The germ of the opening (and closing) Adam Ewing narrative, about a notary crossing the Pacific in the 1850s, comes from a section in Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel, about a Maori tribe called the Moriori, who discovered what we now call the Chatham Islands, but within a few generations “forgot” both their Aotearoan homeland and how to build seagoing canoes, and came to believe that their islands were the only land in the oceanic cosmos. This combines two of my favourite themes: islands, and the fragility of knowledge. For mid-19th-century language I ransacked Herman Melville, in particular Moby-Dick and his superb sketches of the Galápagos Islands, The Encantadas.
Robert Frobisher, the louche second narrator of Cloud Atlas, can trace his ancestry to a book called Delius As I Knew Him by the frail composer’s amanuensis, Eric Fenby. An early reader commented that Ewing and Frobisher sounded too alike, so I made Ewing straighter and Frobisher more morally ambiguous and sexually unfussy. Frobisher’s language comes from Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood.
Luisa Rey, an American investigative journalist, is a mix of the 1970s TV detectives I enjoyed as a kid, All the President’s Men and James Ellroy, whose plot-velocity always impresses me. Luisa appears in a short scene in my first novel, Ghostwritten, as an older woman – this was the second time I’d re-employed a character from an earlier book. Timothy Cavendish, Cloud Atlas’s fourth protagonist, also has a short scene in Ghostwritten.
The care home that Cavendish finds himself incarcerated in comes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a young man’s fear of senescence. My teenage reading diet was rich in colourfully jacketed science fiction, so conjuring up an underground dome staffed by clones for my novel’s fifth section came naturally enough. Architectural features from pioneering SF classics such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and The Machine Stops by EM Forster – yes, that EM Forster – are present, with rich dollops of Blade Runner. The university where Sonmi is housed is a carbon copy of the technical college where I worked in Japan and wrote a chunk of the novel. The question/answer format for the story was inspired by (if that’s the right verb) those interviews you get in Hello! magazine, where every question is a loaded one.
Cloud Atlas’s central section is set two or three centuries from now in Hawaii, whose inhabitants are well on the way to resembling the Moriori of the Adam Ewing section. On my bleaker days, humanity’s future looks disturbingly like its past.
Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker impressed me enormously (still does), and my characters speak a similar broken-down mutation of English. I visited the radio telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea in 2001, and sometimes a place screams at you to use it, so this is where my protagonist Zachary undergoes his own temptations of Christ. Structure-fanciers will note that this scene is the structural peak, or mid-point, of the entire novel.
great books
Faith, the least exclusive club on earth has the craftiest doorman. Everytime I’ve stepped through its wide open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (via quotasians) ☀
Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of our time. The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has gone too far for me. Such commercialisation has reduced the esthetic and philosophical impact of this creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: turning my head away. Christopher Tolkien ☀
[Orwell] himself seems to have thought that the exigencies of poverty, ill health, and overwork were degrading him from being the serious writer he might have been and had reduced him to the status of a drudge and pamphleteer. Reading through these meticulous and occasionally laborious jottings, however, one cannot help but be struck by the degree to which he became, in Henry James’s words, one of those upon whom nothing was lost. By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage. The Man On Whom Nothing Was Lost ☀
Reading great books is vital for anyone who wishes to become a liberally educated human being. There is a great need these days—there has been for a long time now—for academic programs devoted to liberal education. Such programs are sprouting all over the nation, many of them at Christian colleges and universities. But an overwhelming trend toward the non-liberal persists. All too often we confuse education with professional training, genuine understanding with know-how, and learning with achievement on tests and with measurable results. The professions are, to be sure, necessary and noble—necessary because they minister to the demands, needs, and wellbeing of everyday life, noble because they inspire lives of achievement, service, and self-sacrifice. But human life is not co-extensive with professional life. There are also the lives we lead apart from our jobs and professions, the lives we lead in so far as we are human beings. It is this life, human life insofar as it is human, that liberal education seeks to cultivate and perfect. It is the life not of our business but of our leisure. It is the life we lead when, free of the burden of working for a living or striving for professional achievement, we are left to ourselves, to our families, and to our friends. It is the life that finds us, after a long day’s work, huddled up in a cozy chair with a book, or listening to some of our favorite music, or enjoying conversation with friends. It is also the life of our moral action and activity as citizens. Winged Words: On the Importance of Reading and Discussing Great Books ☀
A part of me agrees. I want to be faithful to the inspired words of the Bible, not bend them to fit my own desires and whims. Being a person of faith means trusting God’s revelation, even when the path it reveals is not comfortable.
