Author Archives: marjoriekaye

Cloud Atlas: Six Stories in Search of Ovaltine

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Cloud Atlas: Six Stories in Search of Ovaltine –a review:       ***Spoilers***

Images from the movie, "Cloud Atlas"

Cover for “Cloud Atlas,” the movie

If you plan on reading the book or if you plan on seeing the movie, this Cloud Atlas review may rain on your plan.

Before I saw the movie, I decided to read the book.

The novel, Cloud Atlas, is the third book by British author, David Mitchell.

Cloud Atlas has won awards, including the British Book and the Nebula. Cloud Atlas is a collection of six related stories, described as a puzzle or a set of Russian nesting dolls. I think paper dolls would be closer.

Each of the six stories takes place in a different time and setting.

Mitchell writes all but one in first person and that is where the similarity ends. Each story is written in a different style. Mitchell’s command of the narrative style of the 19th century and his inventiveness in terms of language are exceptional. The detailed settings of the future worlds in stories five and six are impressive.

Of the Cloud Atlas stories, five are in two parts. Story six, in one piece. is in the middle of the novel and it follows the five half stories.

Story six, “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After,” describes the gasps of a dying Earth. Except for a dying few who cling to what’s left of civilization and scientific study, humanity has devolved into superstitious tribal societies where the strong prey on the weak. After story six which is in one piece, Mitchell completes the other five in reverse order. Story five, “An Orison of Somni-451” resumes after Story six until he ends the novel by completing story one, “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing.

“The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,“ written ala Herman Melville is the first story in the Cloud Atlas.

The story is a first person narrative. After a shipwreck, thirty something American notary, Adam Ewing writes in his journal. It’s the 1850’s. We meet Ewing as he waits on a South Pacific island. Along with Ewing is his companion, Dr. Goose, an eccentric English physician. Following this story was tough sledding. Ewing learns about the victimized peace-loving Morioiris, enslaved by the Maoris (part of the evil “White Man” plan). Ewing learns of this injustice as he witnesses a Moriori being flogged.

When exploring the island, Ewing discovers thousands of carvings of faces.

Frightened, he scrambles to safety and encounters a beating heart hanging from a tree. He speculates on what kind (hog, human?) but never solves the mystery. As his sea voyage continues via a Dutch ship, Ewing rescues a stowaway, Autua–the Moriori he saw being beaten. The mid sentence ending thing was annoying.

Story two, “Letters From Zedelghem” takes place in 1931 Europe, beginning in England then moving to Belgium.

A young English musician/composer, Robert Frobisher, writes his best friend and lover, Sixsmith, telling him of his plans to travel to Belgium and exploit Ayrs, a famous composer who hasn’t written anything since contracting syphilis. Frobisher is something of a snot and the black sheep of his family. Leaving a trail of bad debts, he asks Sixsmith to send him money. Frobisher means to convince Ayrs that he, Robert, will help him to continue his work.

Rather than Frobisher exploiting Ayrs, crafty old Ayrs takes credit for Frobisher’s new compositions.

There’s no sympathy for Robert. He’s a narcissist and a schemer. Out of the blue, not related to anything else in the story, Robert finds the first half of Ewing’s journal. Also, we learn that Robert has a crescent shaped birthmark on his shoulder. We’re left hanging, the story unfinished. There isn’t been one character in either story whom I’ve found interesting, nor have I cared.

Cloud Atlas story three, “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” has two ties to story two (“Letters …”) and one to story one.

Three is the only one of the six written in third person. We know this story takes place in the 1970’s because Disco music plays. Stuck in an elevator Luisa Rey, a journalist in her 30’s, meets Sixsmith, a sixty-something scientist and Frobisher’s friend from story two. Although they are strangers, Luisa and Sixsmith spend over an hour together feeling very comfortable. Luisa has a birthmark on her shoulder, just like Frobisher’s. Sixsmith has written a report, blowing the whistle on plans for a dangerous new energy plant, an atomic energy plant like Three Mile Island.

