The Cloud Atlas by Liam Callanan is a fascinating story based on the fact that between November 1944 and April 1945, Japan launched more than 9,300 hydrogen balloons carrying bombs that were intended to cause damage in Canadian and American cities, forests, and farmland. Only about 300 balloon bombs were found or observed in North America. They killed six people and caused a small amount of damage, but they were armed and lethal. Told in present time and in flashbacks, by Catholic missionary Louis Belk, the novel uses the story of the balloons as a backdrop to explore faith, survival in the wilderness, and love.Callanan’s description of the beliefs of the Yup’ik Eskimos and how they can blend with Christian beliefs is appealing. He paints vivid images of the ways touch, love, and belief affect lives and of the ways our environment shapes us. His main character explains: “Please understand, though, I have never debased my vows. I do not pretend to pray to god while secretly seeking contact with the spirits of whales or walruses. I render unto God what is God’s but in my prayers to Him, I have always asked that He make me aware to all things unseen, not simply His mysteries” (345).Belk goes to Alaska as a soldier, assigned to defuse bombs, but he comes back as a Catholic missionary to search for the truth about what happens during his tour of duty and about Yukon religious beliefs. Orphaned and unadopted, he grows up in the Mary Star of the Sea Home for Infants and children, south of Los Angeles, raised by nuns who “treated us like the grandchildren they never had.” When they give him enough money to go to high school seminary, although, he had “the pure, naïve desire to be His priest,” he instead takes a train to San Diego and enlists in the Army. “The world was on that train, and the world was going to war. …The train smelled like perfume and aftershave and the ocean … I enlisted because I thought it the only other option God could possibly forgive” (84-85).Being very smart, but a lousy shot, he is assigned to the bomb squad, taught to live by the slogan “careful and correct” (47), and sent to Alaska to serve under deranged Captain Gurley. Gurley, a man who “left Princeton a semester early to work in OSS research and development” (102), speaks Japanese and is “heir to a fortune (from fountain pens of all things)” (102), but Gurley screws up his military career early, using classified information that is a trap, and never recovers. His peers and superiors consider him a joke. Most all information about the Japanese balloons is classified, but Gurley knows they are real and takes his mission to find them seriously.The woman in the story, loved by Belk and by Gurley, is Lily who says she is part Eskimo and part Russian and that “My father hauled my mother off when I was four or five to “Who knows? They left and they left me” (89). “Lily reads palms and tells fortunes in the Starhope Building, room 219, most days, 5-7. Careful and correct” (47). Lily believes that she has some mystic powers, as does Ronnie, the local shaman. SPOILER ALERT – THE THIRD PARAGRAPH BELOW REVEALS THE ENDING.The book is divided into three parts, each prefaced by a partial description of an incident that changes Belk’s life. Belk narrates in first person, from his current position at the bedside of Ronnie who is dying, interspersing flashbacks. Belk and Ronnie have negotiated a type of truce and friendship after years of antagonism over religion, the influence of white culture on the Eskimos, and Ronnie’s excessive drinking. In fact, Ronnie has been working with Belk at in the hospice at the Quyana (thank you in Yup’ik) House hospital in Bethel, Alaska. Belk has arranged for Ronnie to serve as an assistant chaplain (18-19) despite the fact that Ronnie does not believe in God or Catholicism. Belk has been asked to retire, not responded and is awaiting a visit from higher church powers to persuade him. He believes their concern is his association with Ronnie and the mystic beliefs of the Yup’ik Eskimos. He describes his attitude toward those beliefs in a word: “… the word that’s become a central tenet of my amalgamated Alaskan faith, a word that inevitably becomes part of any religion that spends too much time in the subzero subartic dark: maybe. No one from Outside understands this law of the bush. No one understands how rock-solid principles can slide here; how black and white so inexorably mists to gray” (10).Ronnie knows he is dying and he wants “to pass on his stories, from one man to another, so they could pass on to still another, and another, so that the knowledge and spirit of the Yup’ik would not vanish from the earth. And …He had something to tell me … A secret. Something I should know, ‘after all this time’ ” (5). Ronnie wants a bracelet that will signal that he is a DNR patient and he wants “no morphine” so he will be able to tell Belk his story. When Belk figures all of this out, he decides to tell Ronnie his story, too, so both will get “release, reward” (21).The title of the story comes from a book, “a journal, really filled with page after page of drawings, charts and notes: (197) maps where balloons should land. It was originally the property of Saburo, “Japanese, a soldier, a spy, sent behind enemy lines to see if early tests of a frightening new device were having any success” (199). Lily falls in love with Saburo and becomes pregnant with his child, but when the baby comes, Lily has difficulty, and although Ronnie is called and believes his spirit wolf could save the baby, Ronnie intervenes, recognizing and distrusting the baby’s Japanese heritage, and the child dies. He regrets his choice, but cannot make amends more than to try to guide Saburo to a safe place for the child’s burial. They are caught, returning to Bethel, and the soldiers take Saburo’s journal, eventually giving it to Gurley.Lily befriends Gurley to get back the journal, but falls in love with him. Then Belk arrives and she senses that Saburo has sent him to help her. She tells Belk and then Gurley about Saburo, creating anger in both, and all three end up in the wild where they find a balloon carrying a Japanese boy. Gurley says he wants to blow up the boy and kill Lily, but Belk sets the bomb so that if Gurley detonates it, it will kill Gurley. To his surprise, when he tells Lily what he has done, she runs to Gurley, and both die in the explosion. Just before this she tells Belk that she believes that she has failed Saburo by falling in love with someone else while his spirit and that of their son are wandering, waiting for her help. Belk believes Lily’s touch enables him to learn the boy’s story (335-341) and Lily’s voice guides him and the boy to the medical care, but the boy dies, too, and Belk goes AWOL until a Catholic missionary convinces him to go to seminary. Belk returns to Alaska, still in love with Lily to do what ever he can to free her spirit. After he and Ronnie exchange stories, Belk goes out to seek Ronnie’s tuunraq or spirit helper, and Belk and the wolf exchange breaths, Belk believes that he is giving Lily’s son, Ronnie, Lily, and Japanese boy the breath they need “to do the work that the spirit world requires” (325).
