An Orison of Sonmi-451, The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish (themes)

          Now having read to page 387 (only 122 pages left!), I feel like I have a decent sense of Cloud Atlas.  While each story is distinct, there are undeniable themes that stretch across the entire novel.  So far the major ones I've noticed are slavery (occasionally with regards to race), perception of death, and corruption (especially in relation to corporations).

          David Mitchell's discussion of slavery begins with the very first chapter.  The Pacific islands Adam Ewing is staying at have a terrible history of Maori massacring and enslaving their peaceful neighbors, the Moriori.  Autua, a slave who joins Ewing on the Prophetess, is introduced to the story being whipped in punishment for his escape attempts.  In An Orison of Sonmi-451, the issue of slavery is not one race enslaving another, but one creating artificially creating another, the fabricants, and keeping them docile and ignorant of their status.  Upon her ascension, Sonmi-451 realizes that even if the word slavery is banned in Nea So Copros, fabricants are slaves, complete with collars.  In response, she wrote her "Declarations" in protest of the social structure and became a martyr.  Again in Sloosha's Crossin', a group of barbarians known as the Kona invade Zachry's homeland in an attempt to round up slaves.  Zachry and Meronym are forced to run and try to escape, unable to help the captured by themselves.  In a reversal of roles, Meronym, a Prescient from a more advanced civilization, is characterized as having darker skin.  While Meronym indicates that slavery is not limited to race, it is a persistent social system that characters are constantly struggling against.

          Across the six stories, characters perceive death in vastly different ways.  Luisa Rey does not look forward to death, yet she considers her pursuit of the truth of the danger of Swannekke worth the risk to her life.  Similarly, Sonmi-451 accepts her death sentence because her publicity caused her Declarations of freedom to become common knowledge.  They both are willing to die for a cause.  On the other hand, Zachry and Meronym decide not to sacrifice themselves.  As the only people not yet captured by the Kona, they are the only ones in a position to rescue the enslaved Valleymen.  But they are severely outnumbered, failure is guaranteed, and they chose to run for it and preserve their own lives in the hopes of helping in the future.  Cavendish, along with his friends, Ernie, Veronica, and Mr. Meeks, are also unwilling to accept death.  They launch a daring escape from Aurora House so that the can continue living life on their own terms.  As Cavendish said in conclusion, "[...] it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead", the "Undead" being those who do not live life to the fullest and simply await death (Mitchell 387).  As important as the perception of death is the idea of what comes after it.  While Cavendish and Meronym scoff at reincarnation, Cavendish even editing it out of the Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery manuscript, other elements in Cloud Atlas clearly support it.  The comet-shaped birthmark is the first indication, but also Luisa Rey's description of the extreme déjà vu she felt reading Frobisher's letters and Zachry's following passage: "Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul"(Mitchell 308).  Over all I would say that life is important (hence Cavendish, Zachry, and Meronym's defense of it), but sometimes the sacrifice of one is necessary for the good of many, for ideals like freedom and truth (hence Luisa Rey and Sonmi-451's acceptance of death).

          Like slavery, corruption is a persistent evil encountered in the book.  From the start in the Pacific Journal, the ship's captain doesn't keep Adam Ewing's room as private as what he paid for.  Dr. Goose is potentially poisoning Ewing for money, according to Frobisher.  In Letters From Zedelghem Ayrs creates a joint piece with Frobisher but passes it of as his own.  Frobisher himself has an affair with Ayrs' wife and sells some of Zedelghem's old books to make money on the side.  As Luisa Rey puts it, "Seaboard [Corporation] would assassinate a man of Sixsmith's stature [a Nobel laureate, veteran of the Manhattan Project], just to avoid negative publicity"(Mitchell 125).  And then Seaboard Corporation goes on to put the nearby city of Buenas Yerbas at danger with their faulty reactor and try to kill Luisa Rey.  In the Ghastly Ordeal Nurse Nokes and her associates abuse there power and turn Aurora House into a prison instead of an elderly home.  Nea So Copros, the corpocracy in An Orison of Sonmi-451, is completely corrupt and creates fabricant slaves.  It even forms an artificial resistance effort because "it attracts social malcontents like Xi-Li and keeps them where Unanimity [the police force] can watch them.  Secondly, it provides Neo So Copros with the enemy required by any hierarchical state for social cohesion"(Mitchell 348).  The over-corporatization side of corruption is emphasized in the juxtaposition of Neo So Copros and the back-to-basics Colony Sonmi-451 encounters.  In Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After, the primary act of corruption is Lyons betraying his fellow Valleymen  in favor of the barbaric Kona.  The list goes on; corruption is omnipresent.  Thus characters throughout the stories must struggle against it, facing the enduring conflict of good vs. evil.