And so the killing begins.

First, someone murders Sixsmith and you know Luisa’s on that list. Luisa is the daughter of a cop, a dead hero. There’s a hit-man named Smoke after her.  We leave the story as her car plunges off a bridge and into some deep water. I found story three to be the weakest. The plot would have been at home on any Hawaii Five-O, Columbo, or Rockford Files episode. The characters were paper thin and totally forgettable.

Story four, “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” begins with the second murder in the Cloud Atlas.

An author murders the reviewer who panned his book by throwing the reviewer off a balcony. Oops, better be careful.Timothy Cavendish, the book’s publisher, is in his late sixties. When the book starts making money, Cavendish joyfully pays off debts until the imprisoned author’s thuggish brothers threaten him, demanding 60,000 pounds. Before he flees, Cavendish receives a submission: “Half Lives, The First Luisa Rey Mystery.” Cavendish begs his own estranged brother (Cavendish slept with his wife) for help and then the story breaks,

His sneaky brother traps Cavendish in an old folks’ home, where a Nurse Ratched running things.

This story was marginally more interesting because of Cavendish’s chaotic nightmarish journey. His randy reminisces of past romances makes use of Mitchell’s florid narrative style. Mitchell showcases literary flourishes while the character declares: “I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980’s with M.A.s in post-modernism and chaos theory.” Style-wise, the story goes from being The Lavender Hill Mob to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with Alec Guinness as McMurphy.

Story five, “An Orison of Somni-451” is a dystopic science fiction piece set in Korea. Corporations run what’s left of a polluted world.

The narrative is a dialogue between Somni-451, a rebel “fabricant” and the “Archivist.” Somni began her life as a customized clone, working for “Papa Song” a fast food franchise where fabricants serve twelve years, and then are rewarded with a glorious retirement in “Hawaii.” Tinkering with her programming results in a wiser, more informed Somni, who becomes a pawn of the “Union,” the rebel entity trying to upend the Establishment. Most of the story involves Somni on the run to rebel headquarters, where she will become a figurehead and mentor to facilitate a fabricant uprising. Along the way, Somni encounters a statue of Buddha. When a nun explains the meaning of the symbol, we encounter the “author’s message,”

Whenever I see an overt “author’s” message in fiction, I remember Woody Allen’s movie, Bananas.

Or was it Take the Money and Run? I’m not sure but I do remember the joke. In the Allen movie, during the “death” scene dialogue, the words “author’s message” kept flashing on the screen. “An Orison of Somni-451” was the first story I actually enjoyed. I did notice elements of other works of science fiction. The layered corruption and the Asian setting evoke Philip Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” Somni’s reflection on the Union’s true purpose echoes O’Brien’s speech in 1984: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.”  And what really happens aboard that fabricant ship bound for Hawaii? Think Charleton Heston screaming, “It’s people!”

Before her execution, Somni asks to see the movie version of The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.

It is my opinion that this connection to Story Four is imposed on the Somni story. I can’t find any indication that shows Somni’s choice as an outgrowth of the plot or her character development. Why does Somni want to spend the remaining minutes of her life seeing a movie? Like characters in Stories One, Two and Three, Somni has a crescent shaped birthmark on her shoulder. I recognize this as a device that implies connection and identity.There needed to be more.

After story six, Mitchell completes the rest of the stories, starting with five.

As I said, I did enjoy Somni’s story. In the second part of Story Four, I got a kick out of the wild prison break in the Cavendish tale. However, the only intriguing part of Luisa Rey was her recognition of Frobisher’s music. The music could have been used to connect all of the stories. And there’s Luisa’s hesitating when she passes The Prophetess, the ship in “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing.” The Prophetess should have appeared in all of the stories. But it doesn’t and Frobisher’s suicide at the end of Story Two made me shrug. Unfortunately he was too unlikeable.

