May 19

I finished Cloud Atlas this morning.  It was a pretty enthralling read for the second half.  That said, I have never seen a book so slow to warm up. The first section was some of the most boring, slow, and un-developing reading I've done in a long time.  The second section was only marginally better, because at least the characters were different from one another. But when I finally pushed through, and the first Luisa Rey mystery started to heat up, I was hooked.  Reading went from a chore, to an addiction.  I would stay up late at night reading through Sonmi's orison,  in particular.  That section made the book for me.  It represented a better dystopia than 1984, masterfully realistic and fact-based.  It was fascinating, afterwards, to see the foreshadowing to this dystopia, in sections where, for example, Luisa's mother tries to set her up with a man whose views are identical to those of the future corpocratic society.
Overall, the novel is about freedom and power, racism and discrimination.  The Moroiroi and slavery in The Pacific Journal.  Society and one's own need for creativity and independance, in Letters from Zedelgheim. In Luisa Ray, it's about freedom from ideas and oppression.  In Timothy Cavendish, the story focuses on freedom from society's expectations, and is a little bit more literal, like The Pacific Journal.  But for the literal discussion of freedom, it's really all about Somni-451. This section looks at a nightmarish free-market scenario, where genetic modification has made, instead of a GM superior master race ruling over the un-modified, but an inferior race, modified to be the new slave labour.  This is an interesting reversal of the common theoretical future. The whole second half of the book is  Then, in the conclusion,  after being imprisoned by a greedy shipmate, Adam Ewing finishes the book with a manifesto about equality, and fighting for what you believe is right.  As the first chronological character.  I'll let you think on the implications of that.