Cloud Atlas Ch. 1

[Will Layman]

The first section of CLOUD ATLAS absolutely compelled me forward.  Those who
found it unreadable kind of have me baffled.  I found it compulsively
readable, as our odd, affable narrator introduced us to interesting
characters, mixed personal narrative with history, and even gave us a bit of
an adventure yarn.

I particularly enjoyed the fact that the subplot of Ewing's brain-centered
parasite suggests an organic cause for him to be an unreliable narrator.

The diary provides us with several different strands pointing forward -- the
footnote writer/offspring, the grateful Moriori seaman/stowaway,
molar-collecting Dr. Henry, Raphael . . ., each sympathetically painted so
that we want to know their story.  A vague mystery hangs over the whole
enterprise.

The M&D connections go beyond the narrations to the invocation of colonial
racism and its consequences.

Can't wait to see how it plays out.

-- Will

On 7/10/05 10:51 PM, "jbor at bigpond.com" <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:

> I'll start, then. No spoilers.
> 
> The first chapter is written as a fragment of the journal of Adam
> Ewing, supposedly written in the mid-to-late 1840s. Ewing is an
> American notary (he is scorned as "Mr Quillcock") who has just been in
> Sydney in the colony of New South Wales on business and is returning
> home to San Francisco, where "gold-fever" is rife. The 'Prophetess',
> the commercial schooner he is a passenger on, has had to stop over for
> repairs on the main island of the Chatham Islands, a New Zealand
> dependency comprising ten small islands about 800 km east-south-east of
> Wellington NZ.
> 
> http://www.chathams.com/
> 
> (From memory, it was the first inhabited place in the world to
> celebrate the new millennium.)
> 
> Embedded in Ewing's account of his exploits is a potted history of the
> Moriori natives of the islands told by Mr D'Arnoq, the preacher on
> Chatham Island. Ewing writes of D'Arnoq's narrative: "His spoken
> history, for my money, holds company with the pen of a Defoe or
> Melville ... " (p.10). I guess it's possible that Ewing had read or
> knew of Melville's _Typee_ (1846) and _Omoo_ (1847), as these and the
> other early works of Melville's were well-received and instantly
> popular.
> 
> While the chapter is written in a faux 19th C. style, it's not as
> stylised as the Rev'd Cherrycoke's narration in _M&D_. Mainly it's just
> the use of the ampersand, some old-fashioned vocabulary, and the formal
> register which mark it as 19th C. language; but it's also
> historically-situated through a representation of the characters'
> various attitudes towards race and the terms used to describe different
> racial groups. The writing is both accessible and effective. Ewing does
> come across in his use of language as a bit twee and prudish, but I
> take that to be part of the characterisation (i.e. he's generally
> perceived as a "Mr Quillcock".)
> 
> Some other possible connections with Pynchon's work, apart from the
> obvious comparisons to _M&D_ and Cherrycoke:
> Ewing went to New South Wales to "locate the Australian beneficiary of
> a will executed in California." (p. 10)
> The footnote on p. 21 seems to have been inserted by Ewing's son (or
> daughter, but it sounds like a masculine voice), which recalls Herbert
> Stencil and Sidney Stencil's diaries in _V._ (At this point it's a bit
> of a mystery, that footnote.)
> The subject matter and use of historical detail are very familiar, as
> is the uncertainty attaching to the various levels of narrative. I
> particularly liked the debate on pp. 16-17 about the best way "to
> *civilze* the black races", which ends:
> As many truths as men. Occasionally I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in
> imperfect simulacrums of
> itself, but as i approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the
> thorny swamp of dissent. (p. 17)
> 
> Mostly it's historically accurate. I'm not sure that the adjective
> "Australian" would have been current in the contexts it is used by
> Mitchell (Ewing also describes the 'Nellie' as "an Australian steamer"
> on p. 5), but Tasmania was known as Van Diemen's Land until 1855 and
> the general information about tribal conflicts (the subjugation of the
> Moriori by the New Zealand Maoris) and British colonialism in the
> period ring true. For example, the reference to the Moriori's
> "woebegone cousins of Van Diemen's Land" (p. 11) is an allusion to the
> systematic extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines by the white
> settlers during the 19th Century. (Truganini, the last full-blooded
> Tasmanian Aborigine, died in 1876.)
> 
> http://www.africawithin.com/rashidi/destruction_aborigines.htm
> 
> The placenames and geography of Chatham Island seem accurate. Details
> about whaling, sealers, multi-ethnic crews, medical treatments and
> protocols, colonial routines and attitudes, inter-tribal conflict in
> the South Pacific, slavery, and the contrasts between the church and
> the public house, polite society and the bordello, are well-rendered.
> 
> While it's supposed to be a journal, there is quite a bit of dialogue,
> and the voices of some of the other characters (Dr Henry Goose, Mr
> Boerhaave, Cpt. Molyneux, Autua the stowaway) are articulated pretty
> well by Mitchell. The mysteries of the plot (the "dendroglyphs", the
> footnote, Rafael, Ewing's "condition" and the narcotic remedy
> administered him by Goose) pique the reader's interest.
> 
> The chapter ends in mid-sentence (p. 39), with Ewing beginning a
> comment about how he had just reread an earlier journal entry (which is
> also not included in the chapter) describing his first meeting with
> "Rafael", an Australian and one of the ship's crew towards whom Ewing
> seems to be especially partial. On board the ship, Rafael has just sung
> the song 'Oh, Shenandoah'.
> 
> best
> 
>