But another part of me worries that a religious culture that asks its followers to silence their conscience is just the kind of religious culture that produces $200 rewards for runaway slaves. The Bible has been “clear” before, after all—in support of a flat and stationary earth, in support of wiping out infidels, in support of manifest destiny, in support of Indian removal, in support of anti-Semitism, in support of slavery, in support of “separate but equal,” in support of constitutional amendments banning interracial marriage.
In recent decades the sciences have made vertiginous leaps in understanding, while technology has given us secular miracles like smartphones, genome scans and stunning photographs of outer planets and distant galaxies. No historian with a long view could miss the fact that we are living in a period of extraordinary intellectual accomplishment. Nor is our newfound sophistication confined to science. It’s easy to focus on the idiocies of the present and forget those of the past. But a century ago our greatest writers extolled the beauty and holiness of war. Heroes like Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson avowed racist beliefs that today would make people’s flesh crawl. Women were barred from juries in rape trials because supposedly they would be embarrassed by the testimony. Homosexuality was a felony. At various times, contraception, anesthesia, vaccination, life insurance and blood transfusion were considered immoral. Ideals that today’s educated people take for granted — equal rights, free speech, and the primacy of human life over tradition, tribal loyalty and intuitions about purity — are radical breaks with the sensibilities of the past. These too are gifts of a widening application of reason. Steven Pinker ☀
As literacy and education and the intensity of public discourse increase, people are encouraged to think more abstractly and more universally. That will inevitably push in the direction of a reduction of violence. People will be tempted to rise above their parochial vantage points – that makes it harder to privilege one’s own interest over others. Steven Pinker ☀
…I wish David Graeber would stop stamping around and announcing how very integral he was in starting the Occupy movement. I’m sure that’s true. Good for him. But an anarchist, making an explicit plea against the movement police, in the context of an anti-authoritarian movement… well, there’s better ways he could spend his energy than broadly waving at his own authority. It’s not just that piece, either. There’s such a fussiness to his discussion of his own influence. It’s pregnant with a desire to say what he knows better than to say: that he has some sort of ownership over it all. L’Hôte ☀
What we’ve seen over the last 30 years is a war on the human imagination. That’s the other starting point for this book—that in 2008 we had this crash, and all these assumptions we’ve been told we’ve had to accept for 30 years came crashing to the ground along with the market. One of them is the assumption that markets are actually self-sustaining. Obviously not true. Another one was that the people running them are competent. For years we were told that they aren’t very nice people—they’re greedy bastards, actually—but they know what they’re doing. All other systems just don’t work. These guys are incredibly bright, they’re incredibly competent. No, it turns out actually that they don’t even understand the working of their own financial instruments, or as far as they do, they’re engaged in scams. They trashed the entire system. Assumption number three is that all debts ought to be repaid. Actually, no, debts don’t really need to be repaid, because AIG, who owes money, can wave a variety of different magic wands and debts can be made to disappear. Once you understand that the narrative we’ve been handed has been false, you’d think this would be the moment when you start thinking about larger questions: Why do we have an economy? What is debt? What is money? How could these things be organized differently? What do we need to keep and what do we change? You would think this would be the moment for international discussion about the basic assumptions that we’ve been making, and it seemed for about two weeks that it was going to happen. David Graeber ☀
In Roman law, property, or dominium, is a relation between a person and a thing, characterized by absolute power of that person over that thing. This definition has caused endless conceptual problems. First of all, it’s not clear what it would mean for a human to have a “ relation” with an inanimate object. Human beings can have relations with one another. But what would it mean to have a “ relation” with a thing? And if one did, what would it mean to give that relation legal standing? A simple illustration will suffice: imagine a man trapped on a desert island. He might develop extremely personal relationships with, say, the palm trees growing on that island . If he’s there too long, he might well end up giving them all names and spending half his time having imaginary conversations with them. Still, does he own them ? The question is meaningless. There’s no need to worry about property rights if noone else is there. David Graeber ☀
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker presents data showing that human violence, while still very much with us today, has been gradually declining. Moreover, he says, “over the long sweep of history, women have been and will be a pacifying force. Traditional war is a man’s game: tribal women never band together to raid neighboring villages.” As mothers, women have evolutionary incentives to maintain peaceful conditions in which to nurture their offspring and ensure that their genes survive into the next generation.
If every idea can get picked up by other people then that means they spread like a virus. An idea infects other people as it goes through society. So with more connections between people (like the Internet) more ideas get picked up and fewer ideas die out. I think we’re about to reach a tipping point where each idea will give rise to more than one idea. And that means the number of ideas is just going to go crazy. I mean, you think we have a lot of ideas now - just you wait. A few years time and this world is going to be just Idea Planet. My New Book: Explosion! ☀
A GNT creation ©2007–2013