          There are a couple smaller themes, too.  While I think they deserve a mention, they have a less important role.  Women's equality, for example, plays a huge role in the Luisa Rey Mystery, but it doesn't really expand to the other five stories.  Ideas about old age and the unwanted elderly surface primarily in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, but also in An Orison of Sonmi-451 where the old fabricants who outlived their usefulness are killed and butchered for meat and people get facescaping, an advanced form of plastic surgery, to hide their age.  Lastly, religion and faith are represented in multiple forms, from Christianity to idolism to the God-like representation of Papa Song with his Catechisms to the worship of Sonmi-451 to the use of judas as a an independent word and "augurin's" that tell the future.

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, An Orison of Sonmi-451, Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After (Characterization)

          Now on page 309, I've read through The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, An Orison of Sonmi-451, Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After.  Flipping through the remaining 200 pages, I can see that the remaining sections bear the same name as ones I've already read.  Based on this, I'm assuming that after Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After (which was the first story I feel like reached a real conclusion, unless you count Luisa Rey's (possible) death) Cloud Atlas will begin to cycle back on itself.  Up until now it has been a steady progression of stories set in the past, present, and then the future.  Now since it looks like Mitchell is going to revisit all the earlier sections in reverse order, I find it to be an appropriate spot to review the major characters (at this point I don't think any more will really be introduced).  On a side note, a huge motif in the book is a mysterious comet-shaped birthmark shared by characters across the different stories; I'll mention which characters I've noticed have the mark. (Robert Frobisher, Luisa Rey, Sonmi-451, and Meronym)
          The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing begins with Adam Ewing meeting Dr. Henry Goose on the beach.  While at first Ewing is off-put and considers Dr. Goose a little eccentric (he was collecting cannibal teeth for dentures, after all) but the two become fast friends after Ewing realizes "he is the only other gentleman on this latitude east of Sydney & west of Valparaiso" (Mitchell 5).  Together they play chess, have educated conversations, and attend church.  After the ship Ewing is paying passage on departs, with Dr. Goose as the new Ship' Doctor, a slave by the name of Autua reveals himself as a stowaway and begs Ewing to help him.  Ewing reluctantly agrees to try and convince the ship's captain to let him work for passage.  This action reinforces what has already been suggested about Adam Ewing's character: in addition to being a gentleman, he is passively against slavery.  While he sympathizes with Autua and the destruction of his people, he only helps him because he doesn't have much of a choice- Autua asked for help or death.  On the other hand, he does go out of his way to pay the cook double and get some food for Autua, realizing he hadn't eaten since they set sail.  Henry Goose's character, as discussed in the last post, is a little ambiguous.  While at first glance he is a gentlemanly and loyal friend, Frobisher suggests he is a deceptive doctor leeching money off Ewing's hypochondria.  While he does have morally questionable lines like "It's one thing to throw a blackie a bone, but quite another to take him on for life!  Friendships between races, Ewing, can never surpass the affection between a loyal gundog & master", it's not like that attitude is unusual around 1850 (Mitchell 37).  While I am inclined to follow Ewing's good impression of Dr. Goose, Mitchell wouldn't have included Frobisher's line without a good reason.  If I had to describe Autua, I would call him persistent and faithful.  Despite his repeated capture, Autua continued to try and escape slavery.  As for the faith part, Autua told Ewing "'Pain is strong, aye- but friends' eyes, more strong.'  I told him that he knows next to nothing about me & I know next to nothing about him.  He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that simple gesture were ample explanation" (Mitchell 29).  Though Autua only has an earlier eye contact with "friends' eyes" and D'Arnoq's, a mutual acquaintance's, word to base his opinion of Ewing on, Autua trusts him, with his life, to do what is ultimately right.
