No 68 - Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt makes it to this list for the second time.
This is a very short book - only 179 pages in the Penguin edition I’m looking at.
Yet to summarise it is almost an impossibility, because practically everything about it is so off the wall that an adequate explanation, let alone an analysis, would take up almost as much space as the book itself.
But I will try -
The narrator starts off planning to write a book (to be called ‘The Day the World Ended‘) about what important Americans did on the day Hiroshima was bombed. While researching this topic, he becomes involved with the children of the late Felix Hoenikker, a fictional Nobel laureate physicist who helped to develop the atomic bomb, and indeed is known to some as the ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb’. But that wasn’t Hoenikker’s only achievement before he died. It turns out that Hoenikker created and developed a substance called ice-nine, and that bits of it are now secretly in the possession of his children.
Ice-nine is an alternative structure of water that is solid at room temperature. When a crystal of ice-nine is brought into contact with liquid water, it becomes a seed that ‘teaches’ the molecules of liquid water to arrange themselves into the solid form, ice-nine.
If you think about that for a moment then you will realise that the potential for apocalyptic disaster is very high, and it does duly come to pass.
Hoenniker is unveiled slowly as amoral and apathetic towards anything other than his research, a genius who does not care how his research is used. Despite that, he’s the “Father of the Atomic Bomb”, and the creator of “ice-nine”, something he saw as a mental puzzle (suggested by a Pentagon general) and his creation ultimately destroys life on Earth.
For reasons which I cannot adequately illuminate, the narrator and the Hoenikker children eventually end up on the fictional Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, one of the poorest countries on Earth, where the people speak a barely comprehensible dialect of English. For example one character says “Zo, yeff jy gong be Kret-yeen hooner yoze kon-steez-yen, jy hap my yup oon lot nee stopf“. Which, being translated, means “So, if I’m going to be a Christian under these conditions, I have to make up a lot of new stuff“.
San Lorenzo is ruled by the dictator “Papa” Monzano, who threatens all opposition with impalement on a giant hook.
The religion of the people of San Lorenzo, called Bokononism, is way beyond my powers of elucidation. The supreme act of worship of the Bokononists is called ‘boku-maru‘, which is an intimate act consisting of prolonged physical contact between the naked soles of the feet of two persons.
Bokononism may well be the religion of the majority of the people, but they daren’t practice it openly because practising any part of it, particularly boku-maru, is punishable by death. The dictator wishes his people to be as scared, isolated and oppressed as possible though ironically (or perhaps not) he is hailed as “one of Freedom’s greatest friends” by representatives of the American government.
The dictator has bribed a son of Felix Hoenikker with a high government appointment in exchange for a piece of ice-nine, and he uses it to commit suicide as he lies dying from inoperable cancer. Consistent with the properties of ‘ice-nine’ the dictator’s corpse instantly turns into a block of solid ice at normal room temperature. By this time, the narrator is, by a process too arcane to mention, designated as the new President of the country, even although he’s only a visitor there.
There’s a fly-past the dictator’s seaside palace by the San Lorenzo air-force and one of the planes crashes into the palace causing his still-frozen body to tumble into the ocean, at which point all the water in the world’s seas, rivers, and groundwater also turns into ice-nine in a gigantic chain reaction, which destroys the ecology of the earth and causes the extinction of practically all life forms in only a few days.
As if all that wasn’t enough, the book contains almost an entire vocabulary of new words and concepts associated with the explication of Bokononism (eg karass, duprass, granfalloon, wampeter, foma, stuppa etc etc).
If you must have religion, then Bokononism is better than most, encouraging its followers not to believe a word of what is written in its Holy Book.
And here is the 14th book of Bokonon, entitled “What Can A Thoughtful Man Hope For Mankind On Earth, Given The Experience Of The Past Million Years?“
The chapter consists of the single word “Nothing“
This book was written in 1963. It must have been bamboozling for some contemporary readers, and I’m sure my summary is bamboozling some now. Graham Greene reckoned it to be one of the best books of that year.
It’s a weird one, but I like it.
