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.