          The next chapter, Letters From Zedelghem, follows Robert Frobisher, a disgraced amateur musician, as he seeks to be and is the apprentice of famous composer Vyvyan Ayrs.  Frobisher is undeniably charismatic, managing to charm his way into pretty much anything, including a policeman's bike and Ayrs' own house.  Yet I find Frobisher dislikeable because, despite starting his story escaping through the window of a hotel he couldn't pay the bill for and begging Sixsmith, his pen pal, for money, he lacks humility.  When Ayrs refers to him as his aide-de-camp, Frobisher is offended, thinking "Aide-de-camp?  I'm his bloody general and he's the fat old Turk reigning on the memory of faded glories" (Mitchell 83).  Ayrs generously gave Frobisher housing and work, and it is through his fame that their joint piece, "Todtenvogel," was even noticed.  Yet Frobisher proceeds to have an affair with his wife, Jocasta Crommelynck, and sell some of the older books in Zedelghem's collection for personal profit.  He also has the comet-shaped birthmark.  Ayrs, on the other hand, is sickly, prideful, and set in his ways.  For example, his sickness is what gave Frobisher the idea to try and become his "amanuensis," when guests come he choses to play the music he composed, and when Frobisher first tries to record a tune for him, he refuses to name the key, time-signature, and notes, instead singing it in a terrible singing voice.  What's interesting is that Ayrs had a dream of the Papa Song café where Sonmi-451 works years in the future.  Jocasta is harder to define as a character; she is stiff and lady-like, but after her affair with Frobisher drags on, he reports her to be unstable.  If anything I would say she is a product of her circumstances.  Ayrs contracted syphilis in an affair of his own and hasn't been intimate with her since, her relationship with her daughter, Eva, is poor, most of her relatives have died off, leaving her isolated at Zedelghem.  The last major character in Letters From Zedelghem is Eva.  Frobisher describes her as "[...] a prissy missy, as hateful as my sisters, but with an intelligence to match her enmity.  Apart from her precious [horse] Nefertiti, her hobbies are pouting and looking martyred" (Mitchell 63).  Eva is unique because as of now she is non-essential to the plot.  However, she is repeatedly mentioned, indicating that she may play a role later on, perhaps by discovering the affair.
          Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery is more scattered, with a lot of characters in small roles.  Sixsmith, Frobisher's old correspondent, found design flaws in Seaboard Corporation's new power plant, called the HYDRA reactor, that endanger the nearby city of Buenas Yerbas.  The corporation is attempting to cover up his report, and managed to bribe or threaten all the other scientists into silence.  Though Sixsmith refuses to comply with the corporation, he is also too scared to simply speak out on his own.  He sets reporter Luisa Rey on the trail after they are trapped together on an elevator during a blackout.  Luisa Rey is obviously the star of the section, and she is a dogged reporter following in her father's footsteps and trying to uncover Seaboard Corporation's secrets.  After reading the Zedelghem letters from Sixsmith, she realizes that she has a similar comet birthmark.  She has a neighbor, Javier, a young boy in a troubled family situation who comes to her apartment sometimes.  As of now, his main purpose as a character seems to be showing Luisa Rey's kinder side.  Isaac Sachs, another minor character, worked with Sixsmith and, though he's scared of the repercussions the truth might bring, he helps Luisa Rey by hiding a copy of Sixsmith's incriminating report in her car.  On the Seaboard Corporation side of things, there are Alberto Grimaldi (the CEO of Seaboard Corporation), Joe Napier (a sort of head of security who recognizes some of the company's moral wrongs, but choses to overlook them in the weeks before he retires), Bill Smoke (an emotionally detached hitman), and Fay Li (a PR person who sympathizes with Luisa Rey's struggles as a professional woman, if only to gain an edge over her).
          The next section, The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, is written as Timothy Cavendish's memoir.  Cavendish's memoir begins (after a page and a half prelude) by describing how he and his publishing company fell into success.  Dermot Hoggins, a gritty, rough around the edges man, publicly pushed a critic of his failing autobiography, Knuckle Sandwich, off a building and said "So who's expired in an ending flat and inane quite beyond belief now?" (Mitchell 150).  The publicity of the murder makes  Knuckle Sandwich a hit, and Cavendish starts doing well until Hoggins' brothers, who are essentially thugs, show up asking for money.  Cavendish decides to escape to Aurora House on his brother's suggestion, leaving the publishing company in the hands of able-bodied Mrs. Latham, whom he describes as being able to "handle the Ten Plagues of Egypt" (Mitchell 158).  On a side note, Mrs. Latham is introduced wearing Nefertiti earrings given to her by Cavendish.  Though this is a clear connection to Eva and her horse, I don't know what it means.  Along his way to Aurora House, Cavendish recalls his youthful interactions with a young woman, Ursula.  Though Ursula never speaks in the section, she is an important figure to Cavendish, and her name becomes synonymous with nostalgia.  Upon arriving at Aurora House, Cavendish realizes it is an elderly home led (or ruled) by Mrs. Judd and Mrs. Noakes, two antagonist, authoritarian sisters ("Nurse" Noakes actually uses physical violence against Cavendish, who is then a reluctant resident of Aurora House).  On the whole, Cavendish is bravely willing to stand up for what he thinks is right, whether it is something like difficult ticket salespeople and his effective imprisonment at Aurora house, or something that doesn't impact him at all, like trying to stop a group of girls from littering.  Unfortunately, the aging Cavendish lacks the power to back up his words, which is part of what makes his ordeal so ghastly.
