Vonne Gut Reactions: Cat's Cradle

Here's the stuff I've been looking for, a Kurt Vonnegut novel that I can say that I absolutely loved without reservation.

We are absent any sort of alien or time travel, though there is a science fiction aspect to the concept of ice-nine which leads to the tornadoes on the cover shown in today's post.

A few things I've been noticing along the way so far that I need to remember to check in before we wrap up Cat's Cradle and head on to God Bell You, Mr Rosewater or Pearls Before Swine: idealized images of women and Vonnegut's opinion of religion.

The second certainly comes up - and could be said to be the dominant theme of this novel. Of the former, I can say that there seems to be at least a little improvement. We'll get back to those two, however.

SPOLIERS - be warned

First, as I do, I'll offer up a little summary.

Our narrator and main character, John, begins the story researching a book about what happened on the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. In the course of his investigation, John (no last name ever given) finds himself corresponding with the children of the fictitious Felix Hoenikker, father of the atomic bomb, as well as people around Ilium where Hoenikker did his atomic research. In the course of his investigations, John is introduced to the concept of ice-nine one which Hoenikker's obsessive attention was focused when he passed away many years prior.

When his research turns up little suggesting that his book would be feasible or interesting enough to continue to pursue, John turns his attention to a commissioned piece on Jullian Castle, a former playboy who has turned his charitable attention to building and running a hospital on the island nation of San Lorenzo. On the plane to the island, John meets up with two of the Hoenikker children who are on their way to meet their long-lost brother who is now a 'general' on San Lorenzo. Once there, John's journey takes a few unexpected turns as he briefly becomes the ruler of the island, marries the woman he loves, converts to a new religion, saves and then inadvertently destroys the world.

No biggie, just the end of all life as we know it.
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This is the first novel in which Vonnegut reuses some of the settings and people in his fictional world. It's something tat I know comes back in many of his later novels.

We find ourselves back in Ilium, NY at the Ilium Research and Machine Works, the military installation where Hoenikker and other scientists partake in the pursuit of research for research's sake, looking into whatever happens to catch their attention and free to pursue whatever explorations that attention happens to flicker onto.

We also make a brief check-in on the Rumfoord Estate which played so prominently in The Sirens of Titan, this time a stop over for Bokonon to do a little yard work.

Vonnegut also continues to mention Indianapolis as a hometown or brief stop over for many of his characters, even going so far as to mention in this book that one of the characters finds Hoosiers running businesses and governmental posts all around the world.
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Vonnegut also uses a another koan that will reappear in his later book, mentioning that the birds make the sound 'potee-phweet'.
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I am not familiar with the word oubliette which Vonnegut uses to describe the hidden basement fortress in which our narrator waits out the initial destruction of the world. I had to look that one up.
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Slaughterhouse Fiveis subtitled the Children's Crusade and finds Vonnegut in an old army buddy's kitchen hearing the buddy's wife accuse them of having been children when they fought in World War II.

Here in Cat's Cradle Vonnegut has the new ambassador to San Lorenzo gives a speech paying tribute to the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy (of San Lorenzo) in which he speaks of 'children dead, all dead, all murdered in war. It is customary on days like this to call such lost children men. I am unable to call them men for this simple reason: that in the same war in which lo Hoon-yera Mora-toorz tut Zamoo-cratz-ya [Hundred Martyrs to Democracy in the San Lorenzan dialect] died, my own son died...I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die...And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the hundred lost children of San Lorenzo, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind."

Vonnegut's opinions of the world were clearly shaped by his time in World War II, and he does not speak of the glories of war but rather of the foolishness of war, of the need to and impossibility of never fighting another war. He doesn't hope to stop wars because he would sooner hope to stop wind, but rather Vonnegut seems to want us all to recognize that war serves no purpose other than to thin our ranks.
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The father of Mona Aamons Monzano, our story's image of perfect beauty - more on that in a bit, was a Finn who

'was captured by the Russians, then liberated by the Germans during the Second World War...forced to serve in Wermacht engineer unit that was sent to fight the Yugoslav partisans. He was captured by Chetniks, royalist Servian partisans, and the by Communist partisans who attacked the Chetnicks. He was loberated by Italian parachutists who surprised the Communists, and he was shipped to Italy.

The Italians put him to work designing fortifications for Sicily. He stole a fishing boat in Sicily, and reached neutral Portugal.