Then I read part two of Story One, “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing.”

I assumed that Mitchell would unite all the stories into one, universal narrative. He didn’t. I read again, assuming I didn’t read it carefully enough.

 As I finished Cloud Atlas, I was reminded of another movie, A Christmas Story.

Like the nun’s speech and Buddha’s statue, Mitchell wants to make sure we understand. So the last two pages are pure “author’s message.” It’s 1939’s middle-America and Christmas time. Ralphie, a nine-year old boy, schemes for a bee-bee-gun to be under the tree. A fan of Little Orphan Annie, Ralphie has sent in all the boxtops to get Annie’s secret decoder ring. When the ring finally arrives in the mail, he eagerly listens to the radio show for Annie’s secret message. This message is accessible only to those in the inner circle of decoder ring-bearers. Ignoring the protests of his younger brother who has “to go,” Ralphie locks himself in the bathroom. Outside, little brother Randy wails and pounds the door.

His breath labored, a defiant and determined Ralphie turns the ring to find each letter.

Then, his excitement barely contained, he reads Annie’s message. Rather than a secret formula or news of a decoder ring-bearer secret meeting, Annie tells him to “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!”  Ralphie is disappointed to say the least. Disgusted, he feels Little Orphan Annie has played him. When I read the rest of “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,”I knew just how Ralphie felt.

Melancholia is no tiptoe through the tulips.

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Melancholia is no tiptoe through the tulips

A review of Von Trier’s Melancholia.   ***Spoilers***

 

melancholia“I’m trudging through this gray woolly yarn . . .” Justine tells her sister Claire as Melancholia begins.

Justine is a twenty-something woman who suffers from severe depression. Melancholia, a 2011 film, was written and directed Lars von Trier.

Von Trier is a Danish filmmaker (Dancer in the Dark) whose idea of a good yarn is the flip-side of what Disney churns out.

Disney makes feel-good/think-less product while von Trier makes feel-miserable/think-alot art films. After a series of strange slow-motion images where we see Dunst seeming to flee, then stop, stop, then flee, the movie shifts from neutral into low gear where it seems stuck for the length of the film.

It’s not exactly like watching paint dry–I wish it were that easy.

The narrative begins with Justine’s wedding. There’s an uncomfortable tension that made me want to head for the nearest exit. We watch as Justine checks off names on her insult/alienate to-do list–all learned at the sharp knee of her toxic cold-eyed mother (Charlotte Rampling) with a little help from the passive-aggressive dad (John Hurt).

As we watch, we shake our heads.

Why does long-suffering sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsburg) and Claire’s ultra-rich, exasperated husband Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) put up with the little darling? Justine insults her boss (Stellan Skarsgard) a nasty man, but one who just promoted her. She skips out on the after-wedding main-event where the bewildered groom (Alex Skarsgard) sits on the bed in his white shirt and underwear. She tells him to “give her a moment” then makes straight for the golf-course (it’s night) where she practically rapes a wedding guest. The groom takes that as a sign things aren’t going to work and stomps out.

One more thing– We learn that because of Melancholia, the world is going to end.

There’s a planet on a collision course with earth. We know this from the opening images accompanied by lots of somber music. I wonder if von Trier and Terrance Mallick swap ideas and tunes. The planet is called Melancholia and all the heavy-duty scientists, Jack assures Claire, say it’s going to pass us by. Right. In the meantime, Justine goes from bad to worse. Claire decides she needs a sister’s care. This was the only time the movie connected for me. Depression is a serious, painful, often disabling illness. Dunst conveys this in her performance. Because she is virtually catatonic, I kept wondering why she wasn’t in a hospital.  Why would Claire expose her small son to Dunst’s unstable behavior?

As Claire realizes that Jack is wrong and Melancholia is going to collide with the earth, Justine gets better.