          An Orison of Sonmi-451 is an interview, produced for historical record-keeping purposes, with the revolution leader Sonmi-451 describing her past.  Her story is set in the future, where a group called the Purebloods holds power over the "fabricants," who are genetically modified and kept complacent with a substance called Soap.  In Sonmi-451's case, she worked nineteen hour days with no breaks at a Papa Song café.  However, in a college experiment the drugs in Sonmi-451's Soap began to be replaced, triggering her "ascension," where her intelligence and curiosity grew and she became conscious of her situation.  Sonmi-451 is then removed from the café and placed at the university, Taemosan, under Boom-Sook Kim, who was conducting the study.  However, Boom-Sook Kim and his friends, Min-Sic and Fang, are the privileged children of wealthy Purebloods, attending school just for show, and their care of Sonmi-451 alternates between neglectful and abusive.  Sonmi-451 is again rescued, and is this time placed under the care of Boardman Mephi.  Despite paying much more attention to Sonmi-451, I get the impression that Mephi is interested in the science of Sonmi-451 being the first fabricant to successfully go through ascension than her and her predicament as an intelligent fabricant.  For example, when Sonmi-451 is first taken from the Papa Song café and was just another semi-ascended fabricant, Mephi chose to fall asleep in the car instead of kindly explaining what was going on.  In contrast, Hae-Joo Im is a mysterious character assigned by Mephi to help Sonmi-451 learn, but who tries to get to know her personally and seems to take a more active stance against the unequal society.  Based on the conclusion of the first half of An Orison of Sonmi-451, where enforcers were attempting to capture Sonmi-451, he "xuded a grim authority" and said "Sonmi-451, I am not xactly who I said I am", Hae-Joo Im is about to become a more significant character, maybe joining Sonmi-451 in starting a revolution to stop the slavery of fabricants (Mitchell 235, 236).  Sonmi-451 herself was marked as special from the beginning because she had a comet birthmark despite the fact that fabricants are made without them.  She is a woman of growing intelligence and curiosity struggling to understand and comprehend society's social injustices.  The last major character in the section is the "Archivist" interviewing Sonmi-451.  Though he does not play a part in her story, at times the interview is more like a conversation, and the reader learns that the interviewer is a young Pureblood openly curious but entirely passive when it comes to the issues Sonmi-451 mentioned.
          The last section I read was Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After.  The three main characters are Zachary, Meronym, and Old Georgie.  Zachary is the narrator and lead of the story, which is about his evolving relationship with Meronym in the dystopia that follows An Orison of Sonmi-451's time, with some personal stories thrown in.  Zachary alternates between calling himself Zachary the Brave and Zachary the Cowardy (Yes, Cowardy, not Cowardly; the section has a funny slang to signify the time it is about).  While he always strives to be Zachary the Brave, he often falls short and disappoints himself.  These failures, whether it be not helping his pa and brother at Sloosha's Crossin' or his freakbirth "babbit" baby haunt him, but by the end he realizes that it's less a battle between Zachary the Brave and Zachary the Cowardy and more "Zachary the Soosider knucklyin' Zachary the S'viver [Survivor]", meaning he recognizes that some things are out of his control and he has to fend for himself (Mitchell 298).  Meronym, who has the comet birthmark, is a Prescient, one of the last vestiges of advanced civilization before the "Fall," and comes to live with Zachary's family to study their way of life.  She is compassionate (going against protocol to save Catkin), willing to take risks for the truth (climbing up Mauna Kea, a mountain riddled with negative folklore, to see old observatories), and a symbol of intelligence and wisdom.  She, being a Prescient, has "Smart," or scholarly knowledge and technology, and her extensive travels to other tribes make her worldly; she can comfortably tell Zachary what it means to be civilized, saying "savages an' Civ'lizeds ain't divvied by tribes or b'liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev'ry human is both, yay.  Old Un's got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals an' that's what tripped the Fall" (Mitchell 303).  Old Georgie is less of a character and more of an idea.  He is bad luck, the devil, temptation, and the evil little voice in someone's head all rolled into one.  When a Kona savage kills Zachary's pa and captures his brother, and looks at Zachary, "them eyes was Old Georgie's eyes" (Mitchell 241).  He can be blamed for practically anything.  What makes him character-like is the fact that he is repeatedly hallucinated by Zachary (or at least written into his storytelling) and the two have full conversations and arguments.
          Long story short, Cloud Atlas is a very long story.  There are enough characters for six individual books without the stories all being crammed together.  Hopefully, though, this exhaustive list is really comprehensive and will give a sense of section as well as each character and help me keep them straight in my head.

