by Victoria Lucas
When a friend lent Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s newest novel, Cat's Cradle to me, I thought, “Oh, I know this book!" because I saw, as I flipped through it, the "ice-nine" and "Bokonon" I'd heard people buzzing so much about. So I was glad to read it and understand the phenomenon.
But that's where my joy ended. Vonnegut is a fine writer. His style is idiosyncratic, askew; this is a novel novel. But no one would accuse him of being optimistic or hopeful about the human future. No Pollyanna he.
So in this account of the immediate future of our species, not only is there "The Bomb" to worry about, but there is a complex web of events that involves a new Doomsday Machine (ice-nine) and a new prophet (Bokonon), as if we didn't have enough of both of those.
The narrator, John, was recently divorced by his second wife because, as an optimist, she found it impossible to live with him, an ostensible pessimist. He has writer's block ("loafing") on a book about the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (title: The Day the World Ended), and slowly he is drawn into the events of the story by actions he has taken to get to know members of the Hoenikker family, children of the "father" of the bomb.
It is hard to say what Vonnegut means by pessimism, because nearly every time something happens in the book, good or bad John seems surprised. I thought pessimism meant expecting the worst in all situations. On the other hand, he is surprised when one of the few good things in the book happens: the music Hoenikker's daughter plays is not just good but exquisite. Just when he thinks he has the world figured out as a terrible place, there it is–beauty! "I shrieked at Julian Castle, who was transfixed, too, 'My God–life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?'" Obviously not John.
And this turns out to be part of his religion, the belief system written by a black man named Boyd Johnson but called Bokonon in the dialect (of what language?) used on an island called San Lorenzo — an island on which events will shortly cause the whole world to end. The author quotes The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, with the title "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" The Fourteenth Book answers in one word: "Nothing."
In case I haven't already made it clear, this is a work of apocalyptic fiction. In explaining how the doomsday tangle of vectors one might call a "cat's cradle" occurred and how attempts to untangle it failed, John uses a new vocabulary invented by Bokonon that has a certain ring to it.
For instance, Boku-maru is an act of intimacy and worship performed by two people placing the soles of their feet together. The members of John's (or any) group who are fated to act together in something important are a "karass." I particularly like "granfalloon," the word for an imaginary connection that (unlike the linkage of a karass) has no real significance (alumni of a school, for instance, or people from a particular state).
"Foma" are "harmless untruths" to be distinguished from the "damned lies" of politicians and corporations which Mark Twain (or Benjamin Disraeli) placed in his famous phrase in my title. As for the statistics, John mentions his two wives, 250,000 cigarettes, and 3,000 "quarts of booze" preceding the events of the book.
About "foma," Vonnegut's epigraph reads, "Nothing in this book is true. 'Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.' The Books of Bokonon. I: 5" Of course the existence of the "Books of Bokonon" is also fictional, but several of the quotations from it, when not black humor or bordering on it, seem almost optimistic. This one, for instance, asserts that a person can believe in lies that make one happy.
This book of foma didn't make me particularly happy, but, dripping with irony, it was entertaining, and it has probably stirred up the college students all over the US as it has on my campus, so I'll give it a 4 out of 5. I recommend it to anyone with a sense of humor who doesn't mind feeling slightly depressed about prospects for human peace and a long and healthy human future.
One of Vonnegut's best novels. What a trajectory of ever increasingly brilliant writing: Player Piano, to Sirens of Titan, to Mother Night, to Cat's Cradle! What next?
An excellent, if dark book. This sort of cynicism can be deeply seductive, but I wonder sometimes if it isn't in some way harmful. On the other hand, Vonnegut seems more to be identifying that cynicism and telling us to fight against it. There's a certain beauty to that epigraph.
Chemists will just have to turn a blind eye to the fact that Ice IX is a real thing with no relation to that in the story. It's a rather dense ice that forms at very cold temperatures under high pressure.
The karass is similar to a Buddhist concept, the name of which escapes me at the moment. The idea is that certain groups of people are bound together and are reincarnated together in varying configurations.
I found this to be an absolutely brilliant novel, extraordinarily imaginative. The creation of Bokononism alone would be enough for one book, but with everything else going on, it's really remarkable.
Vonnegut's relationship with the world of science fiction is complicated, now that he's published as a mainstream author and not in the pages of SF magazines. It can't be just a coincidence that the anti-hero of [i]Mother Night[/i] is named Howard W. Campbell, Jr.