Misery loves company, I guess. Justine tells Claire that she’s known all along the world was going to end because she “knows things” like how many beans there were in the “guess how many beans in the jar” game that was a party game at the wedding from hell. Life as a concept is bad according to Justine; when comes to life in the universe–we on earth are all there is and the universe is going to correct its mistake. Despite the theatricality of the ending, I wasn’t moved. I’m sure a lot of people were–mostly critics from what I’ve read. Regardless, this film wasn’t my cup of tea.

When it comes to deep thought, I like to down it with a spoon full of sugar.

Melancholia, deeply profound as some might find it, was pure caster oil.

 

Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid. The Bird Box—a review

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     ***Some Spoilers***

 

The Bird Box, a novel by Josh Malerman

Cover of Josh Malerman’s novel, The Bird Box (from Wikipedia)

Through years of reading horror novels like Josh Malerman’s The Bird Box, some images have lingered in the fight-or-flight part of my brain, especially the flight part.  When Stoker’s Count Dracula crawled like an insect up the steep castle wall, the vampire bug image scored high on my scare-o-meter.The thing that Danny Torrance saw in the forbidden room  of The Shining‘s Overlook Hotel creeped me out bigly.  In King’s Salem’s Lot, another Danny (Glick), a vampire boy, floated outside his classmate’s window in the dead of night. After reading that one, I kept the curtains closed after sundown for quite awhile. After reading The Bird Box, I may keep them closed during the day.

It’s all about perspective though.  I discovered scarier kids than vampire Danny when I taught middle school.

In my own book, The Demon Rift, there is plenty of horror and gore, but little in it would make a reader keep the lights on. I focused on characters in a high stakes conflict. My characters were in the dark, but readers knew more. The Bird Box keeps us all guessing.

In The Bird Box, both characters and readers are in the dark—literally. 

The plot is simple: In a post-apocalyptic world, a young woman named Malorie struggles to save herself and her two small children by attempting a perilous river journey. Because seeing anything outdoors is to invite madness and certain death, she and her children wear blindfolds as they make their way.

Five years earlier, almost all of humanity committed suicide.

The reason?  It began when random people saw something. Whatever it was, seeing it meant instant madness and using whatever means of self–destruction was handy. There were no police sketches of these lethal visitors and no selfies with aliens. Instead, there were deadly snapchats. You snapped and then destroyed yourself. What was random, spread quickly. Now, few people are left.  Unlike the thing that haunted Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, in The Bird Box, these creatures don’t walk alone; they’re downright social.

In his novel, The Bird Box, Malerman renders the beginning of the invasion in broad strokes.

The vagueness of the threat, the inexplicable nature of it, makes short work of the bewildered human race. Leave the house without a blindfold and something’s likely to greet you. Hear a noise outside? Don’t pull the curtains to sneak a peak. They consider uncovered windows an invitation. The consequences of seeing these creatures are not limited to humans; animals often suffer the same fate, though some are less vulnerable. Birds demonstrate the strongest resistance.

Behind the house, near the well, Malorie keeps a cage full of birds, “The Bird Box.”  Their agitation can signal trouble.

During the torturous river trip, Malorie depends on her children’s acute hearing, as blindfolded, she tries to stay alert. Watching from the riverbanks, dangerous  animals stalk them. And something on the river is following their little boat.

Thoughts dance in and out of her mind as she rows, revealing fragments of her shattered life.  

She remembers leaving the house behind. She thinks of her younger sister, an early victim of the invaders. We learn that casual sex caused Malorie’s unplanned pregnancy. She recalls the people who took her in and  saved her life by allowing her to stay with them. We’re told little about her rescuers. Age, physical characteristics and a barely sketched history introduce them all. None are really defined by who they were before the disaster.

More important, is who these people became when the unthinkable happened and necessity made heroes of ordinary people.

