly, more sunny than cloudy, and Faneuil Hall was pretty crowded.  I had been here before, back in the old days, if you know what I mean, so it was kind of strange to go past Clark’s and The Black Rose and have those old memories come creeping up.  Caitlin suggested we eat at McFadden’s, and we were the only folks there, which tells you that the place you’ll find a table is at the outskirts of a tourist area, as nobody ever wants to stop at the first restaurant they walk by.  As I was recalling the memories of an era gone by, Caitlin was living them, and had to excuse herself after a failed attempt at eating to head back home to nap.  And thus, my daughters had their first lesson in hangovers.

Our visits to eastern cities are nothing without a little historical touristing, so we went first to the site of the Boston Massacre, an event that had earlier in the fifth grade year prompted Emma to charge Thomas Preston with murder, murder I say.  From there, it was up a few steps and into the Old State House Museum, where for some reason my children bought copies of the Declaration of Independence, as if we hadn’t gotten them last April in Philly.  The museum has some interactive exhibits, but not the high-tech kind characteristic of the Constitution Center in the polis of Brotherly Love – you might want to stop by before you dispatch the Sixers from the playoffs, LeBron. 

What was even better than the State House was seeing the view of North Boston and Logan Airport from the conference room at Aunt Mary Katherine’s office, up on the 26^th floor.  We pretty much triangulated the locations of the Old North Church and Paul Revere’s House from there, and drove by them shortly afterward, as parking is a bit scarce on North Boston’s narrow streets, and the clock was reaching that hour when we were going to have to begin the journey back to New York.

Other than those events, the vacation has been all like whatev.  Monday we picked up some necessary sporting goods, and Kate learned triple threat position and the jump stop.  Tuesday was a trip to Hop for the girls, and sitting in the lobby writing about Cloud Atlas for moi.  How’s that for a teaser into the next post?

Hey, did you notice that I hyperlinked the crap out of this post?  That's what a guy does when he's on vacation.  I think you'll learn a lot today, LeBron.