A lingering question...

          By now I've read far past the point where this was brought up, but I'm still not sure what to make of the following line from Robert Frobisher in the Letters from Zedelghem:  "Ewing puts me in the mind of Melville's bumbler Cpt. Delano in 'Benito Cereno,' blind to all conspirators- he hasn't spotted his trusty Dr. Henry Goose [sic] is a vampire, fueling his hypochondria in order to poison him, slowly, for his money" (Mitchell 64).  Though I doubt his medicine is helpful considering "the whites of my [Ewing's] eyes have a lemon-yellow aspect & their rims are reddened & sore", medicine wasn't exactly the same around 1850, so Dr. Goose's intentions are likely far from poison (Mitchell 39).  And while it is true that Dr. Goose decided join Adam Ewing on the ship, the Prophetess, after Ewing told him about his so called Ailment, I feel like there are reasonable explanations.  It was Cpt. Molyneux who requested Dr. Goose to join them as Ship's Doctor in the first place, and it was on this offer that he set sail on the Prophetess.  And if Dr. Goose did decide to go because of Ewing's Ailment, than couldn't it just as easily be a sign of friendship and generosity?  Besides, if Dr. Goose were poisoning him for money, he would require some kind of payment for his medicine.  But instead, "Henry [Goose] bridled when I [Adam Ewing] mentioned his fee.  'Fee?  You are no valetudinarian viscount with banknotes padding his pillows!  Providence steered you to my ministrations, for I doubt five men in this blue Pacific can cure you!  So fie on 'Fee'!  All I ask, dear Adam, is that you are an obedient patient' " (Mitchell 36).  So now I have to ask what Mitchell's purpose was in including this contradiction.  Is Ewing right in being "tearful with gratitude" and Frobisher's reliability as a narrator is called into question (Mitchell 36)?  Or is Mitchell drawing the reader's attention to an idea they wouldn't otherwise see?  Since the Pacific Journal section is written strictly from Ewing's perspective, we only see Dr. Goose in the same good light Ewing sees him in.  As readers, we are as "blind to all conspirators" as he is.  Sometimes it takes one to know one, and after mooching off his mentor, Vyvyan Ayrs, perhaps Frobisher is more apt to see Dr. Goose's true vampiric nature and his evaluation should be taken seriously.

The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, Letters from Zedelghem, and Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery (Style)

Ok, first blog post:

     At this point I have read up to page 142 in my version of the book, or through The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, Letters from Zedelghem, and Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery.  To say the least, Cloud Atlas' beginning is confusing.  Switching narrators or points of view in between chapters has become a widespread literary technique, yet Cloud Atlas takes it to the next level.  The first section, The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing is exactly what it sounds like: Adam Ewing's diary chronicling his time in the Pacific Ocean.  Yet the diary suddenly drops off by saying "I decided to conduct a short Bible Reading in his cabin in the 'lower church' of Ocean Bay's congregation, 'astraddle' the forenoon & morning watches so both starboard & port shifts might" and ending at the bottom of the page instead of at the end of the sentence (Mitchell 39).  Looking back, though, Mitchell's stylistic choice of ending midsentence makes more sense when the reader pictures it as the last pages of his diary being ripped out or missing.  In addition to the abruptness on the Ewing side of the transition, starting Letters from Zedelghem is awkward.  The letters are addressed to a mysterious Sixsmith and the narrator is unrecognizable.  More importantly, between the space of a page the reader teleports from Adam Ewing's California Gold Rush Era to 1931.  The next story change to Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery is less sudden:  Though it takes place in about the late 1970's and Luisa Rey is the lead character, it begins with a man identifiable as Sixsmith. 
     While writing several different loosely connected stories that traverse time is an unusual choice, Mitchell's ability to switch styles with each new story is truly impressive.  Each character has their own distinct voice, which is especially important in a book like Cloud Atlas with so many characters.  Adams Ewing writes in his diary with stiff older English and abbreviations that practically require you to have a dictionary next to you.  Robert Frobisher, the writer of the Letters from Zedelghem, has a cocky undertone, and, since Zedelghem is in Belgium, the section is interspersed with French (I found it helpful to have taken high school French, but that's certainly not necessary).  In the final section I read, Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, it even switched from a first person narrative to a novel thriller style, complete with many chapter.  In short, Cloud Atlas is a book with many elements, and the reader has to pay attention to catch Mitchell's subtleties.