On occasion, The Bird Box narrative shifts to the struggle of the others who had lived with her in the house. Their blindfolds secured, members of the group felt their way using broomsticks as they searched for supplies in deserted buildings. Looking for canned goods, their groping hands often found the soft decay of bodies. Still, the group didn’t return until they found what was needed to survive. Day to day existence was bravery of a different sort. Gripping the handle of a water bucket, house resident Felix was terrified by sounds he could not identify as he inched along the path to the well.

Both scenes highlight the will and courage of Malorie’s rescuers. Both scenes are slow-moving nightmares.

In Chapter Seven, Tom, the resident Malorie most trusted and relied upon, tells her of an attempt by one of the group to learn more about the invaders. After detailing the precautions they took, he describes the horror of the resulting suicide. Tom seeks to define the unseen entities and their destruction of humanity. “It’s a consensus now. Something living is doing this to us. , . . Whatever they are—our minds can’t understand them. They’re like infinity . . . too complex for us . . .our minds have ceilings . . .”   Or to quote A Few Good Men and Jack Nicholson “You {we} can’t handle the truth!” The hidden madness of one of the group results in the sabotage of their defenses and the death of all save Malorie and her children.

At last, we learn the shattering details of the day she gave birth, an event that showcases Malorie’s strength as the protagonist of The Bird Box.

She becomes a survivor whose uncompromising control of her four-year old children is her only hope of saving them. Dingy walls, stained with trauma, encompass the bleak world of her children.  Pieces of picture frames form makeshift trails that guide them when, blindfolded, they venture out to fill buckets with well water. Thinking of her children’s future, Malorie despairs. When someone making random calls connects with the house’s landline and leaves a message, she learns of a small but thriving community twenty miles away by river. The river is close, less than a quarter mile from the house. If they can make the trip, she and her children are welcome to join. Malorie remembers a rowboat she had stumbled upon years earlier.

In Chapter Nine, as she rows, she “struggles to put a name to the invaders. . . .

“they are not creatures . . . a garden slug is a creature.  Demon. Devil. Rogue. Maybe they are all these things . . . Do they know what they do?”  Echoing Tom, she concludes: “They are more than monsters, they are infinity.”  In one chilling scene, her son tells her that he can hear something walking on the river. Soon, it’s in the rowboat with her and it’s waiting as it gently tugs the edge of her blindfold.”

Malorie knows she must remove her blindfold in order to choose the right fork of the river and save her children.

Like many children, I feared the dark, often pulling the covers over my head. As I read The Bird Box, I recalled those fears–the times when I shivered beneath the blankets while something in the dark waited patiently.

 In The Bird Box, Malerman never pulls the covers down.

The monster in The Bird Box remains stored in the dark closet of memory, along with other things that go bump in the night. Faceless monsters are the scariest ones–worse than ghosts, even worse than floating, crawling vampires.

Maybe I’ll get a parakeet. Better safe than sorry, at least that’s what my cats tell me.

Note: In September of 2017, a Netflix film version of The Bird Box, starring Sandra Bullock as Malorie, will begin production. (per Deadline/Hollywood, Mike Fleming, July 19, 2017–deadline.com) Deadline/Hollywood The Bird Box

Skull Island: A Review

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Skull Island: Grumble in the Jungle      a review      ***spoilers!!!***

Skull Island is a new twist on King Kong. I’ll just say it: If I were Kong, I’d sue for defamation of character. This King Kong remake is the second film by director Jordan Vogt-Roberts (The Kings of Summer). Screenwriters, Dan Gilroy (Night Crawler, The Bourne Legacy) and Max Borenstein (2014’s Godzilla) wrote the script. Unfortunately, this Kong is not the 1930’s beast beguiled by beauty or the misfit ape competing with Jeff Bridges for Dwan (Jessica Lange). Skull Island‘s Kong is not the monster intrigued by Naomi Watts’ soft shoe. On Skull Island, Kong, who walks upright like Chuck Norris, is Clint Eastwood’s get-off-my-lawn curmudgeon of Grand Torino.

