A priest, a shaman, and a prostitute walk into a bar...

no wait, or maybe,

Bad guys launch balloons from their side of the Pacific. The balloons are homemade bombs that ride the jet stream on way to their unspecified target. The balloons are designed to inflame imprecise targets. The balloons are made out of a special homemade paper and rigged with a combination of randomness and machines so they will land and go boom on the other side of the pacific. The balloons land in over 10 western states and provinces plus Mexico. The bombs weren’t highly effective. The balloons were crazy scary and caused a damn solid panic. The balloons were secret.

No wait. The priest is “hearing” “confession.” The shaman is dying and leading the priest toward other realms. The prostitute is a half-breed seer looking for her son and other souls.

No wait. faith, higher power, words, transference, spirituality, crying, wolves, ...

What would you do with a cloud atlas? Cloud atlases map the clouds; show connections to water, tears grief; generations, spiritual meaning; cloud atlases illuminate magic when words and drawings fail.

An interesting read in a fascinating setting. Alaska during WWII. This book kept me turning the page. At times, I got lost (which was okay because some of the characters got lost), but it was a fascinating read about a real-life and little known part of the second world war. I really enjoy the antagonistic relationship between the Eskimo healer (forgive the slightly not-woke description) and the priest,

Interesting... boring by the end though

Starts off slow, but gets better, and has some fairly magical scenes.

Haunting story about a man who ends up in Alaska during World War II. He is assigned to the bomb squad with the mission of intercepting balloon bombs sent by the Japanese. The whole program is meant to be secret. Along the way, he meets Lily, a clairvoyant native woman, and falls in love with her. I picked up this book, thinking it was the other, better known "Cloud Atlas" but happy that I did.

Like so many others, I accidentally read this book instead of Cloud Atlas. I did not regret it.

The book tells a lot about Alaska during World War II. The story is told in flashbacks (and sometimes flashbacks within flashbacks), which I think overcomplicates things, but doesn't hinder the plot. The mood alternates between factualism and magical realism, the last one I didn't like at all. This is why I give it 3 stars, it would've been far better without the spirituality.

Captain Gurley was by far my favorite character. This quote sums him up perfectly:
Replaying these memories, it seems unmistakable now to me how completely mad he was. And I don't mean madness like the kind that doctors like to cure nowadays with dollops of prettily colored pills. I mean old-fashioned, Edgar Allan Poe–type madness, incurable but for a gun placed at the temple.

WOW this is one heck of a book. My mother really enjoyed it too.

I tried to not read it! I thought "I'll read it later, or some other time. But I kept picking it up and reading more. What a fascinating story. I'm only about 1/2 way through. My mom has a Nook and I downloaded this book into my phone. I also have a the actual book so I'm reading in two ways. I"m certain this will be a 5 star book for me.

WWII in Alaska. Native Americans. Racism. Shamans. Religion. Balloon weapons from Japan. REALLY well written. Not quite so great towards the end but,

Yes I'll stay with 5 stars.

Since both books have identical titles, I mistakenly read Liam Callanan's book rather than David Mitchell's. I thoroughly enjoyed Callanan's beautiful novel and when I finally sat down to read David Mitchell's...let's just say I was spoiled by the better book, a memerising story spun by Callanan.

The story is about a priest and a shaman, and centers on events during World War II that involved the Japanese balloon bombs that were sent against North America.

There's also a romantic interest in the story, and the story bounces around from the present day to memories of WWII.

The basic concept of the balloon bombs is based on reality, but the author adds a lot of things that I don't believe actually happened in relation to the balloon bombs. The description of the bombs on pages 22 and 23 of the story seem to be pretty accurate, but away the story refers to some men being killed by a bomb exploding in a particular place, and no such thing happened.

On page 38 the author talks about the balloon bombs being mistaken for “comets and flying saucers.” The term “flying saucers” did not come into use until after the end of the war. There was a thing called “foo fighters” that were sighted, but that is what they were called, and they involved planes in the air, not anything relatively near the ground.

The story does refer to a fear of some of the balloons eventually being manned, which was actually one possibility the Japanese considered. Another possibility they considered, and one referred to in the book, was the use of germ warfare by attaching infected fleas or other insects to the bomb, then dropping those on populated areas. The book refers to the source of these germs as Unit 731, which was the actual source. However, the existence of Unit 731 was top secret, and a regular soldier like the one in the book, Louis, would not have known of the unit's existence.

Louis also refers to a Japanese plan to use kamikaze planes loaded with the germs to attack San Diego in 1945. I have not read about any such plan anywhere else. It also probably wouldn't have worked since the crash of the plane would have triggered an explosion and fire which would have killed the fleas or whatever, this not counting the incredible difficult for the Japanese of getting a plane all the way to San Diego late in the war. There was a sub that could launch a small plane that did exist and had been used to bomb Oregon forests, but that was earlier in the war when the Japanese had the time, ships and men that they could use to carry out such a raid.

As for the story itself, revolving around Louis, Ronnie, the shaman, and a woman, Lily, the story isn't that very interesting. The whole book, basically, was somewhat of a disappointment to read.

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).

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.

I’m not really sure how I feel about this book yet. I picked it up thinking it was a completely different book than it was (hi, Cloud Atlas— the power of the “the”) which definitely affected my reading experience for the first half of the book. The confusion aside (pun intended), the first half was extremely slow. So slow that I was admittedly unsure what the book was going to be about. It's like reading a fever dream. There’s no true plot. Or there is. Maybe not. I don’t know. All I know is that the last third of the book was surprisingly more interesting, more beautiful, more gut-wrenching, more thought-provoking than I would have predicted and reading the end left me feeling some type of heartbroken on my T ride home.

I’m a sucker for historical fiction (especially unspoken WWII stories), so this ticked that box. I’m also a sucker for lyrical writing that describes emotions and thoughts in a way that I’ve never thought of before (i.e. “He did not so much speak as take the words and place them, one by one, behind my eyes, beneath my scalp. I can still feel them there now.” p. 348 — I mean… hello?! simply beautiful), so this ticked that box, too. I’m an even bigger sucker for unrequited love stories, so, again, box ticked. Though despite all the ticked boxes, there was still something missing that prevented it from being a Really Good Book™️. I can’t put my finger on it, and I don’t know that I ever will but, alas, such is reading complex stories. 3/5 for posterity. Subject to change.

n  "I have spent a life fighting my way back to that moment. I have spent a life trying to get back to that precipice and leap off it... Lily had been subsumed by the spiritual world; I wanted to be swallowed whole, too, and join her, so I consecrated myself to a spiritual life. I'd go off in search of God and His knowledge- and if I found Lily there in the ether, somewhere along the way, so much the better."n