While there, he met an American draft dodger named Julian Castle"

World War II was an intermingling of people of all nationalities, something that Vonnegut tells again and again in his books.
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Now, to the recurring themes of religion and idealized women.

On page 219 of Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut writes that "[A]ll religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies."

One of the major plot threads in this book is the foolishness of religion, the idea that religion is simply a way for people to find comfort in something but which clearly offers Vonnegut no comfort at all.

Vonnegut even has our narrator end the book inspired by the words of Bokonon who has written...

If I were a younger man, I would write the history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe; and I would lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison [ice-nine] that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose and You Know Who.

There's not a much stronger statement for Vonnegut to make about religion than that.

The religion of Bokononism is one made up entirely of inspirational lie, openly told as lies and commented as such. One of the more apocryphal quotes attributed to Vonnegut - and written in his own hand - is that he hoped when he died that people would say "Kurt's in Heaven now...it's one of [his] favorite jokes."
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From Wikipedia...

"After World War II, Kurt Vonnegut worked in the public relations department for the General Electric research company. GE hired scientists and let them do pure research, and his job was to interview these scientists and find good stories about their research. Vonnegut felt that the older scientists were indifferent about the ways their discoveries might be used. The Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir, who worked with Vonnegut's older brother Bernard at GE, became the model for Dr. Felix Hoenikker. Vonnegut said in an interview with The Nation that "Langmuir was absolutely indifferent to the uses that might be made of the truths he dug out of the rock and handed out to whoever was around, but any truth he found was beautiful in its own right, and he didn’t give a damn who got it next.

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We again get a taste of the idea that you are what you pretend to be, particularly if you pretend to be it long enough. In this case, Bokonon and Earl McCabe landed together on the shores of San Lorenzo. Once they realized that there was no reasonable way to improve the lives of the San Lorenzans, they chose to instead split their efforts, one becoming the epitome of good, a founder of a new religion who existed only as a hidden seer in the jungle, perfect good. McCabe, on the other hand, became the leader of the government, choosing to outlaw Bokononism and become the purity of 'evil'. Eventually, McCabe and his successor, 'Papa' Monzano, become true dictators, even impaling their subjects on the Hook.
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Things are slightly improved in Vonnegut's treatment of women, but only slightly.

We have this time two examples of womanly perfection, women who are so gorgeous, perfect, loving, and wonderful that they cannot possibly be characters of more than one single dimension. Dr Hoenikker's first wife, Emily, is described by a stonecarver as "my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it'll be her wings and not her face that'll make my mouth fall open. I've already seen the prettiest face that ever could be. There wasn't a man in Ilium County who wasn't in love with her, secretly or otherwise. She could have had any man she wanted."

She is blindly devoted to Dr Hoenikker, a man whose one show of humanity toward his children is received with terror, sending his son screming from the house.

Mona Aamons Monzano is described by John as "the most heart-breakingly beautiful girl [he] ever hope[s] to see." Her beauty is so total and unassailable that she is the most treasured natural resource of San Lorenzo.

We do, however, get two more realistic female characters: Angela Hoenikker and Claire Minton. Claire is the wife of the new American ambassador to San Lorenzo, and while her part is certainly small, she isn't described to as being perfectly gorgeous or without flaw. She is a professional indexer who is able to tell much about Phillip Castle, Jullian's son, just from the index that he writes for his own book.

Angela Hoenikker is a new species for Vonnegut. She isn't a gorgeous woman. She has limited talents - taking care of her father, playing the clarinet - and a fairly miserable inner life and marriage. She actually exists as a semi-three-dimensional character here. She isn't our lead character by any mean, but she isn't a blank slate against which the male characters can throw their fantasies.

I don't know if this sort of growth will continue, but it's a solid start. If Vonnegut keeps up this growth, he just might be a decent writer.
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The whole ice-nine thing...

I find the idea fascinating. There's just enough science there that I can accept it. I know that the phase diagram for water does have a number of different ice phases, none of which - by my understanding - copies itself instantly to water surrounding it.

The description of Hoenikker's ability to explain scientific ideas so clearly that anyone could understand, followed immediately by Vonnegut's explanation of ice-nine's properties and the analogy of stacking cannonballs and oranges is beautifully written.
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Best Vonnegut yet...