Cover image Skull Island

IMDB Skull Island image

When old enough, I often stayed up late to watch the 1933 version on Saturday nights.

Despite the wooden acting, the surreal jungle and Kong’s terrifying entrance always pulled me in. The sexual undercurrents of Kong’s attachment to Dwan is all I remember of the eighties version. Later, I found Peter Jackson’s effort moderately entertaining, especially the Jurassic Park dinos. However, I enjoyed it more on DVD; the huge bugs weren’t nearly as gross.

On Skull Island, it isn’t Kong who loses his freedom; there’s no tragic fall. Instead, humanity might fall.

Waiting within the earth are monsters that can wipe us out. Skull Island begins with a WWII dogfight. Planes weave and dive above a sandy shore. When two crash, pilots, an American and a Japanese, struggle out of the wreckage. As they fight, something huge rises on the other side of a cliff; it’s Kong.

Then the scene fades into 1973. The Viet Nam War is ending and Skull Island beckons.

Monster hunters Randa and Brooks (John Goodman and Corey Hawkins) plan a trip to a mysterious island. Randa believes that someday, monsters will emerge from the earth and kill us all if we’re not ready. And oh, yes, they’ll need a military escort.

In Viet Nam, Lt. Colonel Preston (Samuel L. Jackson), who hates to lose, prepares to leave for Skull Island.

A mission to a dangerous island could take the sting out of defeat. Along with tracking specialist Conrad (Tom Hiddleston) and photographer, Weaver (Brie Larson), Preston and his men board a ship. Later, they’re on their way to Skull Island. Nearing the island’s mysterious clouds, the explorers pile into helicopters to scout.  In a few days, more helicopters will meet them.

Ala Apocalypse Now, ‘70’s music blasting, helicopters drop bombs on Skull Island.

Testing the depth of the island, they discover Randa’s “monster.”  Predictably, it’s Kong, who reacts with a “who left the screen door open” glower. Unprovoked, Preston attacks and bullets fly. Kong bats the choppers away like giant flies. When they all crash, soldiers die.

Outraged, Preston vows revenge. He and his surviving men will pursue Kong on foot.

Conrad’s group (Weaver, researchers, etc.) looks for the rendezvous site. This means wandering through arid terrain that pales in comparison to the dreamy jungle of the original or the bug infested nightmare of Jackson’s movie. Suddenly, the American pilot (John C. Reilly) of the opening scene appears. A chatty eccentric, the pilot introduces them to the locals. The locals are a National Geographic tribe of mutes who taught him how to avoid the island beasties.

Don’t mess with Kong, the pilot warns. On Skull Island, Kong fights the monsters.

It’s all a misunderstanding, you see. Like Walt, the old man in Grand Torino, Kong defends the neighborhood by removing the undesirables. While Preston seeks revenge, Conrad’s group, including the pilot, scramble for safety. Flesh-eating wildlife dine on several before the rest are rescued. Of course, Preston’s plans do not go well, especially for Preston. Thankfully, Kong lives to grumble another day.

Despite its A-list actors, I was glad to leave Skull Island. I didn’t care who got eaten.

And the monsters? I’ve read several reviews of this movie. Many describe them as innovative and scary. Maybe it’s just me; I couldn’t connect to the story enough to be scared. I missed the sticky hot jungle. Dinosaurs belong on Kong’s Skull Island, not a weird buffalo, giant daddy-long-legs or skeletal things that looked like dead possums. Plus, I want a huge wall hiding terrible things.

There was one thing I liked. I’ve always wondered where Kong came from, meaning: did he have a family?

Was there a Mrs. Kong, a Kong clan? Skull Island takes us to the Kong family plot. Sadly, Kong, we’re told, is the last one. Is this the last of Kong? I hope not. If not, lose the daddy-long-legs and bring back T-Rex or even Godilla. Bring back the stop-motion charm of Faye Wray’s lovesick ape. Most of all bring back the mystery; bring back the wonder.