I was drawn to this book simply because it had the unfortunate luck of sharing an almost identical title to Cloud Atlas. That book has of course garnered critical acclaim and is now a major motion picture, so it came as a bit of a surprise to me that there was also a book called The Cloud Atlas that was published in the same year by an imprint of the same publishing house. What are the odds of that? That appealed to me on some twisted level, though, and I felt compelled to read a book which seems relegated to the status of dirty stepchild in the wake of the other Cloud Atlas's fame and fortune.This book is a story about a real life last-ditch weapons program implemented by the Japanese at the tail end of WWII. Bombs were attached to what were essentially paper balloons, and these contraptions were floated across the jet stream with the intent of wreaking havoc on the North American continent. These balloons were pretty much the first intercontinental weapons, and they were the cause of the only reported deaths in the continental US caused by enemy fire.The story blends past and present by relating the main storyline as a series of flashbacks from a present-day character, an Alaskan priest who was a WWII bomb disposal soldier tasked with helping classify the threat level posed by the Japanese bomb balloons. While I really enjoyed the first half of the novel, it quickly devolved into a "lite" version of Heart of Darkness. Just substitute the wilds of Alaska for the Congo and it has much the same flavour, although it lacks the same impact.
What do You think about The Cloud Atlas (2004)?
Like many, I thought this was "Cloud Atlas", but it is not. Not that I was particularly excited about reading it, I was just looking for something new to read over the summer. Besides a little bit of confusion during the first quarter of the book, it didn't bother me that this wasn't the book I was intending to read.I really liked being introduced to the history Balloon Bombs sent by the Japanese during WWII. I had heard about it before (maybe in a trivia book??), but didn't know much about it. Because of this book I spent a few hours researching the topic, viewing some videos, analysing maps, etc. But I did not like any of the characters in the book. The main character, in his younger years, was like a puppet watching things happen around him. I just couldn't connect. I really disliked all the other people. And it just wasn't believable to me. There are some supernatural aspects to this book, but that is not why it wasn't believeable; usually that kind of thing is interesting to me.. It was the whole situation. My recommendation is, that if you are interested in the history, go research information about the Japanese Balloon bombs and skip this book. National Geographic has a cool training video from the time: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/ne...
—Candie
I really really didn't like this book.I'll start by saying that I had no intention of reading this. I like many others picked up this book thinking that it was the book that the upcoming movie "Cloud Atlas" is based on. This has become a lesson in how important the word "the" really is! So when I realized my mistake I thought okay I'll try reading this book since it takes place in WWII and focuses on a topic I have never heard of before - the Japanese sending balloon bombs to America. Well so much for being interesting. I don't doubt Callanan's way with words his phrasing really isn't the problem. The problem is that the story never becomes engaging and I never found myself caring about these characters at all. Our main character Louis Belk is reflecting on is wartime experience to a dying Shaman by the name of Ronnie but I found his story so disjointed. He by accident joined the army and by accident got into the bomb squad. He finds himself in Alaska under the direction of Captain Gurley who is really a discusting character. He finds himself falling in love with a local girl by the name of Lily but of course she's involved with the Captain. What he comes to realize is Lily is using them both to find out what happened to her real love, the one who knows all about the balloon bombs. Honestly I'm bored just typing this. The story literally never gets off the ground and never becomes more than exactly what the summary says. It's a shame because the topic is fasinating - so Japan really tried to "bomb" America with these balloons? I'll have to do some research on it. In the end though the story wasn't about the bombs it was about a young solider who honestly had no clue what was going on.I wouldn't waste my time with this one, life is too short!
—Barbara
Okay, so I meant to read "Cloud Atlas" which is a different book, apparently, than "The Cloud Atlas" (seriously, how could these books have such similar names?). Anyway, it turned out okay because The Cloud Atlas was a wonderful book. Set in Alaska, it is the story of paper balloon bombs developed by the Japanese. These balloons flew across the ocean and landed in America. The story switches back and forth between two times in the life of a priest - his time in the army bomb squad, tasked with defusing these bombs, and the present, where he is a priest at the deathbed of his friend and nemesis, a native shaman. The story is dreamy and surreal at times, but the images are lovely and lasting. I highly recommend making the same mistake I did and pick this book up.
—Samantha
